Crossover rhythms

Nice interview at Game|Life with Tsunku♂ -- aka Mitsuo Terada, the J-pop producer behind hit DS game and Beyoncé endorsed Rhythm Heaven. I liked these quotes:

Rhythm games have always transcended nationality, though. Rhythm is something that can be learned without complex theories; it just takes practice and repetition. This is true for children, adults, men and women. This is why I thought a worldwide release of this title wasn't just a pipe dream.
...
I think there will be increased potential for game music to cross over into the mainstream in the future, but avid fans usually don't respond to gimmicks they feel are too contrived. The key is to start with as pure a game concept as possible, and give it the type of music that suits it best. If the fans respond well as a result, performing the song live in concert would be a natural next step. That sort of pattern seems ideal to me.

I was rocking away at RH quite happily this week until I hit the level with the off-beats, and now I'm stuck. Here's a Japanese trailer with examples of many of the mini-games within Rhythm Heaven.

Pre-SXSW news nibbles

This week saw our first open gaming session at the Tisch Games Center. Thanks to everyone who came out to play. After Spring Break we'll form a student-led steering committee, and all looks rosy. I'm packing to go and mess with Texas at SXSW for a week.

Quick links:
Ars Technica says that Rockstar Games and hip-hop producer Timbaland will be releasing PSP mixer game based on a loop sequencer the company developed for the Web three years ago.

Great piece at The Gamer Limit with some thoughts from futurist/genius/nutter Ray Kurzweil on the "Future of Gaming". I love Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines is a turn-of-the-century corker.

The BBC makes an old limey smile with two great stories this week. One on the particular "magical challenge" of composing for video games. Here's the best on though: the feature "Disability no barrier to gaming" opens with a biomechanics researcher at Duke University, who is also an Iraq war vet and amputee below the elbow, playing Guitar Hero.

To play the game, users wear electrodes on their residual muscles, such as those found on their chest and shoulder. The system translates the signals from the electrodes as if they were coming from the game controller, allowing players to strum along, despite not having any hands.

Dr Armiger came up with the idea after becoming a Guitar Hero fan himself. He realised that the movements used by the game were similar to those required during the hours of tedious rehabilitation needed to learn to control a prosthetic limb.

Oh, and Destructoid says that some Osaka elementary schools are requiring Nintendo DSs for every student, thanks to all the educational software released for it in Japan.

On hip-hop and samurai

This deserves a longer post, but one of my absolute favourite cultural mash-ups is Japanese hip-hop. There's a history here. I saw DJ Krush live in London in 1998, celebrated my 27th birthday in a hip-hop club in Shinjuku, and have watched every episode of Samurai Champloo at least twice. So the buzz that's picking up around the new Afro Samurai game, and in particular the soundtrack by The RZA, is piquing my interest. I haven't seen the anime itself, but the game looks and sounds a little like this:



Adding: The RZA, mastermind of the Wu-Tang Clan and one of the few truly gifted weirdos in hip-hop, also produced the soundtracks for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and most of Kill Bill. As for Samurai Champloo, I bought two soundtrack albums and the PS2 game, which was undeservedly overlooked. It was rather too much of a button-masher, but the soundtrack was fully integrated into the gameplay, to the extent that it had DJ controls as part of the HUD (heads-up display) and fight mechanic. Within the game you enter a record store -- this is all in late feudal Japan, mind you -- to buy various tracks, which you select from during play to perform different groups of moves. It doesn't always work smoothly, but it's an honest stab at being true to the hybrid hip-hop/samurai/anime aesthetic that defined the series.

A great book on this topic is Ian Condry's "Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization" (Duke University Press, 2006), which I've used in class and in the lit review of my dissertation.