LIMBO Review
Nihilism has a game!
Not sure what it is about video games, but we like to play as little boys. From Link to ICO to this nameless little guy, the boyish avatars have met with successively darker struggles. Limbo places you in a fuzzy, black and white nightmare with little explanation and no instruction other than the compulsion to run right. Off-balance from the start, you are quickly introduced to the game’s cruelty the first time you explore just a little too much – and are rewarded with brutal execution.
Visit me at PAX: I’m on a Panel!
For anyone that I have tried to meet up with at past events (and failed), we know how difficult a feat it is to cross paths in all the mayhem. I’m making it a tiny bit easier. There is a window of time at PAX Prime in which it will be dead easy to find me – I’m on a panel!
Online Gaming Communities & “Real Life”
Saturday, September 4th
Wolfman Theatre, 3:30 PMThe panel is spearheaded by 2old2play’s Derek Nolan,
N4G Vindictus Swag Giveaway
Today N4G is kicking off a giveaway for those of you that want to get your hands on some E3 swag from Nexon! These Spirit Hoods (pictured below) were in high demand and very short supply at E3, but Nexon helped N4G get their paws on the Vindictus themed goodies for you.
Party like it’s 1922
Gatsby couldn’t leave well enough alone. Coming hot on the heels of pushing-classic-lit’s-buttons Dante’s Inferno, The Great Gatsby is a video game.
Fingers crossed for Tropic of Cancer?
Ancients of Ooga Review
Ancients of Ooga is spawned by NinjaBee, better known for their Keflings, and has some of the same quirky charm and fascination with god-like power. As the great spirit you possess different Oogani to direct their actions thereby solving puzzles, completing tasks and even the occasional sacrifice – of the same Oogani you possess.
According to the Oogani pleading for your intercession they got themselves into a bit of a pickle with some nasty folk called the Booli. After getting drunk on slugs the Booli brought them, they destroyed their own chiefs and ended up as slaves. Now, the slug munchers want your help in resurrecting those same chiefs so they can use their power for an emancipation effort.
A side scrolling puzzle platformer you use the Oogani you possess to free yet more Oogani, collect items, carry out sacrifices and pull levers to access additional areas. There is a bit of depth that allows you to hop from front to back on the levels, but it isn’t particularly well represented and can cause needless confusion from time to time.
Swapping possession between Oogani, however, is a breeze and your primary puzzle solving tool (it even allows you to float around the screen and check out areas you need to gain access to). As you collect items and complete tasks for the various Oogani they’ll believe that you’re the demon spirit they asked for and join your cause, putting more Oogani at your disposal for possession. The object is to solve all the puzzles and bring the tribes and their respective skills together. Each different type of Oogani is suited to particular tasks, like the Harvest Oogani that can survive walks through brambles hazardous to other Oogani , or the Firelings that can breathe fire and brave smoking hot surfaces.
There are some items to collect like bones, and spices so that you can eat less pleasant things. You see, all the items you pick up the Oogani are willing to put in their mouths. Many of them they’ll even swallow, and anything you pick up and chew on while you navigate the platforms can then be puked out at will – including other Oogani – miraculously unmasticated.
Using levers, gates and ladders, Ancients of Ooga is like an easy Toki Tori. Puzzles aren’t particularly puzzling, and the approach here seems to be quantity over complexity as the downloadable packs nearly a dozen hours of gameplay at $10. You can tackle levels with a friend in splitscreen co-op, but it slows the game down graphically and practically – it’s just plain hard to get around with a buddy.
Graphics are solid, but many early directives appear in flashing low-contrast text that is nigh unreadable, and at times the music is downright annoying. The points system is a bit obscured by the puzzle solving. You pick up points as you complete levels and are awarded more for things like minimizing the number of times you die as well as picking up items. Since dying and finding different ways to kill an Oogani was half the fun of the puzzle solving I abandoned high score as a personal goal.
