61 Frames Per Second : edge

iPod Games, You're Doing It Wrong

Derrick Sanskrit — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Like it or not, the iPod/iPhone has become a gaming platform. There are tons of statistics out there and I'm not going to bore you with them, but the fact is a lot of people are making games for the iPod and a lot of people are downloading and playing them. This post is not about educating the blog-reading public so much as a friendly word of advice to the game developers out there.

iPod game developers, remember what your platform is. No matter how Apple dresses it up or the media hypes it, the iPod is first and foremost a portable music player. The iPhone is just an iPod that also happens to make phone calls. So please, when you want us to play your games on our personal music players, do take care when shutting off our music.

Just using the examples that are currently on my iPod Touch, the biggest offender is probably Scramble Live, Zynga's Boggle clone. There is no music in the game and very minimal sound effects, so why does clicking the icon automatically shut off my music? Are you worried that listening to Nas will distract me from finding words, and if so isn't that really more of my concern than yours? Scramble is clearly designed for short bursts of casual play, so every time I play a round on the train I have my music interrupted, then end the game and go back to start my music all over again. Not cool. The same goes for THQ's de Blob. The game does thankfully use the same wonderful music as the infinitely better Wii game (sans player interaction) but it asks you upon loading the game if you want sounds enabled AFTER it has already stopped the music. Why offer sound options after turning off the preexisting sounds? Just set sounds to "on" and I'll mute my iPod if I don't like them. Or better yet, let me paint the town red to the Replacements!

Some games get away with it because the music is so integral to the gameplay, as you'd think it should be on an iPod game. Newtonica, for example, has an incredibly simple gameplay mechanic in merely flicking a sphere around to catch crystals in the correctly colored quadrants, but without the bright and lively electronic soundtrack it would be dreary and impossible to play for more than ten seconds. Radio Flare plays like a 2D side scrolling Rez by targeting up to four obstacles or enemies at a time and blowing them all up in beat with the music. Neither game has a soundtrack I'd listen to on its own, nor particularly interesting gameplay, but the play and the audio element work perfectly together to make them compelling. Both games force my iPod to stop playing music, but they would be impossible to play set to any other music, so it's okay.

And then there are the games that simply get it right. The critically acclaimed RolandoEdge, a game that I've pretty much raved about on here before, is exactly the same story. Great original soundtrack, but no problem replacing it with your own mp3s. Aurora Feint, Sway, Adventure, all great games, fun for long stretches and short bursts alike, with wonderful sound effects and the ability to keep playing your own music while you play the game. has a fantastic original soundtrack, but it's more than happy to let you listen to your own tunes instead.

With OS 3.0 coming this summer - promising access to the iPod's media library within other apps - we can look forward to greater interaction between games and the user's existing music and photos (and hopefully a legit portable version of AudioSurf), so I ask you, iPod game developers, please, think twice before shutting off my tunes. If you have to interrupt Super Furry Animals, at least make the audio component an important part of the game.

The New Graphics Whores: Bit.Trip Beat is Gorgeous, But Retro Style Does Not Equate Quality

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

A strange thing happened to me between downloading Bit.Trip Beat and beating its first boss. While delighting in its vivid color, laughing at its signature character leaving rainbows in his wake across digital space, and letting its infectious chiptune beats colonize my brain, I realized that I wasn’t having any fun. That’s fine — I’m a firm believer in the fact that a game doesn’t need to be fun to be good — but I was expecting to have fun. I wanted to have fun. I was engaged by it, but not in a good way. I found the game to be overbearing and stressful. Then it hit me: Bit.Trip Beat is a bad game.

Its presentation is immaculate and the idea behind its play is sound; a horizontal shooter that has you deflecting objects instead of projecting them, making ammunition and enemy one and the same — Pong + Arkanoid + Gradius = Bit.Trip Beat — is a great foundation. The game is broken though. The motion controls are adequate but far too sensitive, and the game doesn’t allow you to adjust the sensitivity. It also doesn’t offer d-pad control, so you’re stuck. As you chain together hits in rhythm to the music, your combo meter rises and the visual effects start to intensify. They intensify so much that the color and flashes of light make it impossible to follow the action. It should be challenging to play at a high level, of course, but it should come from the speed and layout of the game’s obstacles, not because it’s hard to see. Most problematic though is that there is no respite throughout Bit.Trip’s long levels. Scrolling shooters necessitate moments of peace that allow you to refocus and rest before the next series of challenges. You need chances to blink. Without them, the game becomes exhausting. Bit.Trip is oppressive, necessitating that you pay attention constantly, or fail as a result. In spite of these game breaking problems, Bit.Trip’s scoring very well in reviews. Why?

