Some games are about more than winning and losing.
I'm sure there are people for whom the ability to finish Ikaruga is a defining element of their identity. And that's fine for them--I'm sure if I could ever find it within myself to beat the game, I would never miss an opportunity to tell people about it. But experiences can vary, and the experience I have always looked for in Ikaruga is more like looking into the face of God. I will never be better than Ikaruga, and I know it. But I can spend fleeting moments with it, basking in its glory. Perhaps I can't put it more succinctly than this: Ikaruga is one of the few games that can, literally, bring a tear to my eye. Not through Final Fantasy-esque melodrama or controller-throwing frustration, but simply because it is so perfect. Not just its control mechanics, but its level design, its music, its presentation, its crushing difficulty; every aspect of Ikaruga is a work of art.
The religious terms in which I have so far described the game are not accidental. Ikaruga's director, Hiroshi Iuchi, fully intended the game's Buddhist connotations. Ikaruga is a pure bullet-hell shooter, but its central gameplay mechanic is the player's ability to "flip" the polarity of the Ikaruga ship (or the Ginkei, for player 2), enabling it to absorb same-color (light or dark) enemy fire. The player does not collect power-ups, and in fact the ship's primary gun never changes; but by absorbing same-color firepower from enemies until a guage a the bottom of the screen fills, the player can unleash a flurry of homing missiles which can cut a swath through the enemies which fill the screen at all times. The polarity-changing mechanic is more than a brilliant gameplay concept, though; it also symbolizes the Buddhist concept of Yin and Yang. There are other references to Buddhism throughout the game, but there is also something of an inspirational message conveyed to the player through poetic Engrish (and I hesitate to use that word for fear of sounding demeaning) text that appears onscreen at the beginning of each stage. Playing through Ikaruga is not just playing through a video game; it is a journey toward enlightenment.
As for the greater whole of Ikaruga's gameplay, while from the outside it might appear to be another entry in the seemingly infinite 2D shooter genre, appearances can be deceiving. At times, Ikaruga feels like a pure puzzle game, with the player having to concentrate more on split-second polarity changes to navigate bullet-filled passages than on shooting down any enemy fighters. But there is no denying that the game is at the very least a shooter-puzzle hybrid, a paradox that fits in neatly with the game's Buddhist theme: a shooter that exercises your brain as much as your trigger finger.
Enough cannot be said about Ikaruga's music, either. Simultaneously majestic and ominous, the game's orchestral score provides a perfect, sombre backdrop to the non-stop action. Unlike other shooters, which rely on hair-metal and synth-rock to set the stage for the onscreen fireworks, Ikaruga's music is every bit as deep and serious as its gameplay. And while this might make the game start to sound pretentious, one should not forget that pretense really describes something that pretends to a greater status than it can actually claim. Ikaruga is every bit as great and awe-inspiring as I have so far made it out to be.
Of course this is all leaving aside the one factor that drives many people away from the game: its unbelievable difficulty. While I have spent many hours with both the Gamecube and Xbox Live Arcade versions of Ikaruga, I am not ashamed to say I've never passed the third stage. While of course there are savants who can beat the game on a single life or play a two player simultaneous game by themselves, even a lot of hardcore gamers will be humbled by Ikaruga's challenge. But that does not mean that it is not worth playing. The game's beauty can be appreciated over and over even by players who can't progress very far, and in my experience, frustration has never been a factor. As I said at the beginning, some games are about more than winning and losing, and Ikaruga is one of them.
Ikaurga is a spiritual experience, and one that should not be missed by anyone.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Re: Murder Simulators and You
Maleficent has covered the (very true) angle that the real solution to most problems which might arise from kids being exposed too soon to extremely violent games is greater interaction between parent and child. However, since I am deeply committed to the idea that games have no greater causal link to acts of violence than do movies, books, television or even seeing acts of violence performed on the playground, I wanted to add a few comments to the discussion, mostly of a philosophical nature.
