Downloadable Drug

March 2nd, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuPyFhs-3U

Pixel Junk Eden‘s most poignant quality is the way it slips you into a mental slumber with its hypnotic chimes, weightless gameplay and pulsating visual charisma. It’s perhaps the best sort of game to play before you go to bed, simply because its natural ambiance, as well as the player created ambiance send your body into peaceful hibernation. It’s an incredible trance like state, similar to the way Ikaruga‘s concentration overload sends your mind through channels of mental breakdown. The main difference being that the come down from Ikaruga almost shatters your brain, as you recover back into a less intensive, less destructive state of mind. One that isn’t demanding twitch from the streams of pattern identification.

Eden is unbound from strain, and hence you relapse slower. During play it gently burrows into your self awareness, before manifesting and shutting off everything bar the plugs that allow your brain remains to become encapsulated with the on screen tight rope act performed by those strange bits of characterized shape. The gameplay demands are minimal, with most of your little effort concentrated on staying afloat rather than any objective goals, like completing the level. The lack of interference allows the visual and aural scapes to stimulate and massage you into this zen state.

The higher you climb, the deeper the hooks sink into you. The superbly instrumental sounds bend back and forth to the on-screen acrobatics of these tiny characters. Music becomes the element in which you flow, you orchestrate on screen with synchronocity to the tunes you are influencing. The visual platform becomes just that; a platform to throw yourself at, a tool to proceed with. It’s an incredible unity of presentation with gameplay that all interweaves with such fidelity. Detached, as something so far from real, so much more than cases with price tags on. Pixel Junk Eden deserves not to sit in the space of “real” games on the shelf of game stores but rather, allow itself to be found, discovered, in a place without physicality.

Ikaruga.Respect

February 28th, 2008

As I mentioned a long time ago in this blog, I’ve been trying to branch out into more niche games. So far I’m very pleased with how I am doing and have covered a lot of ground but unfortunately I’m falling short in the shmp or shoot ‘em up genre. Luckily a few weeks ago a newsletter from my favourite Anime/Games store arrived in my inbox informing me that they had a few new copies of Ikaruga for the Gamecube on sale. Being familiar with the game and it’s strong reputation I went out and snatched a copy as soon as possible.

I must say Ikaruga has answered a lot of questions for me. You see, I’ve been a part of the RacketBoy.com retro gaming community for some time now and I’ve noticed whether it be on the blog or on the forums, these guys have a profound love for Treasure, the developers behind Ikaruga.

From my experience with Treasure’s games I thought that they were quite a good developer but not on the same level that these guys were touting. As much as I did my research to try and further understand this developer I simply could not understand these guys. Which is one of the reasons why I bought Ikaruga.

It might sound greatly exaggerated but as soon as I turned on Ikaruga it all started to make sense. As I continued to experience the game’s challenging (but never impossible) levels it continued to make more sense and draw me closer into this game’s main theme. Its much like an unwritten law between gamer and developer and it really is quite profound and provocative.
ikaruga screenshot gamecube
I’ve continually been thinking about this aspect of Ikaruga’s game design and what makes it so brilliant. Because it wasn’t simply that I was playing the game vertically nor was it that I was fairly new to the shmp genre which made me appreciate this fine game. It is the games design, sure I am no expert on shmps but what Ikaruga does it does to perfection. At first sight it seemingly overwhelms you with an array on black and white bullets which you need to avoid or absorb depending on your ship’s state. But once you begin playing through the first level and then the second and so forth you understand that this game is not half as difficult as it looks from a distance.

With solid pattern recognition and nimble analogue stick movements Ikaruga is game which is beatable (well on a few continues at least) with dedication. If you respect Ikaruga for being the formidable challenge that it is then it will reward you for what you put in.

A lot of my feelings about Ikaruga were summarized well in The 100 Best VideoGames magazine which came out some time ago. Theres definitely a lot of mistakes in this publication such as spelling, grammar, general gaming knowledge and ridiculous game inclusions. Actually there is surprisingly amount of mistakes but there are a couple of articles which really do amplify the spirit of the game well and I think that they nailed Ikaruga’s page.

So I quote (The 100 Best VideoGames, Pg54, Derwent Howard, 2007):

“that nothing short of perfection will be rewarded. This isn’t a game in tune with other of the other current gaming buzz words – it isn’t interested in emergent gameplay, it doesn’t want to let you express yourself through customization, or tailor the experience to match your preferences. Ikaruga is a gauntlet, thrown down by four men you’ll likely never meet but whose intention you understand perfectly. The challenge may be steep, but somehow the game never demoralizes. There is never a sense that its designers wanted to get one up on you. Instead, throughout the crushing defeats and the slow ascent from C+ to B to B++, there’s the sense that the challenge is as tough as it is because the designers have too much respect for you. They believe you to be equal to the task, and so failing at the game becomes failing to them as well as yourself.”

So as you can probably tell, I love Ikaruga. The experience is remotely different from anything before it is a simple game just like other games that fall under one of gaming’s oldest genres; the shoot em up

Posted in Game Discussion | Comments (4)
Tags: gamecube, ikaruga, shoot em up, treasure

Images that Defined Gaming – Vertical Gaming

February 8th, 2008

Images that Defined Gaming is a featured series showcasing the various images that changed the way we thought about gaming, the characters and franchises within it. To view more entries in this series click here.

Theres been a bit of fuss lately about gaming monitors, a few weeks back we saw images of the awesome AlienWare curved monitor and many months ago I posted up a screenshot of this new ‘Surround Gaming’ phenomena. Sure, these monitors definitely look awesome but they’re not quite as awesome as vertical gaming:

cruved multi monitor

Vertical gaming is just as it sounds; video games played vertically instead of in your typical horizontal fashion. One genre that works brilliantly in a vertical perspective is the shoot-em up genre.

Not surprisingly there aren’t a lot of games that support vertical play. The only one that I am familiar with is the legendary Ikaruga (pictured) on the Dreamcast and Gamecube.

ikaruga vertical

You’re probably wondering why someone would go to the trouble of buying a vertical only television or monitor just to play one game. Sure its great for shoot em ups but its not like every monitor is built vertically, they’d be difficult to find and probably quite expensive, right? Actually, quite a few new computer monitors (such as my Dell monitor) can actually be rotated 90 degrees so that they can viewed vertically (for photos and such). So it might surprise you how accessible this phenomena actually is.

If you are interested in trying this out and have a TV or monitor that you think might be rotatable then I have two pieces of advice. Firstly check the product information before you try and move anything because sometimes you can only rotate the base one way. Which leads me to the second point if you can only rotate your TV anti clockwise then I’d probably forget about Ikaruga (once again not sure about other titles). Unfortunately as a result Ikaruga will be displayed upside down and there is no option to change it. You can’t flip the picture in the game’s options hence you might be forced to play upside down. I have heard that they’ll be fixing this for the new Ikargua HD on Xbox Live Arcade though.

I ran into the second problem myself and decided to unscrew my base and flip the rotation plate. Which worked but this isn’t recommended.

Playing Ikaruga vertically is like a dream, I’m only new to shmps but I love not having the huge ugly bars in the horizontal mode. I set the display so that there is only very small bars on the top and bottom. The game is stretched out to high definition too. Its been very exciting so far so I want to following this up with some impressions of the game next time.

Posted in Visual Connection | Comments (1)
Tags: alienware, ikaruga, vertical monitor

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