I worry that Bit.Trip Beat’s critical success is a case of the Emperor getting a new wardrobe. Game critics, fans, and casual players are all enamored with the retro-styled games trend. Games with chic visual and aural designs that recall gaming’s NES, Atari, and early-arcade heyday are in high demand right now and I think that some people might be willing to praise a game based solely on its aesthetics. They're new graphics whores for a nostalgia-obsessed age, drunk on the promise of limited technology instead of high-end graphical feats. I’m one of them. I laud Mega Man 9, Space Invaders Extreme, and Edge for their old school looks and sounds. Those are three very well made games underneath their attractive façades though. I expect great things out of Bit.Trip Beat's creators, Gaijin. They’re clearly a very talented team of developers. Before they make Bit.Trip Volume 2, I hope they learn from their first game’s mistakes, no matter how well their first game was received.

Related links:

BIT.TRIP BEAT is Hella Sweet
Chiptune Friday: Trip to the Beat
Design Resurrection: How Capcom Finally Proved That It’s Game and Not Graphics That Matters
The Commander's Out Of The Bag, And I Couldn't Be More Excited

The Path is Real, Not A Fever Dream

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

In 1992, I woke up one morning, got dressed, and got on a large yellow bus plagued by self-doubt. Was Super Mario Bros. 4 real? Was there a game where Mario had to scale a blue giant with red hair, jumping from platform to platform to scale its towering form, using a kite to reach heights his stubby plumber’s legs couldn’t reach on their own? It seemed so real! I played it! Nah. Like an atrocious short story ending from some freshman creative writing workshop, it was all a dream. Super Mario Bros. 4 existed in my head. Much as I thought The Path did, until earlier today.

Like MMO Love, The Path was a game I first read about in an Edge preview almost two years ago, and it sounded far too good to be true. A surrealist re-telling of Red Riding Hood crafted by Belgian artists Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, The Path would be a freeform adventure game comprised of three acts in three genres, crossing between point-and-click, third-person exploration, and a first-person conclusion. The Path aimed to not only reinterpret a time-honored fairytale but also explore the emotional experience of a girl growing up. Harvey and Samyn said that they wanted to do away with linearity entirely, to allow every interaction in the acts to feed into emergent, personalized narratives that deal in discomfort and fear triggered by the player. All of it rendered in stark, primary colored 3D imagery. I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere in the press since. Who could blame me for thinking I’d just imagined it? It sounds incredible!

Turns out it’s coming out next week. Here’s a launch trailer, courtesy of Joystiq.

The Path looks suitably spooky here. It’s stocked with a few of the more prevalent psychological horror tropes that have prospered in the past decade: distorted woodland imagery, creepy little girls, unhinged narration, and the sort of screeching discordant soundtrack that would make John Carpenter proud. But there’s nothing here to indicate that Samyn and Harvey realized their ambitions in play. Only one way to find out, I suppose.

Man, I hope I’m not hallucinating this trailer or writing this article…

Editor’s Note: How sweet would a kite power up be in Mario? Ten year-old me was onto something.

Related links:

The Original Adventure - Now Portable
Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say
Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?
10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill

The 61FPS Review: Edge

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

I am almost certain that over the past three months I've played more downloadable games on my iPod Touch than on my home consoles – and I've been all about Lumines Supernova lately. As expected from any hip new platform that just about anybody can develop applications for, a majority of the iPod games I've tried have been decidedly uninteresting and derivative of other, significantly better, games that I've already played. Thankfully, though, there are small studios putting time and thought into iPod games now and the media player finally has some truly excellent games, even if they still borrow from established franchises.