Ancients of Ooga’s winning moments are playful and charming, but its low points will put you to sleep. The vibrant sillyness just isn’t enough to make you want to keep playing, and all too soon I was wondering not “What’s next?” but, “How much longer?” When just after you’ve had a romp blowing up some chickens you’re stuck completing a level that has you fetching potatoes, it strikes me that this game has filler. Still, you did get to chew, puke and blow up a chicken.
Pros
+ The storytelling scenes
+ Exploding chickens, eating Oogani, puking rocksCons
- Weak puzzles
- Unnecessary foreground and background
- Co-op is offline only7/10
Quick & Dirty at E3: Epic Mickey
Slightly less epic than previously announced.
An action adventure title, Epic Mickey is a painting ethics class. You can choose to paint or thin the environment and obstacles, and the former requires more creativity, while the latter is like punching the “Easy” button. What you choose to do will affect the game’s story, and the road your Mickey takes.
This is a Disney game on Wii, the appeal to a younger audience is prefab at this point. What holds some draw for the older crowd is the heavily nostalgic story, which focuses on Disney rejects from forgettable characters and abandoned theme park sets like the Swiss Family Robinson home.
Nunchuck moves an the Wiimote aims and fires paint or thinner. Painting will create things like platforms while thinner removes previously created elements or uncovers hidden items. Painting enemies makes them friendly, and thinning makes them non-existent. It’s just a bit of a pain, really – the Wii controls are unfun. A touch of waggle gets Mickey to spin so you can find e-Tickets hidden in jars (the game’s currency) or break objects.
Playing in Adventureland I was tasked with tracking down some items in order to progress to Skull Island. These are essentially fetch quests that have you interacting with characters to get them what they need, or collecting things to pay them off. Travelling to Skull Island uses the travel sequence seen at the press conference, Steamboat Willie. It really is a clever addition in a place that could be empty.
Skull Island features a sea of thinner and Sweepers from Fantasia that use thinner at range. On the offensive you can use props you find, in this case a TV sketch. Additional sketches come with more environments, and this one deposits a TV into the environment that hypnotizes enemies.
The game’s morality system and the play with restoring things to former glory is the most interesting aspect of the game. Thinning the world around you sends you down a “dark Mickey” path, and will affect the Guardian that joins Mickey on his travels. In the hero Mickey scenario, this Guardian is a “Tint” that befriends baddies, while naughty Mickey gets a “Turp” (think turpentine) that thins out the oncoming nasties. Very little else is a revealed, and I appreciate them keeping so much of the compelling aspect of the game under wraps.
It’s a very different game from those early concept arts, and so long as you adjust your expectations accordingly you can avoid needless disappointment. As it is, the game structure and story are more appealing than the control system, which I still consider to be a hindrance.
Quick & Dirty at E3: The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest
The Lord of the Rings is serious business, so it’s about time it took itself a little less seriously – we do enough of that. That the game looks more like a Saturday morning cartoon than anything Peter Jackson made is a small shock to the system, but not unwelcome, and it’s appropriate that these rose colored glasses are worn by Sam Gamgee. The game follows Aragorn through the three books in flashbacks narrated by Sam, and is even voiced by Sean Astin of the Jackson films. The game is geared towards a young audience, and so the narration is constructed like Sam is telling his kids the story.
The Aragorn’s Quest aesthetic has more style than the rather literal dark movie to dark game creations pumped out by EA. It fits well with the game narrative, unfolding like a storybook across the decidedly less gruesome battles. War may not be pretty, but Aragorn’s Quest doesn’t shy away from dressing up the ugly with soft focus, vibrant colors and a lot less innards. Despite the cozy bedtime story telling there are baddies, they’re just without gore and extraneous snarling. After all, evil exists, we just fight it with a smile and a flourish.
