Red-hot Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum used to play Angry Birds, since that's what they put on his iPad for him. Then they put Temple Run on there for him. "I'm addicted to it," he said.
Addiction's bad, former Senator, Santorum!
Temple Run is a free iOS game in which you just keep running and running, and maybe it's a metaphor for the American way of doing Presidential campaigns.
Kotaku has heard from multiple sources close to the project that the code-name for Microsoft's next console is Durango.
Yup. Durango.
Note this is a code-name. Like the Katana (Dreamcast), Dolphin (GameCube) and Revolution (Wii) before it, it's not the name that will appear on the finished product when you finally get your hands on one.
It is the name, however, that you'll be hearing during the console's final development phase, that awkward time between it being first shown off and then actually released to the public.
Interestingly, it seems to also suggest a bit of a pattern in Microsoft's recent internal naming policies. While naming projects after places is nothing new, the company seems to be in favour of warmer climates these days; Kinect, before we knew it as Kinect, was called Natal, named for a city in Brazil. Durango, meanwhile, is the name of one of Mexico's 31 states.
Want to read what else we've heard about the next Xbox? Of course you do.
The door closes behind you with an ominous click. It's bright in here—too bright. Before you can get your wits about you, your host begins to speak.
"We hope you'll enjoy finding your own rhythm," she says, all smiles. "So have fun and enjoy all the game has to offer." With that, she leaves the room.
The walls and floors are painted white, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. It's just you, a small video game controller with two buttons, and a television monitor. On the screen is a video game called Rhythm Heaven Fever. Welcome to Hell.
You might think that with an intro like that, I'm about to talk about how much I don't like Rhythm Heaven Fever. But oh, how wrong you'd be! I actually really like Rhythm Heaven Fever. I also hate it. It cracks me up. It terrifies me. I can't stop playing it.
Like the game itself, my feelings are both simple and complex. Let me explain.
You'll quickly find that your rhythm is not as good as you think it is.
Rhythm Heaven Fever is a rhythm game in its purest form. It's the third game in the Rhythm Heaven franchise, and the first one for the Wii—the first two came out on the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. It derives its purity from its control scheme: There are no guitar or drum peripherals, no touch-pads, no fancy dancing mats or motion-sensing cameras. There's just you, the game, and two buttons on a controller. It's really just a tiered collection of 40 rhythm minigames, and players are tasked with matching their presses of the Wii's A button or both the A+B buttons in time with various animations.
It's that simple. But oh man, it is not simple.
Every minigame is different, and all rely on two basic input variations: a "light" beat and a "heavy" beat. Usually, the A button controls the light beat while the A+B buttons control the heavy one. The visual cues tell you which beat is coming: In one game you're hitting golf-balls thrown by a monkey, the next you're assembling robots or stabbing flying peas with a fork. The animations and art are bizarre and cute, and the visuals provide excellent feedback to how you're doing. When I perfectly skewered a flying pea or perfectly screwed on a robot-head, the visual and auditory cues combined to provide an almost physical rush of success.
That's in large part because Rhythm Heaven Fever is an unforgiving game. Right when you start it up, a couple of smiling cartoon animals will put you through a "rhythm test," which has you pressing the button in time with the beat of the music. You'll quickly find that your rhythm is not as good as you think it is—I was consistently registering both early and late hits, doubtless due in small part to getting my head around what appeared to be some tiny lag from the wireless controller (or from my TV, or something), but largely just due to the fact that Rhythm Heaven Fever has a very specific groove that isn't quite compatible with other grooves. Like, say, my own.
WHY: Rhythm Heaven Fever is a focused, merciless rhythm game, as charming in its imaginative art as it is punishing in its stringent difficulty. It's addictive, hilarious, maddening and delightful.
Rhythm Heaven Fever
Developer: Nintendo and TNX Platforms: Nintendo Wii Released: February 13 (U.S. and Europe)
Type of game: A collection of 40 minimalist, difficult-to-master rhythm games, played with only two buttons.
What I played: Beat my head against it for 4-5 hours, played around a third of the games and got perfect scores on a couple.
My Two Favorite Things
The feeling you get when you're in perfect sync with the animations and the beats.