First of all, the philosophy of science is full of interesting material on the nature of causation, and the anti-game community (and this includes the supposedly reputable scientists who provide them with data) is either ignorant of this literature, or conveniently ignoring it. David Hume famously argues that cause and effect reasoning is totally unjustified, because while we can observe events which are constantly conjoined (such as a transfer of motion when two billiard balls collide), what we cannot observe is the causation. In other words, we see two balls colliding and moving apart, but we do not see cause and effect. Those who are uncomfortable with Hume's stringent empiricism are still not justified in jumping to conclusions about what causes what. Frank Jackson, who few would likely call an arch empiricist, marshaled a Humean argument in making a case for epiphenomenalism, which would also be applicable here. While thunderstorms are always preceded by falling barometers, nobody believes that falling barometers cause thunderstorms. Applied to the case of games supposedly causing violence, even if a serial killer played Postal before each and every murder he committed, the conclusion that the game caused the killings would not be rationally justified. There would have to be some serious work done to show that there was nothing wrong with the killer prior to playing Postal, and that there was no other pattern to the killings--and this is just for starters.
While I'm not exactly on board with Hume, I do agree with Jackson's point that causality is far more complex than most realize, and while there is often a "clear" causal connection, even a moment's reflection (which, of course, requires a fair-minded approach to problem solving--generally not a virtue of those who want to see video games eradicated) is usually enough to cast doubt on this supposed clarity. While this sort of methodological irresponsibility is par for the course with political crusaders of all stripes, we should demand more of those who call themselves scientists.
Of course the gaming community deserves some of the blame here, as well, because in general, our responses to the pseudo-scientific studies condemning our hobby go a long way in validating their results to the very people who are most inclined to accept them. Next time Jack Thompson or some guest on Nancy Grace starts ranting about how games will be the downfall of civilization, think twice before jumping on a message board and spewing out some obscenity-laden tirade. While the ultra-conservative (and even some ostensibly liberal) crusaders are misinformed and trigger-happy, the fact is, there are a lot of interesting ethical issues raised by violent games. But until gamers start acting like intelligent adults, these issues won't come out, and the anti-game zealots will be able to go right on defaming what most of us know from experience is a harmless hobby.
The fact is, there is an element of violence in human nature, and exploring it is part of our development. This is not to say that children should really be allowed to hurt one another, or that M-rated games are fun for the whole family. But on the other hand, pantomimes of violence should not be (and have not historically been) so quickly discouraged. Long before there were video games, kids were playing "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and Indians", roleplaying violent, ethically complex situations. This was in a time before conservative punditry was a cottage industry, but it was also a time before attentive parenting was considered optional. Good parents strike a balance between being too hands-on (snatching a game away from little Billy and yelling at him for playing it without telling him why he shouldn't) and being too hands-off ("Oh, you need GTA IV? Let daddy run to the store and pick that right up!") There's a happy medium between forbidding any exploration of violent behavior and allowing sadism to develop unchecked. In other words, "bang bang, you're dead" is not cause for alarm, but "now I'm going to hook you up to the car battery" is.
If all this is not clear enough, let me offer an example from my own childhood. My friends and I all owned the NES when we were kids, but we also owned G.I. Joe action figures and toy guns, and these saw almost as much action as our game consoles. In fact, nearly every sleep-over culminated in the lot of us running around in the dark of night, plastic firearms in hand, playing a game we called simply "guns", which was more or less Metal Gear LARPing. Between games like Contra and Ikari Warriors, our G.I. Joe toys and frequent sessions of "guns", my pre-adolescence was laden with the sort of simulated firefights of which today's "concerned citizens" live in abject terror. But despite all that, most of us have not so much as fired a real gun at a target, let alone another living creature.
Now it would be hypocritical of me to start tossing out theories of causation here, but I will offer some data that I think will illuminate why there is not an interesting causal connection between simulated violence and actual violence: Grand Theft Auto games have sold in excess of 30 million copies on the PS2 alone. Now if violent games really were encouraging copycat behavior on any sort of noteworthy scale, one would think that, at least, 1 in 100 GTA players would commit an excessive act of violence with a direct connection to something in the game. Of course nothing remotely like this has happened. But that fact has not, so far, prevented anti-game partisans from claiming a direct causal link between game violence and real violence, nor is it likely to in the future. But all responsible gamers have an obligation to speak up--without obscenities or ad hominems--and set the record straight whenever such claims are made. Gamers, by and large, are not criminals; and those who are would have been whether they ever played a game or not.
