Archive for March 27th, 2010
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This isn’t new, hell this isn’t even recent. But it doesn’t matter because Miku and Mega Man are both timeless. This video features Hatsune Miku, the first synthesized character voice of the popular Vocaloid 2 software suite, singing the music of Mega Man 3. Now let’s get our education on by completely ignoring everything every college professor told me about using Wikipedia as a source and go ahead and use Wikipedia as a source.
Hatsune Miku (初音ミク?) is the first installment in the Vocaloid 2 Character Vocal Series released on August 31, 2007. The name of the title and the character of the software was chosen by combining Hatsu (初 First?), Ne (音 Sound?), and Miku (未来 Future?).[12] The data for the voice was created by actually sampling the voice of Saki Fujita, a Japanese voice actress. Unlike general purpose speech synthesizers, the software is tuned to create J-pop songs commonly heard in anime, but it is possible to create songs from other genres.
Isn’t learning fun? Check out the video below!
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You better hope your high speed internet is working, because you’re going to need that fat pipe to load the latest 8 Bit Horse game overview. Once again, AJ Johnson blesses us with an immensely image-laden and intensely in depth look at a 2 dimensional game to make the case for Why 2D Rules by taking a look at Game Freak’s Drill Dozer.
Read it! 8 Bit Horse Look at Drill Dozer
Crystal Labs recently released a pre-alpha video of their NES styled action adventure High Strangeness. The four members of Crystal Labs, Sam Bennett, Steve Jenkins, Rich Vreeland, and Mr. Agent MOO , have been hard at it for over two years now, but judging from the video things are starting to come together for them. High Strangeness will be releasing on the XBox LIVE Indie Games marketplace as well as the iPhone. There is currently no official release date other than “sometime in 2010.” Below, you’ll find a brief description of the games storyline, a few music samples, and the pre-alpha footage. Enjoy!
High Strangeness is about a young man named Boyd, who awakes in the middle of the night to find that his home has been intruded upon by shadowy villains. He soon finds himself on a quest to discover the secrets of a mysterious item, after unwittingly being dragged into a foreign world filled with the evil and mysterious Shadow Men. Although hesitant at first, our hero eventually realizes his role in a cosmic battle for peace throughout all universes.
01 High Strangeness
02 A Single Ray of Light
03 Last Night in Podunk
Wally the Walrus is up to no good, and it’s Peppy the Penguin’s job to see to it that his block manipulating schemes are foiled. But what’s that smell? Is it the sticky floors of a 1980′s arcade or just half baked penguin pancakes. This and other mysteries solved in our full review of yyrGames’ Falling.
Gameplay
Falling is an action-puzzle game that kicks things off by asking you to “please insert coin” as if to get you prepped and ready for an authentic arcade experience. You’ll be taking control of a penguin named Peppy in an attempt to help him destroy blocks while fending off the despicable Wally the Walrus. Fortunately for you, Peppy has come prepared to do more than just slide on his belly. In fact Peppy can not only jump but also pickup, push, throw, and kick blocks like nobodies business.
In typical block game fashion, new blocks will descend from the ceiling. During the introduction of new blocks Peppy must take evasive actions or risk becoming a penguin pancake, delicious but dead none the less. On the topic of death, the game begins with 3 lives and awards additional lives as specific point benchmarks are exceeded.
Enough about pancakes, let’s get back to blocks. There are three ways to remove blocks from the field of play: by forcefully knocking like-colored blocks into one another, kicking the blocks until they break, or intentionally allowing your bonus timer to reach zero resulting in Armageddon, or in other words cause fire balls to rain down from the heavens destroying blocks and penguins alike.
While all this block craziness is going on, Wally the Walrus will make regular appearances just to spice things up. Multiple Wally(s) can exist simultaneously and as the game goes on, he will not only occur more frequently but also gain further block manipulation abilities; for example, moving massive piles of blocks, kicking blocks, deflecting blocks, and jumping over blocks. This is typically a strategy reserved for situations when a row becomes full and Peppy has no choice but to let his bonus points run out.
The challenge presented by Wally can typically be overcome by playing strategically. However, there are issues in the game that cannot be. For instance, the controls of the game can at times feel unresponsive, particularly during block throwing. Additionally, when a block is thrown at another like-colored block, they will often stack rather than break. This leaves you in a particularly compromised position with a block hanging over another that will require reorientation.
Also on the list of unintended challenges, there is also a bug related to picking up blocks. When a block is held over head and another block is pushed into it by Wally, the blocks will clip together and cause you to become stuck relegated to accepting death.
Now, this isn’t technically a bug, but it is a questionable design decision. Falling really is a retro arcade style game, but it also talks up its modern features, such as customizable controls and online scoring. However, the game makes no attempt to do any form of saving, as a consequence of this all local high score data and control customizations are wiped out every time the game is quit. And the online scoring? Well the developer has opted to forego any use of XBox LIVE in favor of a crude code generation system that requires you to manually save score data on their website.
Audio Visual
Falling’s graphics and sounds are both in the style of the games you’d see in arcades during the golden age of such venues. It looks and sounds like you’ve fallen through a time warp in a good way as it does have a certain charm about it. All the sprites are cute and animated pixel art, the backgrounds are tiled and static, and the music is very chip tune.
But this ultra retro arcade stylistic approach can be a blessing and a curse, obviously those who like or can tolerate the style will be appriciative of the care taken to recreate the classic experience. Not only that, I’m sure yyrGames managed to save a good deal of time with such simplistic assets. However, those who aren’t fans of all things square, will likely find themselves turned off by Falling before they even demo it.
Summary
Falling is a decent classic arcade feeling action-puzzle game that will appeal to fans of the style. However, the game’s various gameplay bugs and design flaws make it feel a bit half baked. At 80 Microsoft Points it’s still likely to garner a reasonable amount of enjoyment and is certainly not the worst use of a dollar.