Just as ngmoco's much-hyped Rolando gives me what I always wanted from LocoRoco in the form of tilt and touch controls, Mobigame's Edge gives me what I always wanted from Marble Madness – a cube. Yes, yes, Marble Madness without the marble sounds boring and pointless, but that brings me to what is so awesome about Edge: everything else.

Edge's aesthetics have introduced a concept new to me: monochromatic electronic rainbow. Basically, the entire world is rendered in shades of grey with the cube, collectibles, end goal and edges of moving platforms all rendered in one color, but that one color is constantly cycling. At any given moment, they'll all be baby blue, but only for a split second. It's really quite beautiful in action and couples wonderfully with the animation, which is by far the smooooooooooothest animation I've seen on the media player outside of Pixar movie trailers. This all goes hand-in-hand with the absolutely perfect plunk, swoosh and click sound effects, delightful new wave chiptune soundtrack (which automatically turns itself off if you're already listening to music on your iPod) and eerie vocoder voice announcing the title of each new stage for an overall glorious presentation.

As a platform puzzler, Edge's 25 standard stages offer a good chunk of variety with a comfortable learning curve. Swipe your fingertip to push or pull the cube in isometric space (there is also tilt control, but I strongly recommend turning it off as it will only get in the way in the later stages that require precise movement or stillness). The only way to die is to fall into the vacuum of black space, and thankfully there are frequent respawn points and your cube instantly pops back there, no "try again" prompt necessary. There are fall-away tiles and moving platforms of varying speeds, tiles that rearrange themselves like self-aware and ambivalent train tracks and tiles that reform themselves into robots that walk across the stage as you ride atop them. The most interesting and addicting part, though, is the titular Edge mechanic, delicately balancing your cube on one of its eight edges against another platform, suspending itself in mid-air between 90-degree angles. Not only is this procedure awesome once you've become comfortable enough with it to make it more than halfway through the game's challenges (many a gap require this mechanic to be crossed), but it also subtracts the "edge time" from your overall level time, making it an essential skill for speed runners.

Collecting all of the mini-cubes in all of the stages also unlocks a final 26th stage. I mention this because its the one part of the game I haven't experienced yet. Some of those mini-cubes are hiding really well, but I haven't come close to giving up on retreading those stages just yet. Between those collectibles and the ever-present speed-run instinct, there's more than a fair amount of replay value in Edge. Between that and the absolutely top-notch presentation, Edge wins my pick for must-have iPhone/Touch game. The only shortcoming is that when it's over, you want more, and that's a good shortcoming to have.

Final Score: A

Previous reviews:

Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Trailer Review: Edge

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Take a gander at this trailer for Edge, the new iPhone/iPod Touch game released today by mobile phone game developer mobigame and feel the waves of nostalgia for a game you've never even played.

In its presentation, Edge is equal parts Marble Madness, Q*Bert, and Tron, but it clearly has potential to be ever so much more.

Beautiful isometric geometry, subtle use of color, a soundtrack halfway between 80's new wave and contemporary chiptune, Edge may very well be the stylish iPod counterpart to artsy downloadable console titles like Eden, Everyday Shooter, echochrome, Orbient and Cubello.

As I mentioned above, Edge was just released on the App Store today. As I've been on a serious gaming binge on my iPod Touch lately, I'll be sure to check this one out, but damn is that trailer stylish!

Related articles:
Overworld: Marble Madness
iPhone Owners Are Gamers, Idiots
The Original Adventure - Now Portable
Ports That Need To Be Made: iTouchRez

Final Fantasy IV DS: Love, Hope and Betrayal For the Busy Commuter

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:09:00 GMT

Lo, and Nadia purchased Final Fantasy IV and brought the digital tome unto her home. And the Lord sayeth, "DUDE! You got your ass kicked by a sandworm!"

Everything the fangeeks have been saying rings true: Square-Enix mixed up Final Fantasy IV. Up is down, the sky is green and for God's sake, don't assume that magic attacks will save you from the wrath of the Antlion's counterattack.