First of all, the philosophy of science is full of interesting material on the nature of causation, and the anti-game community (and this includes the supposedly reputable scientists who provide them with data) is either ignorant of this literature, or conveniently ignoring it. David Hume famously argues that cause and effect reasoning is totally unjustified, because while we can observe events which are constantly conjoined (such as a transfer of motion when two billiard balls collide), what we cannot observe is the causation. In other words, we see two balls colliding and moving apart, but we do not see cause and effect. Those who are uncomfortable with Hume's stringent empiricism are still not justified in jumping to conclusions about what causes what. Frank Jackson, who few would likely call an arch empiricist, marshaled a Humean argument in making a case for epiphenomenalism, which would also be applicable here. While thunderstorms are always preceded by falling barometers, nobody believes that falling barometers cause thunderstorms. Applied to the case of games supposedly causing violence, even if a serial killer played Postal before each and every murder he committed, the conclusion that the game caused the killings would not be rationally justified. There would have to be some serious work done to show that there was nothing wrong with the killer prior to playing Postal, and that there was no other pattern to the killings--and this is just for starters.
While I'm not exactly on board with Hume, I do agree with Jackson's point that causality is far more complex than most realize, and while there is often a "clear" causal connection, even a moment's reflection (which, of course, requires a fair-minded approach to problem solving--generally not a virtue of those who want to see video games eradicated) is usually enough to cast doubt on this supposed clarity. While this sort of methodological irresponsibility is par for the course with political crusaders of all stripes, we should demand more of those who call themselves scientists.
Of course the gaming community deserves some of the blame here, as well, because in general, our responses to the pseudo-scientific studies condemning our hobby go a long way in validating their results to the very people who are most inclined to accept them. Next time Jack Thompson or some guest on Nancy Grace starts ranting about how games will be the downfall of civilization, think twice before jumping on a message board and spewing out some obscenity-laden tirade. While the ultra-conservative (and even some ostensibly liberal) crusaders are misinformed and trigger-happy, the fact is, there are a lot of interesting ethical issues raised by violent games. But until gamers start acting like intelligent adults, these issues won't come out, and the anti-game zealots will be able to go right on defaming what most of us know from experience is a harmless hobby.
The fact is, there is an element of violence in human nature, and exploring it is part of our development. This is not to say that children should really be allowed to hurt one another, or that M-rated games are fun for the whole family. But on the other hand, pantomimes of violence should not be (and have not historically been) so quickly discouraged. Long before there were video games, kids were playing "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and Indians", roleplaying violent, ethically complex situations. This was in a time before conservative punditry was a cottage industry, but it was also a time before attentive parenting was considered optional. Good parents strike a balance between being too hands-on (snatching a game away from little Billy and yelling at him for playing it without telling him why he shouldn't) and being too hands-off ("Oh, you need GTA IV? Let daddy run to the store and pick that right up!") There's a happy medium between forbidding any exploration of violent behavior and allowing sadism to develop unchecked. In other words, "bang bang, you're dead" is not cause for alarm, but "now I'm going to hook you up to the car battery" is.
If all this is not clear enough, let me offer an example from my own childhood. My friends and I all owned the NES when we were kids, but we also owned G.I. Joe action figures and toy guns, and these saw almost as much action as our game consoles. In fact, nearly every sleep-over culminated in the lot of us running around in the dark of night, plastic firearms in hand, playing a game we called simply "guns", which was more or less Metal Gear LARPing. Between games like Contra and Ikari Warriors, our G.I. Joe toys and frequent sessions of "guns", my pre-adolescence was laden with the sort of simulated firefights of which today's "concerned citizens" live in abject terror. But despite all that, most of us have not so much as fired a real gun at a target, let alone another living creature.