The demo highlighted a couple of different areas to include Pelennor Fields and Mines of Moria. Each level has objectives, but also what are essentially side quests – like fighting off siege engines from the walls. The side quests can net you special items, though failing to complete them doesn’t cause you to fail the level. Helpful for the young gamer is the sparkly breadcrumb trail that guides you to your objectives; Aragorn just says “no” to stopping to ask for directions.
Your party includes the regulars like Frodo, Legolas and Gimli – and Gandalf can pop in/pop out for some co-op. You only play as Aragorn in single player, and when Gandalf joins the game he is tethered to Aragorn. Gandalf can alternately fight (with fireballs) or heal, and is a useful contribution. However, the co-op camera is tricky and made it difficult for me (playing as Aragorn) to target enemies.
Controls use the Wiimote and Nunchuck. The latter controls the shield, bow and a torch and allows for moves like shield bash. The sword has special moves and combos, and your weapons, tools and moves even help with some puzzle solving.
There’s a small RPG element to the game that has you snagging items that level up members of your party and even lore that you can collect and read about. LOTR enthusiasts will find something here in the lore and items, but this game is for the children through and through. It’s a refreshing addition to a series that has, frankly, blundered down the same path for too long. While I’m not clamoring for a kiddie game myself, it’s good to remember that we don’t have to keep hitting the same note. Due out this Fall for Wii, PS3 (with Move), PS2, PSP and DS this is shaping up as a good Christmas buy for the family
Quick and Dirty at E3: Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is going where no Lara Croft has gone before – downloadable. Due out mid-year on PC, XBLA and PSN, this adventure goes gameplay centric, for the win. Be advised: this isn’t your Tomb Raider. Abandoning the Lara blueprint, Guardian of Light takes the savvy archaeologist and gives her a game worthy of a fearless heroine.
Lara’s camera is stuck on isometric as you explore the platformer and its puzzles. One stick fires while the other moves, twin stick shooter style. The simple control scheme made jumping into the co-op demo on the show floor a breeze. Arsenal-wise, you’ve got Croft’s pistols as well as other heavy firepower – even spears. Getting into the game the weapon menu’s counter-intuitive screen prompts did give me pause, but after that it was smooth sailing.
Tomb Raider fans really need to be reminded: this doesn’t look like a Tomb Raider game, this doesn’t play like a Tomb Raider game. Sure you will find some of the familiar, like Lara making use of her grappling hook, but overall this is a wholly refreshing and fundamentally gameplay centric re-imagining. If you’re thinking of complaining about the relative lack of pixels devoted to Lara’s bosom, bite your tongue and give the lady another shot at being part of a good game.
Gameplay focuses on crowd control, clever platforming, puzzling and, in the case of co-op, teamwork. Lara joins forces with Totec, a really old Mayan warrior dude – that means 2000 years of old. Totec can use his shield to boost Lara up, and it’s also a handy defense against enemy fire that can protect Lara while she interacts with the environment. In the demo Lara and I were deposited near a temple and the enemies started pouring in. Rapid mow-em-down gameplay is punctuated with teamwork platforming and some theatrics, like a collapsing bridge that Lara and Totec must cross in tandem.
If, however, Co-op isn’t your thing then there is a single player campaign. Absent from the single player is the option for co-op with AI which is, frankly, a great omission. The environment-based puzzling and gameplay in Guardian of Light just isn’t suited to AI teamwork. It would either frustrate or cheapen the experience, so kudos for not shoehorning that in.
For online types, headsets would be needed to properly enjoy this co-op. Lara and Totec can revive one another, if one of you dies then you respawn next to the other player and puzzles require coordinated teamwork. With no limit on lives, the only penalty is a return to checkpoint if both players die.
Despite its dungeon-crawler appeal, there’s no loot proper – but you do receive points for kills adding a competitive element to the co-op. There are health, ammo and gems to find, but Lara’s pistols never run dry. Mini-achievements add to the fun, and in the demo rewarded feats like crossing the river without touching the water, or collecting ten red skulls. The bounty for your efforts ranges from ammo and health to artifacts, and the significance of the last hasn’t been revealed yet.