The hilarious vocal cues on the showstopping "Working Dough" level.
My Two Least-Favorite Things
Knowing halfway through a Remix level that I've already made too many mistakes to pass.
"No seriously, I have a blister. On my thumb."
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
"It hurts."
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
Specifically, Rhythm Heaven Fever sits on top of the beat, and quite deliberately so. Much of the music I play and listen to lays back; the hits happen a fraction of a second behind the beat. Games like Rock Band, which allow players to mimic more laid-back rock and funk, have forgiving "windows" during which players can hit the pad or strummer, letting players feel like they're playing the music with a groove that matches the performance. This is... not the case with Rhythm Heaven Fever.
As a result of its pushy groove, Rhythm Heaven Fever feels super caffeinated at all times. In order to register a hit properly, you've got to be a hair ahead of the beat, and it takes some getting used to. It never quite feels comfortable, but I sense that that's by design. This is actually the sort of music game designed more for people who are good at video games than for people who are good at music.
Play a few minigames and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about—the game is profoundly picky, binary in how it defines "right" and "wrong." You'll fail time and again, and only through extreme focus on that one button, on that one beat, will you find success. Rhythm Heaven Fever is a brutal taskmaster, but if it weren't, it wouldn't be nearly as distinctive or fun.
Rhythm Heaven Fever's greatest success is in how it merges visuals and music. The art is vital to gameplay, and every time I tried playing it with my eyes closed, I found that I wasn't as good. It's possible to play it reacting only to the auditory cues, but it feels entirely different and doesn't feel right. The visual feedback is amazing, occasionally distracting, often maddening, and is a crucial part of the experience.
Everyone will have levels that they love and levels that they hate. For me, I adore "Screwbot Factory," where you screw on robot-heads, as well as the wicked-groovy "Working Dough." Others stymied me utterly—one game that involves matching a monkey's tambourine beats is so infuriating that you'll want to grab the little bastard, tie him to your controller, and throw them both out a window. Another one, "Monkey Watch," is like injecting yourself, Inception-style, into a metronome's nightmare.
A couple of years ago, I taught myself drums. For a while, I was content to just figure out beats, work on limb independence, and have fun with the instrument. But eventually I decided I needed to work on fundamentals. I've long been a fan of Ted Reed's book Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer (seen to the side here). Don't let the cheesy dude on the cover fool you—this is one of the hippest, most comprehensive guides to syncopation money can buy.
The book is set up in a long series of simple-looking patterns. Just single notes on the snare drum, with a steady beat on the bass drum. (You can see these on the cover.) Page after page after page of eighth, quarter, and sixteenth notes. And yet when you play through it with a metronome (on any instrument, not just drums), you'll find yourself lost in an endless ocean of rhythmic possibilities. One note can be played so, so many different ways, mathematically displaced by fractions. The possibilities are essentially limitless.
Rhythm Heaven Fever feels this same way. The input is incredibly simple, the beats are basic, the cues are always the same. But once those fundamentals are set, the game methodically twists, skews, and displaces them until you're playing all manner of funky, surprising beats.
The game has features adjacent to its focused single-player—there is a multiplayer mode that lets two players fail challenges together, and each set of five levels is capped off by a challenging "Remix" that combines all of the five games before it into one super-groove. There are also unlockable bonuses like songs and rhythm toys that, while goofy and entirely inessential, are fun enough to provide incentive to earn medals by hitting perfect scores on the various levels. (No small feat, that. I've only earned a few medals.)
The cheery, borderline creepy art is winning and distinctive. Like the smilingly menacing imaginary test-giver I described at the start of this review, the game will taunt you with its extremely high standards, calling you funny names for failing while simultaneously telling you that you're doing okay! And don't give up! It's all so peppy and colorful (and merciless) that it gives Rhythm Heaven Fever a more-than-faintly psychotic edge. This game pretends to be colorful and charming, but at its heart it is 100% Not Fucking Around.
I wouldn't want to play in Rhythm Heaven Fever the band, but I had a great time playing Rhythm Heaven Fever the game. It's refreshingly brutal in its simplicity of design, and for all its family-friendly color, it is one of the most hardcore games I've played in ages.