Now it would be hypocritical of me to start tossing out theories of causation here, but I will offer some data that I think will illuminate why there is not an interesting causal connection between simulated violence and actual violence: Grand Theft Auto games have sold in excess of 30 million copies on the PS2 alone. Now if violent games really were encouraging copycat behavior on any sort of noteworthy scale, one would think that, at least, 1 in 100 GTA players would commit an excessive act of violence with a direct connection to something in the game. Of course nothing remotely like this has happened. But that fact has not, so far, prevented anti-game partisans from claiming a direct causal link between game violence and real violence, nor is it likely to in the future. But all responsible gamers have an obligation to speak up--without obscenities or ad hominems--and set the record straight whenever such claims are made. Gamers, by and large, are not criminals; and those who are would have been whether they ever played a game or not.
Murder Simulators and You
Now if I was a politician you would expect this to be an uninformed rant about the sexual deviancy of games and how these so called "murder simulators" flooding the market are corrupting our youth. I am not, and never plan to be, and maintain that the root cause of all of the problems with the world's youth can in some way be traced back to the glut of reality programming. Those ladies who clean your house will also pop a cap in your ass so you best watch out.
No, I am more troubled by the fact that the gaming world is making no effort to show that for every Rock Star game, there are 30-40 titles by everyone else that go unnoticed. From myexperiences with the unwashed thug mass that comes in to get their already abused copy of SanAndreas, I've concluded that no one has any idea what makes a game fundamentally good, orwhat makes a game bad. Not every game where you shoot a guy and make sausage out of hisremains and feed that sausage to your mother is bad, and not every game that is full of flowersand their upkeep is good. This is of course on the consumer end of things. When the idea o games is left to the government, even Chibi-Robo would have a considerable amount of questionable content.
One completely ridiculous view on this whole problem is that video games cause violence more so than the Power Rangers had children wanting to fight crime, and wear funny costumes. The concern here is that children will have access to such violent games and this will warp their sensitive minds to the point that they see nothing wrong with gunning down a hooker. Well, I'd like to say that gunning down a hooker is inherently wrong, and they do not fall into floating blocks of green bills.... but if they did, well, perhaps the world would be a bit different. What I mean is that you cannot assume that because a kid sees something like this they are more inclined to do it. More children actually respond to hero characters, and the violence that is in the name of justice. Now with a home environment that condones the shooting of hookers in an every-day way, or the beating of bitches for that matter, is more likely to produce a child that is capable of doing such a thing. Mortal Kombat was the series that was all the rage when I was young enough to be trained in the ways of the modern killer, and I remember my friends not being allowed to play those 'dirty games' because they were 'evil' and made people do bad things.
That truly boggled my little mind. What was so wrong? They weren't real.... It was a game, it was fun. I had had video games explained to me by my parents, about the time the ol' NES was hooked up in our living room. I never gave the concept much thought, I just went on assuming my friends were lame and my parents were awesome, but now I see that the issue is not violent games, but the irrational protective spirit of parents . For every family that produces a serial killer, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other families to strive to avoid such a result by presenting the children with the idea that absolutely anything that does not fit in a certain world view is wrong. Rather than explaining that video games simulate fantastic situations, they condemn the lot then when their children cry to be able to play games they only allow them movie games.
I feel for these children, as I have had to deal with the irrational parents who would not buy their 15-year-old Twilight Princess because it had a teen rating। Think about the complete ridiculousness of that situation. People have read this bizarre code into the ESRB, to the point that they cannot grasp the reasoning behind such a rating. These problems could be helped if parents actually put more effort into understanding the system, and there is no excuse now with the wealth of information online and even on magazine racks. I am not against the ESRB, and I am not against parents being cautious, but I feel more care could be taken to learn just why Twilight Princess is Teen and why Halo and Resident Evil differ greatly from Saints Row and Jericho.
Another problem with the idea that video games are inherently bad and corrupt children is that genuinely fun games are tossed aside in favor of the ones that are over-hyped. Professor Layton's American release was the exception to this, but the promotion for it was subtly charming with big posters of the heroes and the world, and little Nintendo pamphlets that many game stores neglected to put out. It was the first time in a long time a game sold out that did not have a soda, lawsuit, or exaggerated delay behind it.
I feel more effort could be made by the gaming population to devote less time to being hardcore and more time to enjoying all types of games than sticking to the controversial. Games like LocoRoco do not get the chance they deserve because there is no shooting. Were video games not created to be entertaining? I suppose I have very old tastes, where I like games to actually be fun every so often. I do not find 3/4s of a GTA game fun to play through again, Manhunt and Condemned are needlessly grotesque, but I am all about focusing on Japanese Survival Horror games because the emphasis is on how the game uses its horror elements.
The greatest downfall in gaming I believe was the first Manhunt game. Since I recovered from being irrationally afraid of the first Resident Evil game I came to see "horror" games differently. Manhunt had no depth, only mindless slaughter. No puzzles, but plenty of violent fetch quests. I compare this now directly to the Japanese games in the Silent Hill series that are not focused on fighting, or being outrageously disgusting for no reason. The gore in Silent Hill means weird shit is going down, the gore in Manhunt is a romp through Snuff Land.
I feel the real solution to the Murder Simulator problem is to better identify what makes a game appear questionable, and have parents understand their place in the filtering of the world to their children. It is bad to overindulge, but it is also bad to over protect to the point that the Legend of Zelda series is too questionable.
The fear of evil in games will not slack any time soon, not with Rock Star's new goal to make their games pure fuel for the war against freedom of expression. Politicians have worked their fear-mongering fingers into the minds of many a conservative, and to the point that I am yelled at at work for selling "This ungodly filth. People should be sent to jail for making these filthy displays...if they want to make them, make them pay." This same man was forcing his 14-year-old son to buy Billy Hatcher.
No, I am more troubled by the fact that the gaming world is making no effort to show that for every Rock Star game, there are 30-40 titles by everyone else that go unnoticed. From myexperiences with the unwashed thug mass that comes in to get their already abused copy of SanAndreas, I've concluded that no one has any idea what makes a game fundamentally good, orwhat makes a game bad. Not every game where you shoot a guy and make sausage out of hisremains and feed that sausage to your mother is bad, and not every game that is full of flowersand their upkeep is good. This is of course on the consumer end of things. When the idea o games is left to the government, even Chibi-Robo would have a considerable amount of questionable content.
One completely ridiculous view on this whole problem is that video games cause violence more so than the Power Rangers had children wanting to fight crime, and wear funny costumes. The concern here is that children will have access to such violent games and this will warp their sensitive minds to the point that they see nothing wrong with gunning down a hooker. Well, I'd like to say that gunning down a hooker is inherently wrong, and they do not fall into floating blocks of green bills.... but if they did, well, perhaps the world would be a bit different. What I mean is that you cannot assume that because a kid sees something like this they are more inclined to do it. More children actually respond to hero characters, and the violence that is in the name of justice. Now with a home environment that condones the shooting of hookers in an every-day way, or the beating of bitches for that matter, is more likely to produce a child that is capable of doing such a thing. Mortal Kombat was the series that was all the rage when I was young enough to be trained in the ways of the modern killer, and I remember my friends not being allowed to play those 'dirty games' because they were 'evil' and made people do bad things.
That truly boggled my little mind. What was so wrong? They weren't real.... It was a game, it was fun. I had had video games explained to me by my parents, about the time the ol' NES was hooked up in our living room. I never gave the concept much thought, I just went on assuming my friends were lame and my parents were awesome, but now I see that the issue is not violent games, but the irrational protective spirit of parents . For every family that produces a serial killer, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other families to strive to avoid such a result by presenting the children with the idea that absolutely anything that does not fit in a certain world view is wrong. Rather than explaining that video games simulate fantastic situations, they condemn the lot then when their children cry to be able to play games they only allow them movie games.
I feel for these children, as I have had to deal with the irrational parents who would not buy their 15-year-old Twilight Princess because it had a teen rating। Think about the complete ridiculousness of that situation. People have read this bizarre code into the ESRB, to the point that they cannot grasp the reasoning behind such a rating. These problems could be helped if parents actually put more effort into understanding the system, and there is no excuse now with the wealth of information online and even on magazine racks. I am not against the ESRB, and I am not against parents being cautious, but I feel more care could be taken to learn just why Twilight Princess is Teen and why Halo and Resident Evil differ greatly from Saints Row and Jericho.
