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"We made a commitment to real choreography. I basically drew a line in the sand and said, “If this interface is going to be great, and we're going to make a dance game that's gonna be transformative, you have to be able to dance 'Crank That' by Soulja Boy.” That’s the bar for a good interface."
18
January
2012
January
2012
Links
Tagged as:
choreography, dance, games, harmonix, interface.
04
October
2010
October
2010
games
Tagged as:
choreography, dance, games, westsidestory.
GTA: West Side Story
At some point in the pub after Playful, I got rambling about dance, and choreography – I forget why – and I blurted out the phrase “GTA West Side Story“. And when you name the game, you have to explain it.
This is a belated explanation.
I’m a sucker for good choreography. I’ve never really got on with musical theatre, or films of musicals, but god, good choreography is just fabulous. And in this age of fragmented, hyperlinked video, I can point you at some. I found this a few months back and was blown away:
This is the Nicholas Brothers in Stormy Weather. I’m not even a big fan of tap, but blimey, they can dance; there’s a lightness of touch and a terrifying strength all at once. I also love how it exhibits one of the great elements of choreography: it’s not always about people performing identical actions, but rather, sympathetic ones; their feet are locked in step with one another, but their bodies act sympathetically.
And then there’s the big finish, which is just showing off.
Anyhow: West Side Story is a funny one. Although I don’t care much for the main love story in it, it’s just great musically.
A lot of people have a problem with the dancing. It’s understandable: these guys are meant to be street-gang members, and yet they break into dance a lot. I can only explain this by with the golden rule, it seems, of musical theatre: you just have to get over that. That’s how people move in this musical (just as they express their innermost thoughts by singing them). Once you’ve got over that – just look at this:
As a piece of choreography – movements set to music – isn’t that marvellous? The basketball sequence!
And I keep thinking about this, not because I’m a good dancer, or because I like the act of dancing, but because: wouldn’t it be marvellous if, when you were walking around, everyone else knew the dance too – could snap in time with the music in your head?
And that’s where a game about choreography – and gangs – comes in. GTA: West Side Story.
In a nutshell: you recruit a gang by getting them to join your chorus, which tags along with you, and acts as strength-of-numbers when it comes to rumbles, not to mention looking awesome. It’s a bit like the way in Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2‘s Pacifism mode you end up with a massive chain of diamonds following you:
except the diamonds are thugs, and they’re not out to kill you; they’re out to dance with you, to back you up.
So you pile through the city, with your own private gang, lockstepped, scissor-kicking as they turn corners.
Of course, not everyone can be in your chorus – in every movie musical, there’s always background talent that isn’t part of the chorus: and so part of the skill of the game is only “chaining” other gang members, who can definitely be part of the chorus – ie, they know the music, they know the words. Try to chain with a “civilian” and you’ll lose some of your posse. How do you identify a potential recruit? He’s the one doing something in time with the soundtrack – playing basketball, snapping his fingers, combing his hair. (Other civilians do these things too – but out of time).
And then there need to be rumbles: fighting as rhythm-action, dance-offs between rival gangs. Somewhere between Streets of Rage
and Space Channel 5.
It’s the video to Bad made game.
But, like all the best music games, it’s best when it’s not about competetive or combative elements; when you’re just about making pretty patterns, catchy, finger-snapping rhythms, and strolling around the turf you own.
Whilst dancing.
29
April
2010
April
2010
Links
Tagged as:
ac4a, architecture, armoredcore, buildings, choreography, church, dannytrejo, fiction, film, games, hidden, history, interview, jamesbridle, jpop, machinima, movies, stml, stories, volcano.
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I could, charmlessly and redundantly, expand on that to say: when life surprises us, making the everyday strange and wonderful, our first impulse is to make stories. These are of course personal stories: the volcano itself is too remote, too vast, to fit into our little narratives. Like Vonnegut’s glaciers, they just exist: human lives happen around them.
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"An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years. The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway." Wow. Via BLDGBLOG
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Lovely interview with Danny Trejo about many of his roles. If you like movies, totally worth a read. He's really quite a guy.