The environments are alluring, and while the temple seemed to have some extraneous paths and areas the progression was pretty linear with all detours optional. Those are the nooks that hide the rewards like artifacts, and it seems that players disinterested in those bonuses can just plow through the primary puzzles, a deft handling of the downloadable format.
Guardian of Light puts a safe distance between Lara and less admirable forays. Stamp this one as a day one purchase, Guardian of Light is a fresh start for Lara – and her fans.
Quick and Dirty at E3: Rage
Go take your favorite post-apocalyptic open world game, pick up the crafted universe of Bioshock, make some smoochy sounds and out comes a beautiful screaming baby – with guns. We’ll name it Rage! At E3 we were taken through two different sections of the game, and both supported all the bold claims of the id Software staff on hand to show off the game. The environments are beautiful, the gameplay is badass, and I most fervently want to get my Rage on.
A meteor destroys the planet, and something called The Authority has buried people in arks so that the human race can rise again. When your personal ark goes faulty you escape to the surface to rejoin the mutated insanity that remains. The first section focused on an encounter with an old, slightly off-his-rocker guy in a shack and a combat-heavy ride in a makeshift vehicle, heavily outfitted with weaponry. Your vehicle has to be upgraded and outfitted, and the employees made it clear that our breezy trip from shanty to Wellspring was only the result of some hard work and modification.
The drive, fraught with gunfire, concludes in Wellspring, a major city in the game. Wellspring’s signature underwater fresh water spring makes it an oasis in the desert-y wilderness. It’s here that we dive into the well to stop the Ghost clan from poisoning the supply and get a real taste for the arsenal.
You’ll find familiar weapons like a sidearm and an AR, but I was most pleased when the id employee playing the demo pulled out a crossbow loaded with electric bolts and electrified some enemies in puddles. I was downright giggling when he used the spider turret (a bot that takes down enemies in range, Agents of Doom, anyone?) and then a remote control car loaded with explosives. For that back-to-nature feel use your wingstick, a boomerang barbed with knives. As you progress through the game you learn how to build different items, like the turrets or a gadget that picks locks. Once learned, all you need are the requisite parts for construction and you can build it on the spot.
The wasteland is littered with mutants for you to dispense with. The Ghost clan, just one of the game’s factions, are nimble. They like to adhere to the ceiling and pull of bullet-dodging acrobatics, so it was especially gratifying to see the effects the hits you do land have on them. Nailing the guy in the chest caused him to stagger just enough to slow down his speedy assault.
For the grand finale, we were treated to the ruins of Dead City. Since Dead City is largely abandoned and apparently more deep in the apocalyptic wasteland, the mutant types were very different from those previously encountered. They looked, well, further gone. After a few mutated nasties migrated up from the sewers for an attack, a giant, enormous, gargantuan hulking baddie lumbered out into – no, over – the space. As the id guide began to unload all the firepower he had on him, the Rage logo appeared. If that conclusion isn’t testament enough to the cruel genius of id Software, just wait until you see the game.
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Interview with Perfect World Product Manager Jon Belliss
Before E3 I made Perfect World Entertainments Product Manager Jon Belliss answer a bunch of our questions. The results of the interrogation are over on ZTGD.
Forsaken World
Quick and Dirty at E3: Vanquish Preview
Some games just aren’t attention grabbers. They exist in the background, somewhere outside the blinding glow of words like “Halo” and “Motion control”. Games like Vanquish whose creator, Shinji Mikami, had something entirely other in mind while he was crafting this Western shooter through an Eastern lens.
