MonsterVine Weekly News Round-Up For The Week Of
4/8/11

post from MonsterVine on 08 April 2011 11:58:40 PM. © MonsterVine

Starting today, we will be rolling out a weekly round up of news stories from MonsterVine.com. Here you will find various links to stories covering announcements from all over the Video Game Industry. Click on the title for the story: Max Payne 3 Details Emerge from EDGE Spider-Man Edge of Time Reveal Trailer, Screenshots Final [...]

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http://monstervine.com/2011/04/monstervine-weekly-news-round-up-for-the-week-of-4
811/

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Watch us seek revenge tomorrow morning on
Hangover

post from Destructoid on 08 April 2011 11:05:45 PM. © Destructoid

Watch us seek revenge tomorrow morning on Hangover screenshot

Every Saturday at 10:00 AM PDT, Conrad and I put on a live stream called Saturday Morning Hangover. Problem is, weekends are meant for sleeping; you guys are always telling us how you forgot to show up until right at noon when we shut things down. This is me officially reminding you to remember.

Remember. Hard.

We may have run into some technical difficulties last show with Super Crate Box Versus, and some we-can't-stop-losing difficulties with The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, but fun was still had. This week, we'll be checking out more of the Xbox Live Indie games and killing that damned spider boss until he stays dead.

If you're lucky, Jim might once again grace us with his presence -- and ensuing potty mouth -- in chat. You'll just have to jump on Destructoid's Justin.tv channel tomorrow to find out.

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Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac tracks to hit Rock
Band 3

post from Destructoid on 08 April 2011 11:05:45 PM. © Destructoid

Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac tracks to hit Rock Band 3 screenshot

Next week's additions to the Rock Band 3 music store have been announced, bringing legendary songs from Fleetwood Mac the solo career of their singer, Stevie Nicks. These are, predictably, just about every song by the artists that you'll hear on radio today, the core hits.

We're talking, "Landslide" and "Edge of Seventeen," here, songs that will worm their way into your mind, their cold grip on your consciousness squeezing like a vise until all you hear is the chorus looping while your friends and family stare at your twitching, prone body and wonder if they should be calling a doctor or a priest. They should probably call both, just to be certain.

Check out the full list below. The Fleetwood Mac/Stevie Nicks pack contains all six songs for $9.99 (800 MS points), while individual tracks run the usual $1.99 (160 MS Points). Pro versions of "Dreams" and "Edge of Seventeen" are also available for an additional $0.99 per track. The pack hits PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace on April 12th.

Available on Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation®3 system (April 12):

Fleetwood Mac – “Dreams”
Fleetwood Mac – “Gold Dust Woman”
Fleetwood Mac – “Landslide”
Fleetwood Mac – “Rhiannon”
Stevie Nicks – “Edge of Seventeen (Just Like the White Winged Dove)”
Stevie Nicks – “Stand Back”

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The Revenge

post from Escape Games 24 on 08 April 2011 10:05:53 PM. © Escape Games 24

The Revenge is another very good point and click adventure type downloadable hidden object games from Download Games 24. Help Queen Elisa battle against the power of evil and save her son from Zoraida, a terrifying and terrible witch! After being entombed alive by the Royal Family for practicing witchcraft, Zoraida has vowed to get Revenge. After a century in captivity, the evil witch has escaped

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Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin': Red Faction: Guerrilla

post from Destructoid on 08 April 2011 10:05:45 PM. © Destructoid

Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin': Red Faction: Guerrilla screenshot

This latest installment of HAWP has got to be one of my all-time favorites.

Long-time fans of Podtoid -- and Anthony, in general -- will appreciate the humor of this episode. As far as bits about terrorism go, this is probably one of his greatest accomplishments yet.

We also get more of that great two-versus-one dynamic that never ceases to crack me up. Try not to watch this video in a public place.

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Free apps of the day: Squareball & WAVE

post from Destructoid on 08 April 2011 10:05:45 PM. © Destructoid

Free apps of the day: Squareball & WAVE screenshot

Normally Jim does these things, but I've been getting into iOS stuff more and more now that the market has matured a bit, and he doesn't always have the time to do it. Also, I am a major cheap-ass. So here's couple of interesting free games!

