Bliterations
Thoughts/Gaming

Addendums
30
Apr

A round-up of nervous back-pedals, apologies and shout-outs. I placed my hyphens ironically, but no one will understand.

I realize now that in my post on the music of Super Mario Galaxy I may have given composer Mahito Yokota short shrift. This was absolutely not my intention! Yokota’s amazing work on the score and orchestration of SMG is in part the main reason why I wanted to write the piece in the first place. What I was attempting to do with my article was bring to mind the idea that Koji Kondo has instilled a certain “value” into the Mario series, that value being mainly a “living” soundtrack that coalesces with the gameplay in a masterful manner that is seldom explored in other games. Kondo’s philosophy carries over to the Mario games being developed today, and Yokota has proven himself a talented composer in his own right, keeping the legacy of great Mario soundtracks alive. Hope that clears things up!

It’s funny; I’m still trying to figure out exactly HOW to get my voice out there in the blogosphere and incite discussion and feedback, but I’m so self-conscious of it that I usually end up e-stammering like I’m the new 7th grade student at a very cliquey middle school. There’s an unabashed casualness amongst video game writers and journalists that’s both threatening and inviting at the same time. I haven’t wrapped my head around the decorum yet. Twitter has only made things worse; it’s an extremely selective social system that parades under the guise of a slow motion open chat room. Sure, you can @reply anyone and everyone you want, but I wonder, who is going to actually take you seriously if they don’t know you in the first place? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to devalue the merits of Twitter; it’s actually been an extremely useful networking tool and has allowed me to meet and chat with some great folks who I don’t think I would have otherwise. I think what I’m trying to do, rather, is apologize for some of the inane outbursts and filler tweets I’ve done lately as an attempt to “fit in” with a crowd that I don’t have the right to roll with. Clearly, I just need to calm down and focus on what matters: the content. Always the content.

As a way to absolve myself from the embarrassing @replies and forum posts, please allow me to recommend some websites:

Nobuooo
Nobuooo pitches itself as “User-submitted Videogame Music News,” and for a videogame music junkie like myself, it’s deliciously niche. An impressive source of VGM related articles, interviews, and fan remixes make up the majority of Nobuooo’s content, but the site also has a self-produced video series that is positively bursting with fascinating info (the latest episode features an interview with Tenchu series composer Noriyuki Asakura). The work that the prolific Jeriaska has put into the site is truly commendable.

Infinite Lives
The internet has a lot to say about former 1up Community Manager Jenn Frank, but the truth of the matter is that she has the enthusiasm and intelligence of a hardcore gamer without the pretension, and I find that really refreshing. The gal’s got spunk. She’s also got an excellent website that consistently points me in the direction of retro-themed goodness. For example, she recently ran a story on the Retro Arcade Museum in Beacon, New York, a place that I will soon be visiting with a hammer and a hollowed out wheelchair.

Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World
Roger Travis’s blog marrying video games with the discipline of classics always makes for an interesting read, and something that I’ve always appreciated about Living Epic is that Travis takes the time to patiently and thoughtfully respond to comments, creating an honest-to-goodness dialogue with his readers. He’s also been posting much more frequently (a New Year’s resolution, he claims), so it definitely deserves bookmarking.

Finally, I want to thank you, Dear Reader, for taking the time to visit and read Blit. I may not be connected to the industry (in fact, I’m as far on the outskirts as you can get), but I do have a deep respect and passion for electronic games and enjoy sharing my thoughts about them. As always, I welcome feedback…in fact, I CRAVE it. Let me know what’s on your mind, what you think of the site, what you’d like to see in the future, etc. If you’re too shy to comment (and hey, I understand), then feel free to drop me a note at:

kurt AT bliterations DOT com

You can always follow me on Twitter as well. And I promise not to Tweet so haphazardly anymore.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 30th, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , ,
0 Comments

Collision Detection
27
Apr

  • label: Image Series

Image Sources: Protector-one and calyxa.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 27th, 2009 :: Images :: Tags : , ,
0 Comments

Remembrance of Things Boy
23
Apr

The 20th anniversary of the Game Boy was a few days ago, as I’m sure you all know, and there’s been some fine retrospectives, personal reflections and historiography on the plucky little machine that moved so much product for Nintendo it kept them high above water even as its popularity with gamers waned. Seek and ye shall be rewarded, wanderer of the aether!