Another problem with the idea that video games are inherently bad and corrupt children is that genuinely fun games are tossed aside in favor of the ones that are over-hyped. Professor Layton's American release was the exception to this, but the promotion for it was subtly charming with big posters of the heroes and the world, and little Nintendo pamphlets that many game stores neglected to put out. It was the first time in a long time a game sold out that did not have a soda, lawsuit, or exaggerated delay behind it.
I feel more effort could be made by the gaming population to devote less time to being hardcore and more time to enjoying all types of games than sticking to the controversial. Games like LocoRoco do not get the chance they deserve because there is no shooting. Were video games not created to be entertaining? I suppose I have very old tastes, where I like games to actually be fun every so often. I do not find 3/4s of a GTA game fun to play through again, Manhunt and Condemned are needlessly grotesque, but I am all about focusing on Japanese Survival Horror games because the emphasis is on how the game uses its horror elements.
The greatest downfall in gaming I believe was the first Manhunt game. Since I recovered from being irrationally afraid of the first Resident Evil game I came to see "horror" games differently. Manhunt had no depth, only mindless slaughter. No puzzles, but plenty of violent fetch quests. I compare this now directly to the Japanese games in the Silent Hill series that are not focused on fighting, or being outrageously disgusting for no reason. The gore in Silent Hill means weird shit is going down, the gore in Manhunt is a romp through Snuff Land.
I feel the real solution to the Murder Simulator problem is to better identify what makes a game appear questionable, and have parents understand their place in the filtering of the world to their children. It is bad to overindulge, but it is also bad to over protect to the point that the Legend of Zelda series is too questionable.
The fear of evil in games will not slack any time soon, not with Rock Star's new goal to make their games pure fuel for the war against freedom of expression. Politicians have worked their fear-mongering fingers into the minds of many a conservative, and to the point that I am yelled at at work for selling "This ungodly filth. People should be sent to jail for making these filthy displays...if they want to make them, make them pay." This same man was forcing his 14-year-old son to buy Billy Hatcher.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Rock Band DLC and Cognitive Dissonance
It had never dawned on me that Rock Band's DLC, just like Xbox Live Arcade or the Wii's Virtual Console, offered a hit or miss selection of products. I'm not sure why it took me this long to figure it out, except that the only song I had purchased before this weekend was Nine Inch Nails' "March of the Pigs", and that track was pretty fun. But now I know, and all future purchases will be made with a bit more caution.
My downloads for this weekend were David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream", Smashing Pumpkins' "Siva", Oasis's "Wonderwall" and, last night promptly at 11 p.m. (intuition told me that it would go up at midnight, Eastern time) the free download of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" (the song is not, as some April Fools wary message board posters feared, a lie). Of these four, three are perfectly playable, and one is a dog. But in hindsight, I should have seen it coming.
While I love both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I've always had the problem that my music tastes lean toward the pale and the pasty, and decidedly do not rock. Ok, I do like some pretty intense music, but it's generally the kind of stuff that flies under the rhythm game radar. I'd buy song packs by Lightning Bolt, Melt-Bananna or Naglfar without a second thought, but I seriously doubt any of those are forthcoming. But my true favorite bands include the Cocteau Twins, the Cure the Smiths, and New Order, and that means the future looks bleak for me. And, for the most part, that's with good reason. I realize that the primary reason for publishers to exist is to make money--not to please me. I would probably have a great time playing "Fascination Street" or "This Charming Man", and would at any rate be more than happy to purchase them, but I know I'm in the minority. And so I understand when the offerings run more toward the mainstream and the rockin'.
But there is another reason that you don't see more lonely, introverted and over-sensitive music on the horizon from these companies, and that's that a lot of it just doesn't translate well into chart form. "Wonderwall" proved this to me. While I'm not a big Oasis fan, I do enjoy that song, and so it seemed natural to me that I would enjoy pretending to play it. It didn't occur to me as I hit the "purchase" button that most of the song is built around repetitive acoustic guitar strumming and a fairly simple rhythm part. Even the vocals don't offer much in the way of variety, especially when you get to the long outro and just repeated "Maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me" over and over and over.
