Break-ups go better with jazz

Tried out Erik Loyer's first Opertoon iPhone app, a mash-up of grown-up graphic storytelling, animation, and music that's quite unlike anything else you've seen before. "Ruben & Lullaby" is a love story told in expressions and gestures, both of the characters in the "game" and of the player manipulating the device. Below is the YouTube demo, which is better than any description I might attempt. I played it for about 20 minutes last night and after I'd exhausted what the characters could do I closed my eyes and just played around with the musical variations the app is capable of. This is a very promising innovation in interactive music games and narrative, even if as a standalone it feels somewhat limited. The app sells for $2.99, and I hope it shifts more than a few units. More like this please.



Adding, until I looked up this game on iTunes I didn't know that there is an age rating system for iPhone apps; this opertoon is for 4+ only. What other age cut-offs might there be? What are the criteria? Hmmm...

Emergence and kingpins

Popmatters' games and multimedia blog Moving Pixels has a great piece on emergent music games -- as opposed to linear games, like GH and Audiosurf -- in which players generate music through their actions on-screen. A familiar example is Rez, which I downloaded from Xbox Live a few weeks ago in a rare instance of retro-gaming, and Auditorium (see a few posts below). Others in the emergent category that I have yet to try out include Everyday Shooter and Electroplankton. The upshot is that emergent music games are relatively rare, but they offer a glimpse of a new form of narrative that is only beginning to be explored. The Clash picture is from this piece.

Speaking of Popmatters, its music blog Crazed By The Music has a series of articles about "The New Music Kingpins of the Post-Napster World", in which it names Guitar Hero as one of those kingpins. There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in the piece, but the overall tone is basically positive.