In this imagined future, Russia and the US are superpowers duking it out over the energy of the sun. Story goes that Russia has laid waste to San Francisco with a US-built space station, originally made to harvest solar energy. You play as Sam, an agent with a cybernetic battle suit and a team of soldiers. It’s all a bit Flash Gordon era with a retro style, Russian enemy, and our hero, Sam Gideon, who was the star football player. Dreamy!
The demonstration highlights a furious battle with the Russian robotic force. There is a lot – a lot – going on onscreen, and Vanquish doesn’t flinch (the engine is a modified version of the one used in Bayonetta). As you progress across the surface taking out emplacements and enemy forces, the environment is coming to pieces around you. While the environment attacks, you can use the environment, exploding barrels around the station to take out enemies.
The controls are almost as intense as the graphics. Heavy Rain style, you’ll be pulling off finger Twister holding down both bumpers, face button while moving a stick. The control scheme is probably best suited to someone that has never played a shooter before: Square controls cover, X is evade, O is melee, Triangle for grenade, L1 is boost (a power slide), L2 aims/slow motion, R2 fires and R1 reloads.
Cover is critical, and so Vanquish makes use of a boost element to speed up gameplay and significantly shorten the time getting from cover to cover. Cover-based paired with fast-paced, it seems you’re only supposed to take shelter for mere seconds. The speed has some Gears of War style (roadie run), but this is more nimble, more satisfying.
Weapons have great variety. While Sam is only equipped to carry three firearms at a time, he gets a number of options across the game and the weapon you carry is swapped out through a sort of onscreen morphing. Basically, as you encounter weapons throughout the game, Sam learns how to create them and you can change your weapon on the fly, like during your approach to an enemy.
Weapon variety takes a back seat to Sam’s duds, however, as his super-suit allows him to perform some impressive slides and flips as well as speed up his perception. Special moves like sliding, slow-mo bullet-time, evasion and even melee require energy and using them too much causes Sam’s super suit to overheat and then it’s back to cover.
Sam is part of a squad and being a man of many talents can heal his teammates, which is advisable as they seem to be genuinely useful. Because your suit’s primary powers are related to speed, not armor, things like cover and keeping your team healthy are a huge part of gameplay.
The action is consistent with Bayonetta and MadWorld, and what I saw and played at the show made Vanquish one of the more memorable titles of the week. I hope Sam uses his perception-altering powers to launch himself nearer the forefront of gamers’ minds this winter.
Eyes on Civilization V
Hello, my name is Cat, and I need just one more turn.
If you’re a longtime Civ fan like me, Civ V will do much to impress and delight you. Notably, it seems to learn from recent forays into the casual. Don’t worry, you still get your same level of control and detail (and then some), and this bold new Civ does much to lure more gamers into our fold. Nowhere are these efforts more apparent than the interface, which in the case of the primary view pushes your myriad options to the border making all those micromanaging possibilities as unobtrusive as possible.
“Believability” was their art lead’s key word, and you can really appreciate this in moments of negotiation, which feature the Civilization leaders. Basically, it’s less unintentionally funny. The leader artwork is beautiful, they fill the screen and reside in their own unique settings. Elizabeth is on her throne and Napoleon is horseback on a smoky field of battle, each speaking their respective languages. The AI of the leaders gives them unqiue playstyles, as well, so Napoleon will be aggressive with his military – but if you pose a strong threat in return he won’t blindly press forward.
A more subtle step toward believability is how you manage tasks during your turn. You no longer have to keep up with occurrences, but can go to them later, after the turn. Similarly, it is not necessary to make production choices right away. This will make managing those large civilizations easier, and removes the frustration of trying to remember what city need which changes while 12 of them require immediate production input.
Tiny change you might have heard about: Civ V tiles are now hexes sp unit movement radiates naturally. City influence also spreads more believably, absorbing the tile that it needs, like a production tile. If you need that production but your influence isn’t great enough yet, you can use gold to purchase adjacent tiles. Or, you could always tweak your city and its citizens, something the new city view makes simple. If you are in a production race, for example, you can focus on production, even selecting civilians and moving them around to different tiles (though the AI often knows what’s best).