I’m sitting here trying to think of a way to articulate exactly what I want to say about the first and, in a way, only portable gaming console that I owned. Sure, I was one of the few lucky kids to have an older brother who instinctively wanted everything that his younger sibling didn’t (which is also a roundabout way of saying that we had a Game Gear in our household at the same time since he wanted a portable console that was “not Game Boy”), and I did later buy the successor to Nintendo’s savior, the Game Boy Advance. Heck, I’m currently playing Rhythm Heaven right now on my DS Lite, so it’s not like it was the ONLY portable system in my possession.

But, yes, in a way it was. My memories of Game Boy mostly consist of it being the first palpable object that I always took with me on long car trips and into doctors’ offices (save for my trusty yellow Sports Walkman). Most of my experiences with my DS have actually been indoors, on my sofa or at my day job on a slow day, and these play-sessions almost always have a tinge of boredom attached to them; its just a way to pass the time that also involves videogames. This wasn’t so with my Game Boy. There was an omnipresent THRILL in being able to play a videogame away from a television, with the screen and your hands so close together it almost felt as if you were symbiotically bonding with the machine, with all of your actions somehow becoming more immediate and empowering. This was the system that gave us Donkey Kong (1994), our first taste of the way our modern Mario games would control in a 3-D environment. The funny thing is, looking back, debuting Mario’s new move-set on Game Boy was the best method possible, as that instant and visceral feel of interacting with a screen so close within your personal space made the jump to 3-D realism pretty intuitive. It was a personal extension of character control on two different levels, but the results were one and the same.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on Link’s Awakening (1993). This game is championed by many, and I can certainly echo those sentiments. In fact, quite by accident, I made the overworld map of Koholint my desktop background at work a week before I realized that the Game Boy’s anniversary was approaching, but even before I decided to sit down and try to hash out my feelings on it, I was admiring the thought and care that went into the overworld design (click to view fullscreen):

Looking at this map as a cohesive whole, one can see how an area blends into the next in a natural geographic way. There aren’t really any jarring transitions from one environment to another, yet all of the standard Zelda ecosystems–graveyards, deserts, mountains, towns–are still intact. It actually seems like a living, breathing world, clearly evolved and alive well before you even turn your Game Boy on (which is all the more ironic and heartbreaking considering the story’s ultimate outcome). What’s even more brilliant about the layout of Koholint is that it begs to be explored: there are dense pockets of marshy swamps and shorelines and bushy fields that are TOO enticing for an explorer to simply scuttle through. The developers employed the perfect way to encourage this kind of exploration as well: an overhead map broken down into a grid of blacked out squares that are “filled-in” one by one, as you move from screen to screen. The temptation to “reveal” the entire map ensured that you would travel to every nook and cranny, leaving no stone unturned or rock wall un-bombed.

Well, I said I didn’t want to get started but I did anyway. Suffice it to say, I obviously have a very soft spot for Link’s Awakening since I’m gushing about the MAP. The game kept my eyes glued to that small green screen for hours. I remember taking a family trip to Napa during that time, but to be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what the landscape looked like. I can’t describe a single vine. I do, however, know every square inch of Koholint from memory.

So far, no other portable system has lived and traveled with me in quite that same way, and I don’t know if another one ever will. There are many great games for DS, and I certainly have the hope that maybe I’ll find another Link’s Awakening or Donkey Kong (or Picross or Metroid II or Super Mario Land 2 or Tetris), something that will grab and beckon me to take it out, to have its narrative meld with the one I have to follow every time I step outside of the escapist glow in my electronic sanctuary. In the meantime, Dear Game Boy, I have my memories…and frankly, isn’t that part of the fuel that sustains our passion for this medium anyway?

Koholint map courtesy of VGMaps.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 23rd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , ,
0 Comments

Key of Kondo: The Music of Super Mario Galaxy
22
Apr

The greatness of game composer Koji Kondo has been expounded upon in countless articles, books, and blogs, so–as I’ve reiterated a few times already–I don’t want to use this precious space (or your time) to simply retread ground and talk about how great the man is. But seriously: this man is GREAT. His sound work really has proven to be monumental for video games, and not just because he crafts instantly recognizable and catchy melodies, but also because of the way in which these themes interact with the player within the context of the gameplay happening at any given time.