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Mecha-choreography, filmed in Armored Core 4 Answer. Pretty, and I'm not really one for Machinima, but there's something about the jet-trails that just works.
12
December
2008
December
2008
Links
Tagged as:
bag, bonkers, choreography, colours, community, cushion, design, discussion, dpreview, flash, forums, games, gentle, kongregate, laptop, networks, notebook, pillow, pixelated, reflective, slinky, trees, video, visualization, web.
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"The Napbook is a laptopcase which also happens to be a comfortable cushion." I could do with one right now.
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"I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colours", a pixelated Cthuluesque love-hate story. Sweet; overwritten, but the core mechanics is nice, and the pace of the game is very soothing.
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Some interesting visualisations of the way forum threads on dpreview – which has nested threads in posts – grow and progress. Interesting for the patterns it throws up, and somewhat useful, if only for rough, high-level analysis.
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Bonkers. It's a man, dressed as something a bit like a slinky, and it broke me a little.
Links & notes for this month
- A whole bunch of vintage Rawlings fashion photography from 30s and 40s Vogue. Something about many of these that's just magic; great direction, great pictures.
- Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.
- "..some tweets were destined for fail." - or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.
- Nothing out of the ordinary, but the take-on-release tip is a good one, and I'll be checking out Pano.
- For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.
- "I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.
- "Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."
- "But in a game - or, at any rate, in the kind of game you used to get for Christmas - you’re literally the only person in the universe, and literally the only person with the power to fix things. No-one’s going to come and help, no-one’s going to come and tell you off or second-guess your choices: there’s just you and a world that will stay broken unless you fix it. What’s in the box isn’t a frog power fantasy - it’s a vibrant, momentary taster of the glorious pressure of being a grown-up." Margaret, being brilliant (again) on games, Christmas, childhood, and what it means to be meaningfully alone.
- "Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.
- "Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell." Utterly, utterly gorgeous.
- "A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages." Oh, that could come in handy.
- Lovely way to generate pages for your github projects - and to do so as a branch of said project. Clever.
- "CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy." Read the links for more details; suffice to say, EVE is going through a major economic upheaval right now; exploits that have lasted for four years are no longer viable, and everything's getting very expensive. Sound familiar?
- "Semi-jestfully I would talk with my friends about how stupid it would be to get an I <3 Helvetica tattoo... an even stupider idea would be to get it as a tramp stamp. Well, I got good reviews from my posse and impulsively I got it last night..." Oh boy.
- A nice post to end the year from Kars - it feels like a top-trump of so many things that have risen to the surface in my head in 2008.
- "Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation." Yehuda Katz weighs in with a great, informative post.
- "Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that." No, really. Not an April Fool. It sounds like the architecture changes that are going to be made are going to be a big win for Rails 3. Looking forward to it.
- Not concerned with the Javascript bundle, but the Vibrant Ink syntax-highlighting link is lovely.
- "Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.
- "Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.
- "'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' ... It's because computers are fire... If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process--documentation, as it were--but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."
- This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.
- The Offworld 20 "...isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.
- "Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it... turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.
- "...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."
- "...it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."
- "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
- "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
- "I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand... These suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future." But of course.
- "The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.
- Lanchester writing about games, from the point of view of a smart person who's actually played the games he described. I certainly don't agree with all his points, but I don't disagree with them all, and he's not mouthing off: he's making smart connections and indicating more than a passing familiarity with the medium. Might write a tad more on this.
- "1352 components driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums, prices range from $275k–$400k." Ignoring the price: do want very much.
- It's basically Outrun 2 SP, but in hi-def, and on XBLA and PSN. And it looks like it has all the music intact. Very exciting!
- The metagame is the game. Use the elephant to earn achievements. Apart from earning slightly /too/ many instantly at the beginning, it's a lot of fun. Don't reach for the hints too early.
- Yes, it's an app about weight loss. But: the UI is superb in its touchability and suitability for task at hand, and the reporting functionality is solid (and looks like it'll get much better).