It's hellish; it's a rush. It's maddening; it's joyous. My thumb literally has blisters on it. I can do no less than to give it a wholehearted recommendation.
That's the bad news. The good news? The delay is down to an extensive localisation push: it'll include an English dub (along with major European languages for the Old World), sure, but also a Japanese vocal track with subtitles, for those who like to keep things as nature intended.
A Tweeted offer to back a sequel to Tim Schafer's cult favorite Psychonauts was "a semi-joke," said Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft and a guy who's not hard up for cash in light of that game's success. Notch rattled off a host of reasons why we shouldn't get our hopes up, especially the cost of the project.
"The budget for doing a Psychonauts 2 is three times higher than my initial impression, Notch wrote on his personal blog today in a post titled "Hype!" He also assumes (rightly, one thinks) that Schafer's Double Fine studio will be tied up with the Kickstarter project, which has raised $1.8 million in about a week.
"Tim and I haven't spoken much at all other than a couple of emails," Notch wrote. Also "a couple of other parties have mentioned also being interested in investing in it."
In one of those conversations, Schafer told Kotaku that he informed Notch the original Psychonauts budget was $13 million. It released in 2005. "I was like, 'I don't think you can make [it] for a million dollars,'" Schafer says he told Notch. Yet, "as soon as I mentioned the amount of money he said, 'Yeah, I can do that.'"
Evidently that figure moved up to about $40 million. That's not to say Notch hasn't seriously thought about it—he has, to the extent that he would be very specific about his reasons for doing so. "I would not be investing in this as a charity. It would be because I think the game would be profitable," he said. "And naturally, I wouldn't want to have any creative input in the game. It would be purely a high-risk investment in a project I believe in.
"All I know is that IF the numbers work out and IF they still want to do it and IF they don't decide to self fund a sequel by doing more crowd funding (which is honestly what I would've done if I were them), I would be most interested in doing this type of investment," he said.
It's going to be available on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's also shooting for iPhone and (certain compatible) Android devices. It's going to have voice. It's going to be translated into French, Italian, German and Spanish. There's going to be a closed beta on Steam for backers of the Kickstarter project.
Best part? Shafer says that, for those who like it, there'll be DRM-free versions made available for Kickstarter backers.
Lin-finite Potential | Jeremy Lin's so good they'll need two roster updates this week for NBA 2K12. He takes his act back to New York tonight, where the Knicks greet the woeful Kings at 7:30 p.m.
The PlayStation Vita is built to last more than half a decade and is designed to confound pirates more than it confounds the average gamer, Sony's head of worldwide game development, Shuhei Yoshida, tells Kotaku.
"We are designing this PS Vita to last five, six, seven, eight years," he told me in... More »
The PlayStation Vita has been out for two months in Japan. So how is a PSP game topping the charts?
Andriasang reports that Konami's Genso Suikoden Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki, released last week for the Vita's predecessor, was the number one game sold in Japan between February 6 and February 12,... More »
A re-rated update to the NBA 2K12 roster failed to appease America's feverish Linsanity-the phenomenon surrounding the New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin-and so a second update, giving the point guard even more of a boost, is due by the end of the week.
Lin, who went from the end of the bench... More »
New game designer Hannah Wyman won a trip to New York, got a grant for her school, educated kids, and met the President of the United States. And she managed it all around her dance lessons and her homework, because she's eleven years old.
We may keep seeing the same old arguments over whether... More »
Less than a year ago, EA told PC gamers it would give them something that many PC gamers probably thought they didn't need: a competitor to Steam.
Another PC storefront for downloading games.
Another PC service for connecting PC gamers.
Another thing to install and… wait, where'd the EA games go... More »
When I see the term 'gaming laptop', the first word that comes to mind is 'performance'. And when I hear of a gaming laptop with a price tag of nearly $2,800, I imagine a system that can readily outperform any less expensive machine. More »
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News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming:
• EA Sports has gone cover-vote crazy of late, but Madden NFL 13's all-star 64-man scrum for cover honors isn't the only contest taking place this spring. College Lacrosse 2012, the third edition of the Xbox Live Indie Game sports simulation, will hold a fan-voted cover contest through its Facebook page beginning tomorrow. Those are the three examples above.