A concept that Kondo has mentioned in numerous interviews, and which appears to be more and more prominent in the work that he both composes and oversees, is that of “interactive” sound that morphs and changes depending on what action is taking place on-screen and where; in other words, dynamic composition.

We can trace this technique in Kondo’s work all the way back to Super Mario World (1991), in which an energetic percussion beat would accompany Mario as he rode Yoshi, and stop whenever he dismounted. I suppose if we thought about dynamic composition in this way, we can trace the concept even further back, all the way to Super Mario Bros. (1985), in which the music would speed up to a frenetic pace as the in-game timer winded down, adding a sense of urgency to a level that was, up to that point, a usually cheerful and exploratory game experience. It’s a small temporal detail that has a huge impact on the gameplay, something that Kondo would expand upon in his later musical scores.

In Super Mario 64 (1996), one can really get a clear picture of what Kondo was driving at concerning fluidity in game music, especially during the “Jolly Roger Bay” level, the first in a Mario game to feature swimming in a 3-D environment (discounting the castle moat in the hub-world, of course, which serves more as a sand-box for experimentation and practice than an actual stage). At the start of Jolly Roger Bay, a lone electric piano plays the soothing main theme, unaccompanied by any other instruments. It is only upon entering the water–in essence, beginning the level proper–that a string section enters the arrangement, and as you venture further, eventually reaching an underground cave and sunken pirate ship, the rhythm section fades up and the different layers and complexities of Kondo’s piece are fully revealed. While a player could simply marvel at the expanse of the lake and the beauty of the rendered environment from the shore (well, beautiful at the time, at least), that’s not the main objective that the designers wanted to convey. The true excitement, the “meat” of the stage, was beneath the surface of the water, and having the full score swell in if and only if you actually “dive in” is the perfect way to encourage the player to do so. One of the challenges of creating a good 3-D environment is to compel the player to explore and investigate areas that they can already see in front of them (pop-in and fog, consistent visual blemishes in Nintendo 64 games, are precisely the wrong way to go about doing this, as you’re constantly breaking from the reality of the space, and who wants to explore somewhere or something that’s always undermining its own construct anyway?); achieving this goal with an appropriate and, more importantly, CONTEXTUAL music cue is a stroke of genius on Kondo’s and Shigeru Miyamoto’s part.

While Super Mario Sunshine (2002) also exhibits these kinds of traits–Yoshi, once again, has an accompanying bongo drum beat whenever Mario rides him, for example–Super Mario Galaxy (2007) takes Kondo’s concepts of dynamic sound in videogames to another level entirely. In Galaxy, specific sound effects harmonize themselves with whatever music is playing in the background. So, not only does the music shift and change elastically according to what action is taking place and its location, but the sound of grabbing a coin, for example, actually has a different pitch depending on what chord the music is on the moment Mario grabs it. A tense moment in a level, say, the Ghost Ship, results in an appropriately tense sounding score, which itself results a coin grabbing sound effect that doesn’t feel inherently positive, like a major chord, but is instead a tad dark and mysterious, like those Halloween-y sounding diminished 7th chords in music. This seems like a fairly innocuous mechanism, but it really helps to bond the player and environment together (see Flower (2009) for a recent application of this).

We can also hear this same type of aural effect at the main menu screen, where the twinkling sound of selecting your file can vary depending on the temporal position of the musical interlude occurring at that same moment. Again, this is a small and seemingly inconsequential detail at first, but it results in a videogame that has an almost anthropomorphic nature, constantly resonating with itself in an immediate and organic way so that every nuance of sound is in perfect harmony with each other…AND the player. The result that Kondo and his team is trying to achieve, I think, is one of total immersion, with every aspect of the game fitting together like a giant interlocking puzzle or sculpture. This isn’t a case of different departments coming together and simply combining their parts, but instead, much like a symphony, is a collective voice made up of many smaller components that are all performing in the same key and with the same timbre.

And this is all without even taking into consideration the actual music of Super Mario Galaxy itself, which is amazing stuff! Having lush symphonic orchestrations accompany the player from level to level gives the game a much deeper sense of space and scope, creating sonic expanses that appropriately echo the notion that Mario has moved beyond pipe mazes and Cheese Bridges and has become a full-fledged astronaut, soaring between planetary masses with dignified resolve (credit must be given to composer/arranger Mahito Yokota, who helped create most of Galaxy’s score under Kondo’s supervision). What’s more, there are wonderful judgements regarding when to use these epic arrangements. My favorite example is the Comet Observatory, which serves as a hub-world in the way that Peach’s Castle did in SM64. As the player progresses through the game, unlocking new areas by collecting stars and restoring power to the gigantic floating structure, the music shifts from a thin, mostly synthetic arrangement–save for a few recorded instruments, such as flute and harp–to a majestic, swelling live orchestra. These kinds of thoughtful touches result in a score that’s not only the best for the Mario series, but one of the best game soundtracks in the last ten years.

Throughout the Mario series, we can see (or rather, hear) Kondo’s philosophy of dynamic composition shining through, reinforcing the solid standards of gameplay that Nintendo has made their bread and butter, and actually making it more fluid, more interactive and, ultimately, more fun. While Koji Kondo is certainly not an unsung hero in game design, the work that he and his group put into Super Mario Galaxy is more than just a part of what makes the game so good, but may very well be the cornerstone for the entire Mario series and a crucial element in that mysterious formula that keeps gamers enthralled by the squat Italian-American plumber again and again and again. It seems to me that the “essence of Mario” that Kondo has spoken of is also the essence of the composer himself, and both just happen to be perfectly in tune.

Related Links:
Iwata Asks column featuring the sound team of Super Mario Galaxy
1up Interview with Kondo (October 2007)
Video of Jolly Roger Bay from SM64

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 22nd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0 Comments

Games/New York
16
Apr

  • label: Image Series

Part of a continuing series of images. Click on photo to view full size.

When all of the humans are gone, who will take over: the dead or the rodents?

Related Link:
Art by Banksy

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 16th, 2009 :: Images :: Tags : , , ,
0 Comments

Braid: Everything and Nothing
10
Apr

To celebrate Braid’s release on PC today (although as of this writing I’ve been unable to confirm it), I’m encouraging everyone to check out my article on the game if they haven’t already. In a way, Braid, and the piece I wrote on it for the Auteurs’ Notebook back in January, was what kick-started Bliterations and my timid but passionate foray into game writing. Kudos to Jonathan Blow, David Hellman and the rest of the Number None team for crafting such a beautiful and provocative (and fun) game. If you haven’t experienced it yet and have the means to acquire it, get it!

You can find the article here.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 10th, 2009 :: Posts
0 Comments

Command|Performance: Games and their Performative Modes
6
Apr

  • label: Feature

A "stage" in Brendon Chung's Gravity Bone, with extras in place.

The performative aspects of videogames are not lost on those who consistently play them. Games, in general, can be a form of recreation, a show. Their immediate audio/visual stimuli lends itself perfectly as a spectacle for an audience of others to passively watch, from the AI controlled “attract” mode first present in early arcade machines to the maximum capacity audiences that clamor to see gaming tournaments and record attempts taking place at conventions and venues the world over.

Ian Bogost, in his Gamasutra article “Performative Play,” provides some fine examples of how some games are, in essence, bringing the duality between fantasy-world action and real-world implication to light in a more immediate and explicit way, through “performative mechanics.” This is certainly apparent with games like Wii Fit (2007) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998), which actually require specific physical interaction, but also shines through in more experimental games like Attent, designed to be played in office environments as a means of assigning value to internal memos and email, with the hope of actually increasing productivity and reducing unnecessary digital clutter (as anyone who has ever crossed items off of a personal “to-do” list knows how satisfying an organizational meta-game can be). While there is still a kind of “separateness of play,” to quote a Johan Huizinga term that Bogost uses—a way to escape inside of an alternate reality while still safely being grounded in the tangible one we are all familiar with—games that utilize or experiment with, or even comment on, the performative mode inherent in other types of media are evoking, as Bogost puts it, “a special kind of play for which outcome alone is an insufficient criterion.” Roger Travis, in his own series of articles on performance in video games, labels this relationship as “Performative Play Practices,” which he defines as an “intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having an effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected).”

Bogost and Travis have both written great pieces on performative play, and I don’t want to retread over already covered ground, but I would like to offer my own thoughts and examples of what I consider to be “modes of performance” and how they affect gaming culture as a whole.

Read more »

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 6th, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : , , , , , , , , , , ,
0 Comments