Squareball is a cool little game where you slide a 2D level around a giant bouncing pixel. It's like playing an underground level in Super Mario Bros.'s if Mario was a Pong ball that goes up and down, and if you controlled the level instead of the character. It's also balls hard, so if the thought of a hard indie 2D Pong side-scroller kind of thing make you soil yourself, grab it while it's free. Even if you don't, it's worth grabbing just to check it out.

Wave - Against Every BEAT! is a 2D top-down shmup with a couple of modes, including a customizable Free Style mode that lets you play to your own music's beat and rhythm. I don't particularly care much for bullet hell shmups on a touch-screen, but it's pretty fun and the controls are decent enough. Trying it with R&B, hardcore techno, and David Guetta didn't really seem to make that big of a difference though. But if you're bored and listening to your music anyway, you might as well shoot some stuff for free while you're at it.

[Got a Free App suggestion? Hitting up Jim or me on Twitter is the fastest way! Be sure to get him before 9am Central though!]

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inFamous 2 Quest for Power Trailer

post from MonsterVine on 08 April 2011 09:13:19 PM. © MonsterVine

Sucker Punch has released a new ecstatic trailer for inFamous 2 today. In the previous installment, Cole was caught in a blast from a city-demolishing device called the Ray Sphere and imbued him with the superpowers for good or evil. In the sequel, Cole must face “The Beast,” alluded to from the first game and [...]

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The master of Mortal Kombat, Shang Tsung

post from Destructoid on 08 April 2011 09:07:20 PM. © Destructoid

The master of Mortal Kombat, Shang Tsung screenshot

Can't see the video? Click here

All the way back to the first Mortal Kombat, Shang Tsung has been my homeboy. Oh, I would never play as him in a game. His move sets were too complicated, too strategic for my desperate flailing and mashing approach in playing the arcade games. But he was the coolest character in the universe because he consumed souls and stole the powers of other combatants in addition to his own magical gifts. A jack of all trades, to be certain, and that appealed greatly to me.

This new video outlines some of Shangy-poo's history, his journey to Outworld and the pact he made with Shao Khan. There's a bunch of neat concept art in here also, including Tsung's classic "Soultaker" fatality.

I've pre-ordered my copy from Amazon and can't wait. With Portal 2 releasing the same day, it's going to be really tough to figure out how to best spend my time.

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Aaamaazing: There's a symphony in there!

Aaamaazing: There's a symphony in there! screenshot

_{[For his Monthly Musing, bassbeast shows how game music can be just as memorable and amazing as the gameplay itself. Want to see your own work on the front page? Go ahead and write a blog on this month's topic and it might get promoted! -- JRo]}

I'm a musician. Not the "I play guitar in my mom's basement" kind of musician. I've got a university degree in this. It's how I put food on my table and support my wife and son. Rather than retread the old, tired debate for music's value in a gaming experience (there are enough articles about that), for this month's Monthly Musing, I remembered the first time that music actually blew me away.

I'm 30, which means I'm old enough to remember when chiptunes weren't this cool alternative way of looking at in-game music; it was the only way. Certainly, the NES was filled with great soundtracks like Metroid, Castlevania, the Mario series, etc. Thinking back, given the memory and sound generation limitations at the time - four voices at most, saw, wave, triangle and noise generators - it's damned impressive that we have the amazing repository of great 8-bit tunes that are still hummable to this day. There's something to be said about doing so much more with less.

But that's not what this is about.

Sure, my Genesis was a big leg up from the NES in terms of sound, but it still reeked of 80s Roland-style synthesizer sounds. CD-based systems were still just in the hype-filled EGMs and Nintendo Powers of the day, and other than spending $300 on an add-on for Red-Book audio (basically, the system would load a level into the RAM, then hit the play button on the CD to stream an audio track), having real, decent music in a game that had real symphonic qualities was a pipe dream.

In 1991, enter Sony.

But wait, you may be saying. Wasn't the SNES introduced in 1991? The PlayStation was still years away! True, but Nintendo forged a more important relationship with Sony prior to the SNES CD debacle: the development of the SPC700 audio chip. For the first time, it wasn't just tone generation; these were real samples. Wanted strings? You could actually have a string sound. Cymbals finally shimmered with a metallic crash that had never been possible before.

As a budding musician, this was huge. I didn't have to imagine what the piece might sound like with real(ish) instruments. For the first time, game composers could actually make a soundtrack that sounded like it was played by people. In fact, if you go back, they still hold up pretty darn well 20 years later. For example, go back and listen to the Axelay soundtrack. I'll bet half of you haven't heard it before, and the other half probably forgot, but it's a great 16-bit collection of tunes.