The change-up was sorely needed, though, especially if you're a geek like me who knows the game better than priests know the Bible. Be warned: Final Fantasy IV DS is quite difficult. Kain and Cecil still begin the game as medieval brick shithouses, but they can die. For one thing, enemies are not afraid to use their special attacks and they counter if you so much as sneeze in their direction. I know more than one player who fell victim to the gradual petrification of the helldiver quartet that roams the path to the Mist Cave. As for me, I met a sandworm on our morning constitutional. It cast Whirlwind without hesitation and that was the end of the Dark Knight of Baron and that jumpy friend of his who wants to follow in his father's footsteps or something.

The good news is that for every instance of enemy tweaking, there is an instance of character tweaking to match it. The most talked-about helper in the new battle against Golbez is the augment system, which allows characters to gain the abilities of other party members--typically the members who croak for story purposes. If you give augments to characters who are destined to depart, you usually get something better in return. Of course, if it's your first playthrough and you have no idea who's staying and who's going, it sucks to be you.

Fortunately, while augments make life easier, they're not essential. There are other tweaks. Arrows are no longer limited, so let 'em fly. Defensive spells like Shell and Protect can be cast upon the entire party. Bosses are often vunerable to status magic. There is a map system that rewards you with items for filling in a floor. Edward is useful, for a change.

And of course, we have our upgraded graphics, music and voice acting. The voice acting is good. The script is a bit silly, but Final Fantasy IV reflects a simpler era of RPGs where melodrama and Star Wars-type twists were celebrated.

The characters are still the same angstclowns you remember and love: Cecil wails over his dark fate, meaning he's too busy to notice that Kain wants to execute his "Jump" command horizontally on Rosa. Porom acts silly, Palom scolds him and Tellah is what your grandfather would be like if your grandfather wielded death magic and was awesome.

So far, I am having fun. Show your DS some Final Fantasy love.

Related Links:

Are You Buying Final Fantasy IV DS? Huh? Huh? Huh??
Square-Enix's Coup Brings Back Memories

Gaga for Segagaga

Cole Stryker — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

You suckers in America won't get to read it for a while, but this month's Edge features a great interview with Tez Okano, creator of an odd little Japan-only Dreamcast RPG called SGGG (pronounced Segagaga). The object of the game is to save Sega from financial collapse, and was ironically released around the time of Sega's collapse (2001), in the console arena, at least.

Segagaga is a plan formulated to save Sega from DOGMA, an evil corporation intended to portray Sony. From there it goes totally meta. You talk to a down on his luck Alex Kidd and go up against a flying, sentient Genesis console in a schmup segment. Insane.

When you begin working for Sega, you find that the employees are violent, caged subhumans who have lost their humanity due to the stressful development lifestyle. In combat, you hurl insults a la Monkey Island instead of fighting. There are also business sim elements, wherein you choose between making a bunch of crappy games or throw all your eggs into one basket for a landmark innovative title. You analyze market trends and delegate labor to design, music, marketing, etc. Upon completing the game you are fired.

The gameplay itself sounds halfbaked, but it's amazing that a company would actually produce something so self-deprecating. Check out Hardcore Gaming 101 for more.

Game Designers: Rockstars, Auteurs, Dweebs?

John Constantine — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One crummy thing about living here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. is that we don’t get issues of Britain’s Edge Magazine for a full month after they hit stands in Britain. Yes, I know, it’s a hard life. We’ve been at war with two separate nations for close to a decade, the economy is disintegrating, and our health care system is an atrocity but all that pales in comparison to not getting pretty videogame rags in a timely manner. But I digress. Yesterday, while flipping through their July issue, something stuck out about their Platinum Games cover story: the photo spread of Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, Shigenori Nishikawa, Hifumi Kouno, and Tatsuya Minami made them look like a god damn boy band.

I’m conflicted about the emerging designer-as-rockstar image. Once upon a time, it wasn’t unusual for a game to be made by a single person, but in 2008, it’s the rarest exception to the rule. Big games, the vast majority of games the public plays, are made by studios whose collective creative vision makes the game what it is, not one woman or man’s vision. Instead of celebrating and promoting the individual, the rockstar of David Jaffe, Cliffy B, or Shigeru Miyamoto, maybe it should be about the rock band image like in the Platinum Games spread. I’d wear a Valve t-shirt over a Gabe Newell one any day, wouldn’t you?

Related links:

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum