While Godzilla won’t hit North America until next year, the game is releasing for the PlayStation 3 in Japan this month.
Bandai-Namco has a demo available via the Japanese PSN Store, and we’ve got some new video equipment to test out, so why not sit back, relax, hit play and watch me try to kill two birds with one stone in the most awkward way possible?
Though the kittens will quickly grow larger from the feast, the never-ending red pangs of hunger and scarcity of prey will drive the pack from the shops of their youth toward the broken streets of Shibuya Station. The young cats push forward while claiming the stray rabbits and chicks seeking shelter in the patches of forest slowly reclaiming the land through cracking cement and decaying automobiles.
Marking their territory along the way, the cats could easily choose to settle into their nest atop the train tracks and relinquish the fight for survival to a new generation. But youthful exuberance and curiosity causes them to follow their pack leader further in the search for new prey and territory to conquer. And as the swarm reaches Dogenzaka, the prey becomes dangerously scarce, changing the balance of this struggle as they encounter a cougar seeking to feed the same need.
Despite their numbers, several of the cats immediately fall to the wild swipes of this predator. Though two escape down a narrow alley, the beat of hunger pounds in rhythm with falling health to see them surrender to the scavengers overhead as they lay down in the street and lose their bid for rule over the Tokyo Jungle.
Have you ever really lamented leaving a coin behind?
I mean, when we need some money to pay the shopkeeper, or find ourselves forced to collect every coin in order to complete a level or win a challenge, we begrudgingly do those things. But if I only grab two coins while fumbling through a Mario stage, it’s hardly something that keeps me from leaping toward the flagpole and moving on to the next stage.
Maybe there was a time when I attempted to collect all the rings with Sonic, but forever abandoned the idea after getting hit by an enemy and watching them all shoot across the screen – that’s trickle-down economics for you!
But Queasy Games’ Sound Shapes, released earlier this year, offers up something rather brilliant in the realm of obsessing over every collectible, despite the very real risk of repeated failure on the part of the player. Each stage starts in relative silence, save for the strange rhythmic chants of critters sparsely spread throughout the environment.
Collecting a coin adds a musical note to the proceedings, the everyday visual subtraction of a collectible object earnestly bringing the stage to life for the trouble, and visually replaced by the beating pulse of the note in time with the evolving score. In this way, the idea of suddenly leaving any coin behind robs the landscape of its full potential, denies the player a complete harmony at the finish line, and necessitates that no note be left unplayed – a grand recalibration of want and need on a subject that has lazily floated its existence between the tediously obligatory and the entirely optional.
With most rhythm games, missing a few notes is no big deal; the song continues and the chance to improve remains intact. But here there’s a demand for completion.
Simplicity is at the core of mechanics continually capable of boundless elasticity, offering stages wrapped in albums that all deliver distinctly unique sensations with the same tool set. You can experience the chill Zen tactile pleasure and you can have the retro flavored platforming challenge within the same framework.
And then there’s the entirely fresh thesis of Corporeal, a contribution from Superbrothers that cements the achievement of Toronto’s collaborative development space – tracks that place players within soulless corporate spaces to discover beats and rhythm while traveling to the hellish heart of some lost idea of conformist machinery. The trip is something of a beautiful nightmare, grasping at some idea of what the structure of society looked like to a six-year-old version of myself.
A lot of people will tell you that Sound Shapes turns music games on their ears, but it’s difficult to know what that means without stealing some quiet space and time with the game. Its full intent hasn’t been easy for me to divine since its release, but I’m scratching at some idea of exploring the relationship between sounds and the sources that create them, an earnest attempt to enable players to feel what they hear and vice-versa.
Persona 4’s candy pop aesthetics may well be the Vita’s saving grace this year, but Sound Shapes represents something more enduring for the soul ,with a thesis on sound and play that offers a fresh path toward undiscovered territory in lands generally considered barren.
A storybook framework introduces players to Monroe, a young boy left alone, with only a single unfinished painting to remember his mother by – the unfinished swan that serves both as the game’s title, and as the breadcrumbs soon leading players through the looking glass, or canvas in this case, as the swan wanders off into the unseen space of the painting one fateful night.
As emotional charged as the premise sounds, explaining the digital offering is a challenge – another one of those Move titles you’d be better served by picking up and experiencing firsthand rather than reading my scribbles on the subject.
Though I’m obviously going to scribble about it anyway.
The game offers no tutorials or guidance to start the exploration either, which is confusing for all of two seconds as players find themselves holding the Move controller and staring into a blank white space.
At least, it should only take a second or two before you press the button that causes Monroe to use his brush, tossing a gob of paint into the void to find it quickly splatter against the environment that secretly surrounds you.
To say that Arkedo’s latest creation bursts with color and creativity falls short of capturing the artistic madness of their work. Prince Ash’s quest to eviscerate the 101 monsters that have laid eyes upon his incriminating photographs offers a world, not quit as organic in the flow of life as last year’s Rayman Origins, but gushing with an attitude all its own and a degree of more comic minded artistry that ensnares the eyes just as easily.
In a sea of releases where minimalism offsets the truth that detailed art is extremely time consuming and expensive, Hell Yeah is a punch to the retina that also brings a much needed dose of unbridled batshit crazy design to the table – that feeling that no idea was too crazy in whatever subterranean development space allowed this game to be created.
With great madness comes great risk however, and the play mechanics of Hell Yeah favor a safer and more familiar road, which on the one hand limits the mileage, but on the other goes a long way toward offering a title that may convince some that the Sega Genesis is alive and well in the year of gaming that is 2012.
Sega plays the funky dealer for another revisit to the golden age of Dreamcast with Jet Set Radio, which like Space Channel 5, remains one of the most romanticized titles from those gaming days gone by, now back by popular demand with an HD makeover.
Players are once again invited to strap-on their magnetically driven in-line skates to hit the chaotic streets of Tokyo-To, while listening to what scientists largely agree is the greatest soundtrack for a videogame, ever.
If however, you weren’t a card carrying member of the Dreamcast faithful and find yourself new to the graffiti tagging play mechanic, let’s get scratchin.
Though very nearly missing the boat on the latest release from Q-Games, I’ve finally stolen time with the title in recent days, which has proved a curious and intimidating affair.
Setting aside the presence of a very helpful tutorial for a moment, there’s a point at which the player begins their first performance, where music tracks begin to play and the trippy visualizer takes over the television screen, and the terrifying realization that one must find a way to create can feel a bit paralyzing and confusing.
Not unlike a frightened animal, I began flailing my limbs, which armed with a PlayStation Move controller exposed the interactive potential to manipulate the audio. Initially, the experience is similar to prehistoric man striking at objects with a leftover dinner bone to find a marvelous world of sounds all around. As a modern man, armed with said Move controller, I was no less perplexed and fascinated by the possibilities – the great discovery of the potential to create coupled with the terrible burden of making some sense of the opportunity, emerging from the cave with fresh experience for the trouble.
While I’m fashionably late to the party, PixelJunk 4am has picked up a bit of a reputation for being a terribly difficult game to review – fair enough given that there is no scoring system or end goal in the traditional sense. But the actual playing of 4am isn’t nearly so hard to nail down, so maybe that’s a good place to start.
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