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You've never heard this, and that's a shame.

But by the time Axelay was out, a lot of folks already knew what they were doing with the SPC700. Nintendo sure didn't with Super Mario World. Now don't get me wrong. It's a great memorable soundtrack, but most of the samples are weird pad-like sounds that sound two steps above what the Genesis was putting out. It took one game to transform what we thought was possible in game audio, my focus for this post: Actraiser.

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The most important orchestral cartridge-based tune of all time.

See that caption? I'm deadly serious when I say that "Bloodpool" is the single most important cartidge-based orchestral tune of all time. There is so much happening musically that had never happened before from a compositional standpoint. "Bloodpool" is our medium's seminal Beethoven moment.

First, we have symphonic texture. There are actually many instruments working together here. First, we have the obvious string melody (polyphonic, mind you, meaning it's actually harmonized constantly). You also probably noticed the military snare underneath. But did you hear the cleanliness of that crash cymbal? Never before had we heard that on a console.

But there's more. It's tougher to hear, but there's a great harmonic counterpoint occurring under the main melody in the form of French horns. They're very syncopated, and sit right in the middle of the pitch spectrum. They fill in the piece, making it feel much more broad and grand. Speaking of brass, there's also the secondary melody that the trumpets take over after the string repeats the opening motif an octave above. The fact that there's even a trumpet counterpoint to mention is huge. And they actually sound like trumpets! The tuba that supports the whole opening section is lush and Wagnerian.

It then morphs into a Danny Elfman-esque sequence of chromatically-descending dissonance. All of a sudden, we have a new set of instrumentation: plucked bass, drum kit and xylophone. The strings, once the main driving force of the melody, are now an off-beat rhythmic punch. Despite the fast stylistic shift, it all sounds organic and compositionally sound.

The strings are then abandoned for a short, dissonant brass section, where the tuba French horns and trumpets destroy any tonality that had been established before, using a series of French augmented sixth chords, chromatically rising until we reach the final section.

Finally, we move to a combination of the two different ideas. The xylophone begins to flurry about underneath, creating serious rhythmic momentum. The trumpets are clustered, creating that hard dissonance, along with the octave unison lines of the tuba and third trumpet rising on open 5ths. The line is then repeated a semitone higher, putting it on the dominant of the original key, setting ourselves up for a perfect cadence as the loop begins anew.

The entire piece is put through a reverb filter, allowing both the bass frequencies to be exaggerated (think why a subwoofer is so important for a home theater setup) and also giving the impression that the music is being performed in a concert hall.

All of this in a 37-second SNES tune.

Music technobabble aside, this kind of analysis is huge to be able to do. Think to the most memorable tune on the NES. You know what I'm talking about:

Can't see the video? Click here
The only tune you think of for NES music.

Actraiser was a launch title for the SNES, much like the original Super Mario Bros. was for the NES. But listen to the difference! It's literally night and day. It may seem trite now, but think about what it would have been like 20 years ago, going from the blips and beeps of Mario to the orchestra of Master.

There also the fact that the soundtrack was dynamic enough to even be analyzed at that level. When you've only got three notes and one noise, it's tough to find enough content to be able to find layers.

The soundtrack also has the distinction of being the first one to be orchestrated and performed live onstage. It was that different, that amazing that people actually paid money to see it performed by a real orchestra. The scary thing was that it doesn't sound that different when you compared the two performances, one live, one digital creation.

I'd never heard anything like this before, ever. It was so amazing I actually used my Game Genie to give myself unlimited time on the level, and just sit and listen. I didn't care that the loop was so short (they all were back in the day), it was just so engrossing that I couldn't stop.

Yuzo Koshiro may not have the name recognition of a Hans Zimmer, or Nobuo Uematsu, but what he did for music in gaming was nothing short of Aaamaazing.

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Mortal Kombat Shang Tsung Character Trailer

Warner Bros and Netherrealm Studios released a new video featuring Shang Tsung and his rise to power as host of the previous nine Mortal Kombat tournaments. Mortal Kombat is set for a April 19th release for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles and brings old-school MK gameplay back to form in a modern take.

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http://monstervine.com/2011/04/mortal-kombat-shang-tsung-character-trailer/

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