Gaming Weekend: Sweet Music Edition
The way that visual media has been intertwined with accompanying audio is like a dense ivy growing over a chain link fence. In theory, they could be separated, but the realistic mind will admit they are functionally singular. I find this fascinating because while we enjoy activities that involve a single sense (music, books), somehow there is a presentation format of the generated or filmed motion picture that it seems cannot be acknowledged without some sort of auditory component.
I suppose it has to do with the motivation of the medium. With books or music the experience is internal, abstracted by design to create a (allow me to borrow a modern phrase for an old concept) user-generated experience. However the explicit and external descriptions presented by film, theater, games, even music performed live is reliant on spectacle and for that to be effective we have, long ago, determined that accessing multiple senses is most effective at captivation.
But we don’t even really notice the distinction any longer, except maybe when it is absent. A filmmaker can create a certain tension by excising the soundtrack from a scene, for example. What I find interesting though is that it has become such an integral part of this type of media that it often fades to the background in deference to the principal visual aspect. Which is why so many games that have captured people’s attention lately are interesting because they take that sort of secondary audio element and push it to the forefront and come up with something that effectively narrows the gap between performer and audience.
Of course, this is principally true in the world of games.
Play Music/Game
The two games that dominated my time this weekend were Everyday Shooter and Rock Band. It may seem strange to compare the current de facto karaoke night/party game hit with an indie twin-stick shooter, and perhaps even more so when I suggest that they both have a lot in common with Rez (HD), but the principal similarity in all those games is the incorporation of sound into the key gameplay elements.
What it comes down to, essentially, is that playing these games feels remarkably like playing music.
Take Everyday Shooter as an example. The basic mechanic is like Geometry Wars (longtime readers of this column will immediately understand why that means I had to pick up this game) only less frenetic in pace. There are no power-ups, and while the screen does fill with enemies and obstacles, for the most part they move languorously toward you instead of the cascading tide you try to stem in something like GeoWars. The twist is that there is a chaining system that you can use to clear the board by causing certain enemies to explode into a short-lived dead zone where any other creatures that touch it also affect the area around them for a time. But the system for initiating the chains isn’t consistent from one level to the next and the game makes it pretty clear that part of the point is figuring out how to start the chains.
What brings this around to the music thing is that instead of your standard pew-pew-pew sound effects, the game is organized like a CD: Each “stage” is actually a song and when the song ends you’ve completed the stage assuming you’re still alive. Replacing those standard shooty and explosion sound effects is a note or a riff in tune with the stage’s soundtrack. So while picking up the game’s currency results in a subtle single note (all the songs and effects are played on guitar), successive hits on key targets start arpeggio runs and large chain combos generate a more dramatic flourish. The result is that you begin to catch a certain groove as you play, picking small-sounding notes as you collect the tokens and then find a suitable spot to start a rain of shots at a key chain-starting foe and have the lead melody erupt into a crescendo. It’s quite an experience.
The whole thing feels very similar to Rez, where the game is in fact not about playing music but the music is so tightly incorporated into the gameplay that it feels like the music is responding to your actions. It isn’t really playing music in either case, at least not exactly. Instead it feels like you become part of the musical decision-making process; you take a certain level of control like a DJ mixing a song and it’s like you have a hand in, if not the creation, the execution of the song.
Obviously Rock Band is a little more obvious in its incorporation of the “playing music” dynamic within the parameters of a game. What strikes me though is that when talking with other Rock Band players, even those who typically don’t lean toward video games as a regular pastime, they rarely speak of it in terms of pressing buttons or moving levers. Instead the vocabulary of the game is like that of people who are actually playing instruments. Rock Band never really lets loose the reins entirely: There is always some original song track playing somewhere or another regardless of how well or poorly the players perform. And certain songs are in a particular range of difficulty that is either too simplistic or too complex to facilitate the fantasy pursuit. Occasionally though you will find that moment where pretense and the cardboard illusion that stems from plastic guitars and home entertainment consoles evaporates and you find yourself exactly where you go when no one is home and you grab the tennis racket/guitar or the hairbrush/microphone and you join the band on stage in the theater of your mind.
I downloaded Oasis’ “Wonderwall” because I heard the acoustic strumming was handled in a particularly intriguing manner by those responsible for the note-tracking but it was during our Thursday jam sessions under the banner of “Joey Big Hat” that I found a moment during the song (I wasn’t even playing guitar but filling my role in that band as singer) where my eyes were closed, I no longer saw the pitch tracking or the lyric scroll. I sang as if I were alone in the car, or lost in a teenage hairbrush performance or… perhaps… on a stage. Later in the evening I took over briefly on drums and played one of the OXM exclusive Bang Camaro songs (a brilliant, anthemic power rock song that channels everything awesome about 70s and 80s arena rock), “Rock Rebellion.” The song is perfectly tuned for the Rock Band experience to begin with, but on the drums it is able to highlight the pure joy that comes from banging on a drum kit. On “Easy” mode the song is as close to adding control and reward to the activity I pursued above all others my sophomore year in high school: Sitting in my room, wailing on an imaginary pair of drums while my CD collection played at top volume.
The Other Games
- Gears of War – I’ve been kind of systematically picking through my collection of 360 games and revisiting them on the HD set as kind of an unstructured evaluation of the new rig. Gears was this weekend’s choice and it didn’t really surprise me to learn that a game widely hailed as the best looking 360 game when it was released looked fantastic. Surprisingly I also managed to complete the last of the Chapter I was working on and earned a quick 20 point achievement, but the never-ending train ride that makes up Chapter 5 stood before me and I did not put forth the requisite effort to conquer it.
- Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction – I worked my way through a big portion of this game during my rental period but unfortunately had to return it before I could wrap it up. Historically this situation has lead to me not finishing the game in question and I suspect that may happen here. I enjoyed the game quite a bit but I don’t know if it is something I feel is worth the extra expense to pursue to the end. I played it, had some fun and I think I’m about ready to move on.
- Silent Hill Origins – On the upside I had a lot of time on my hands Friday with little to do besides play PSP. On the downside I struggled nearly the whole time to complete the puzzles in the theater and fend off those annoying puppets that hang from the ceiling. After many fits and starts I made it through to the cave, only to find that my ammo was woefully low for defeating the boss creature who lay in wait for me. Somehow I must persevere, but I fear there may be a visit to GameFAQs in my future.