The lesson here, aside from my recommendation against picking up "Wonderwall" no matter how much you might still love Oasis, is that songs you like aren't always going to be fun to play, especially if you like music by pasty Brits. For me, that makes for a weird disconnect within the game. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are both about living out fantasies, but I don't particularly fantasize about being anybody whose songs appear in the games. I'd much rather pretend to be Robert Smith or Johnny Marr than Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger. Maybe my day will come, but for now I'll just have to keep thinking of these games as a fun exercise in frantic button mashing rather than some sort of wish fulfillment.
Bonus Content
Just in case anyone from Harmonix would like to turn me into the company's personal ATM, here are some suggested song packs:
Cocteau Twins Pack: "Carolyn's Fingers", "Bluebeard" and "Wax and Wane"
Siouxsie & the Banshees Pack: "Candyman", "Cascade", "Arabian Nights"
Cure Pack: "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea", "Fascination Street", "One Hundred Years"
Random Shoegaze Pack: "Alison" by Slowdive, "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine, "Frost" by Chapterhouse
Smiths Pack: "This Charming Man", "The Headmaster Ritual", "Stop Me if you Think You've Heard This One Before"
Morrissey Pack: "Hairdresser on Fire", "Speedway", "First of the Gang to Die"
Lush Pack: "Sweetness and Light", "For Love", "500"
My downloads for this weekend were David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream", Smashing Pumpkins' "Siva", Oasis's "Wonderwall" and, last night promptly at 11 p.m. (intuition told me that it would go up at midnight, Eastern time) the free download of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" (the song is not, as some April Fools wary message board posters feared, a lie). Of these four, three are perfectly playable, and one is a dog. But in hindsight, I should have seen it coming.
While I love both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I've always had the problem that my music tastes lean toward the pale and the pasty, and decidedly do not rock. Ok, I do like some pretty intense music, but it's generally the kind of stuff that flies under the rhythm game radar. I'd buy song packs by Lightning Bolt, Melt-Bananna or Naglfar without a second thought, but I seriously doubt any of those are forthcoming. But my true favorite bands include the Cocteau Twins, the Cure the Smiths, and New Order, and that means the future looks bleak for me. And, for the most part, that's with good reason. I realize that the primary reason for publishers to exist is to make money--not to please me. I would probably have a great time playing "Fascination Street" or "This Charming Man", and would at any rate be more than happy to purchase them, but I know I'm in the minority. And so I understand when the offerings run more toward the mainstream and the rockin'.
But there is another reason that you don't see more lonely, introverted and over-sensitive music on the horizon from these companies, and that's that a lot of it just doesn't translate well into chart form. "Wonderwall" proved this to me. While I'm not a big Oasis fan, I do enjoy that song, and so it seemed natural to me that I would enjoy pretending to play it. It didn't occur to me as I hit the "purchase" button that most of the song is built around repetitive acoustic guitar strumming and a fairly simple rhythm part. Even the vocals don't offer much in the way of variety, especially when you get to the long outro and just repeated "Maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me" over and over and over.
The lesson here, aside from my recommendation against picking up "Wonderwall" no matter how much you might still love Oasis, is that songs you like aren't always going to be fun to play, especially if you like music by pasty Brits. For me, that makes for a weird disconnect within the game. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are both about living out fantasies, but I don't particularly fantasize about being anybody whose songs appear in the games. I'd much rather pretend to be Robert Smith or Johnny Marr than Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger. Maybe my day will come, but for now I'll just have to keep thinking of these games as a fun exercise in frantic button mashing rather than some sort of wish fulfillment.
Bonus Content
Just in case anyone from Harmonix would like to turn me into the company's personal ATM, here are some suggested song packs:
Cocteau Twins Pack: "Carolyn's Fingers", "Bluebeard" and "Wax and Wane"
Siouxsie & the Banshees Pack: "Candyman", "Cascade", "Arabian Nights"
Cure Pack: "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea", "Fascination Street", "One Hundred Years"
Random Shoegaze Pack: "Alison" by Slowdive, "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine, "Frost" by Chapterhouse
Smiths Pack: "This Charming Man", "The Headmaster Ritual", "Stop Me if you Think You've Heard This One Before"
Morrissey Pack: "Hairdresser on Fire", "Speedway", "First of the Gang to Die"
Lush Pack: "Sweetness and Light", "For Love", "500"
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