New to the game are City-States, single city entities that don’t grow and don’t complete. In the demo shown at E3, Geneva is the featured City-State. City-States begin neutral, and have their own personalities, in this case “Irrational”. Doing favors for them wins them over to you, and they will give you culture and assistance. In the demo we were shown Elizabeth and Geneva were near neighbors, and Elizabeth’s AI predisposes her to coastal cities like Geneva. If you are aiming for a Diplomatic victory, then taking a City-State by force is risky. If Elizabeth were to take it by force, however, then liberating Geneva would win us favor with the Genevans while putting us at war with Elizabeth and her formidable navy. In the demo, we politely sent a delgation to Newcastle to suggest that we purchases Geneva from them, but since Lizzie was unrepsonsive, we went to war.
In the past I have derived pleasure from my stacks of doom, particularly when it was a tile theoretically crumbling under the weight of tanks and mech armor against longbowmen, but it just wasn’t very satisfying. Now, with one unit per tile, Civ introduces more tactical gameplay that reinforces the need to place your units strategically on the terrain to give them bonuses and back-up. Ranged combat is reintroduced, and artillery will need support from nearby units as they are defensively weak.
Once you acquire a city you can decide what to do with them. You can, of course, choose to raze then to the ground, or you could annex them. Annexing the city will still leave the citizens unhappy and pull resources, but the puppet state reduces unhappiness. As a puppet state you collect their science, gold, and culture but they do their own thing without your lordly input.
Cities themselves no longer get a unit stack, either, so the critical change is how to go about defending them. Simply, cities themselves become a unit. They have HP and can garrison a melee unit (as well as an air unit since those exist on different planes). Cities can employ the usual defenses, like build castles and walls, and if they are coastal can keep a navy in the nearby waters – you just won’t be able to have 20 pikemen holed up within the walls of your capital.
Victories (science, culture, domination and diplomacy) work differently, too. For a Domination victory you need to capture capitals, not decimate the entire civilization. Culture victory’s are particularly interesting: you must have to have 3 cities at the top, but now there are Social Policies in play. With Social Policies, you unlock things like tradition, liberty or piety, and each carries its own bonus and corresponding policy trees. The culture you accumulate is the currency you use to purchase these policies, and acquiring all policies unlocks the Utopia Project which, if built, means a cultural victory!
There is full steamworks integration with a friends list, invites and achievements. Additionally, Civ V now features Mod system integration – free – which you can access through the main menu (community ratings will weed out the fodder).
Civilization V brings some much needed updates, and even more that I never even thought of. The average game is estimated to last 8 hours, significantly less time than the E3 demo, so while I didn’t get to see what all these changes mean in “Civ time”, I’m very excited to play through to year 2050 this fall. This September 21, we all get one more turn.
E3 Life: Tender Moments
It’s not all running around and craziness, here are a couple quiet moments from the show:
Pony!
Getting friendly with the Helghast.
There is a prohibitive height requirement to work on the PlayStation Blog.
Quick and Dirty Hands-On at E3: Rock Band 3
Rock Band 2 was a fun game. It found a place in my home for a week or so, and I may have even played all of the songs – but that was it for me and the sequel that had little of the magic of the first game. My bandmates and I weren’t showing up to work on Monday hoarse from singing all weekend, tapping out drum beats on our keyboards, and so it was with that same ambivalence that I went to my Rock Band 3 appointment at E3.
The nitty gritty: you can import your songs from Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Green Day, downloads and track packs. Keyboard and vocal harmonies will be limited to the disc tracks and future DLC pending any possible, but unconfirmed, future updates. Where previously there wasn’t a clear-cut way to “win” at Rock Band, this edition includes over 700 challenges and positions your band at the bottom of the musical cesspool with the task of rising to the top.