• From Twitter, Ronnie Singh, 2K Sports' community manager, put out an appeal to have Jeremy Lin visit their northern California studio to record motion-capture video for NBA 2K13. Lin grew up in Palo Alto, so Singh's figuring that he'll be back in the area sometime during the off-season and can pop over for some signature passing and dribble animations. Singh also made appeals to Bruce Baumgautner, who plays Kevin Malone on "The Office," and the Yankees' Nick Swisher, regarding "a fun opportunity for you pertaining to the NBA 2K franchise." Wonder what they have cooking?
• Elsewhere at the virtual country club, John McEnroe gets a code violation for racket abuse in Grand Slam Tennis 2's launch trailer. That game arrived on Tuesday for PS3 and Xbox 360.
Kate Upton's boobs made the front of yesterday's annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, fairly bursting from that smedium-size top. She took time out of her supermodeling to show all-star pitchers David Price and Justin Verlander just what kind of twirling motion she wants them to do with their thumbs. Cincinnati's Jay Bruce looks like he still can't find the button she's talking about.
A re-rated update to the NBA 2K12 roster failed to appease America's feverish Linsanity—the phenomenon surrounding the New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin—and so a second update, giving the point guard even more of a boost, is due by the end of the week.
Lin, who went from the end of the bench to leading a desperate Knicks squad to six straight victories, rose from an overall 56 rating to a 69 in a "Living Roster" update that arrived early this morning. Even with a rare 13-point overall increase, a 69 (the scale goes to 99) is indeed unremarkable, and neither captures Lin's importance to the Knick offense nor his ability to influence games. Lin outscored Kobe Bryant with 38 points to defeat the Lakers on Friday and then, despite a poor shooting performance, drained a game-winning three-point shot yesterday to down Toronto 90-87.
The video game still leaves Lin as a nonfactor. This morning I ran a background simulation inside the game's Association mode, using the re-rated Lin and both teams' starting lineups, setting all performers' minutes played to what they logged last night. Toronto blew out New York as Lin scored 11 points on 3-for-13 shooting and had six assists.
Sports video game designers don't want to go overboard re-rating players based on what is a statistically small sample size. But they also want to create something that appeals to the current interest in the league, and Lin is by far the No. 1 sports story in the United States.
Ordinarily, NBA 2K12 updates its rosters weekly. It's my understanding 2K Sports will push through a second update specifically to re-rate Lin before the Saturday's nationally televised contest between Lin's Knicks and the defending NBA champion Dallas Mavericks. The roster that showed up this morning didn't account for his Toronto performance, in which he again led all scorers with 27 points (but shot less than 50 percent doing so.)
@Ronnie2K
Ronnie 2K 2K12Mind you, I think Linsanity is legit and will make it to the 80s before the end of the year. After last night, he's up for another bump4 hours ago via web · Reply · Retweet · Favorite · powered by @socialditto
It's in 2K's interest to get Lin another boost for a couple of reasons. One is that a more dynamic Knicks team is a more popular online choice, and NBA 2K, like any sports video game battles against the problem of seeing players choosing from the same three or four teams in quick matches. Another is because the pre-game broadcast packages usually involve the game's top-rated star. While that remains Amar'e Stoudemire (and probably Carmelo Anthony, when he returns from injury) fans are looking for Lin in these virtual games as much as they are on the television.
Kotaku has heard from multiple sources close to the project that the code-name for Microsoft's next console is Durango.
The door closes behind you with an ominous click. It's bright in here—too bright. Before you can get your wits about you, your host begins to speak.
The book is set up in a long series of simple-looking patterns. Just single notes on the snare drum, with a steady beat on the bass drum. (You can see these on the cover.) Page after page after page of eighth, quarter, and sixteenth notes. And yet when you play through it with a metronome (on any instrument, not just drums), you'll find yourself lost in an endless ocean of rhythmic possibilities. One note can be played so, so many different ways, mathematically displaced by fractions. The possibilities are essentially limitless.