Another new feature is the ability to filter – extensively – by anything from song length to rating to genre, even attaching labels to songs you don’t want to hear during a party or creating track lists at work for when you get home. Also helping eliminate party fouls is the ability to choose a band leader. This member is in charge of things like picking tracks, which means that when a friend gets overly enthusiastic on the drums while you’re getting ready to rock the bass you won’t be bounced back through the menus. Also party-friendly is the ability to drop-in and out of a song, but since you still have to pause for this to happen it’s not quite seamless.
Those are all nice additions, and certainly improve the Rock Band experience, but none of them is revolutionary enough to really transform those feelings of music peripheral apathy. No, that is where Pro Mode comes in. Honestly, it wasn’t until after the presentation when we got to talk to the guys behind the hardware that my icy feelings were globally warmed. The instruments are there, some work in the same way, but now they are something new and entirely game-changing.
For starters a keyboard, with keys – though you can use the five colored sections for a simpler approach. In Pro Mode however, users will have to play the keys as the instrument is a MIDI controller. What that also means is that if you have a MIDI-capable keyboard you can buy an adapter and hook that up. Just like in traditional Rock Band, the easy mode is a pared down version of a song with Expert getting you to play the songs note-for-note. On keys, the difficulty increases as you use more of the peripheral/instrument, even moving across the note scale in-game. The keyboard is available on its own for $79.99 or bundled for $129.99. Pro-Mode is also compatible with drums, which always seemed brutally true to life to me, only now they incorporate cymbals.
Squire in the foreground, Mustang in red
The guitars, oh the guitars! Stay with me, because this gets really good: On the Mustang Pro guitar from MadCatz (sold separately for $149.99) every string of 17 frets is a button, with six strings over the strum bar. The notes coming at you onscreen will have a color as well as a number to tell you which string and which fret. Later on, like when you aren’t rubbish, there will be chords. It is connected directly to the console as a wireless controller, and is some sort of mutant hybrid between the Rock Band controller and the Fender Squier.
Originally I assumed the Squier (pricing still unannounced) was merely a MIDI and, therefore, lame. How wrong I was. The Squier does use a MIDI translator to connect to the console, but each fret is divided across the six strings so that the strings complete circuits, allowing the game to know the notes and chords you are playing. The game software does not require direct tuning, and a perfectly tuned guitar is not needed for success – but since the Squier can be plugged into an amp and be used as a real electric guitar, you’ll probably want to give some attention to the tuning.
Previous MIDI instruments have used pitch detection, which doesn’t track quickly enough for the purposes of playing Rock Band (which needs to be very precise). Neither the Mustang nor the Squier uses pitch detection, which theoretically means that you don’t have to be playing the right notes, just the right strings on the right frets. Thanks to Todd Baker, Director of Hardware Development at Harmonix, for this concise explanation:
Success in the game requires that you fret the correct fret and strum the correct string (as communicated thru the game interface). Because of the technology we use in the Mustang and the Squier, we detect your fret hand and your strum string independently. This allows us to give more effective real time information about your fret hand positions as you change fret positions up and down the string.
Oh, think of the children! If you don’t believe that having a game to learn an instrument will get more kids playing music, then you’re crazy.
Guitarists may find it interesting, or they might wonder why they aren’t just playing the real thing, but for someone like me (with novice musical skill at best) this is a game-changing opportunity. Now I can play, with the potential to truly rock. Think of it: the next time someone obnoxiously asks you why you don’t just play real guitar you can now retort, “I fracking am!”
E3 Life: Food
Sometimes at E3 you get to eat. Sometimes.
We made time on Monday post Microsoft to fill up at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles!
Dave is either laughing with me, or at me...
Sam ran out of waffles.
Dutifully posing
About
I’m Community Manager and Admin for the NewsBoiler Network, home to N4G, TechSpy, AnimeShinbun, FilmWatch and 11×2. I also write for network editorial site, ZTGD.
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