Virtua Tennis is one of those names – you know, the ones with iceberg-like memories attached. But be assured that nostalgia hasn’t generously biased this review. I’ve been playing through the 360 version as well as this impressive PSP conversion and it’s astonishingly balanced videogaming. The more I play the more I’m in awe of the designers at AM3 – the subtlety and depth of what’s going on here is staggering and, in this third game, my appreciation of the actual sport of Tennis has increased a hundred fold.
Technically speaking, a video game that successfully recreates a classic sport should be, by its very nature, one of the best video games. After all, sports such as tennis, football, and rugby enjoy tried-and-tested rules and mechanics that have been honed over decades of field-testing.
What hope has a humble video game designer trying to invent a new game of matching the complexity and elegance of, say, cricket, on a six-week schedule using Mickey Mouse for a lead character?
So it follows that if a developer can really capture the essence of a famous and beloved sport, distilling its subtleties into a series of tiny thumb movements and button presses, it could and should be astonishing. At its best, a sports game should allow those without the physical requirements of the real sport a glorious echo of what it is to step out in front of a cheering throng of spectators, while at the same time allowing those who already play to practice their real-world technique and theory in a virtual world.
Virtua Tennis 3 is one such video game. It marries all the complex detail of playing tennis to a professional level with the paraphernalia of being a world-class competitor. In other words, you’ll need to master the perfect timing required to strike punishing top spin ground strokes and pixel-perfect cross court slices, as well as a training regime that delicately balances rest with ability-enhancing fruit-dodging mini-games. (More on those later.)
Yeah, so with regards to the execution I can’t decide on what I think yet, but the idea is simply brilliant.
As far as I can tell from this video each drum is linked to a sample in a music sequencing program. When a drum (not the cymbal though, which appears to be separate) is hit it triggers the next sample in the pre-set sequence. So, by playing a pre-prescribed drum pattern, this lone drummer (know as Duracell, real name Andre Diamant) is able to play as a one-man videogame band.
The audio is then fed into some kind of monster guitar amp, squeezed through some distorting effects and turned up rock ‘n roll loud. The result is a bit like Lightening Bolt meets Dance Dance Revolution. While there’s no screen as such, the guy is essentially playing an audio videogame live.
There are a lot of implications to process from seeing this approach to making music, not least questions of how something like this might be implemented into actual rhythm-based videogames in a similar way. Essentially this is Guitar Hero live (as in that game hitting buttons on the guitar triggers real samples) but I like the way the pace he plays at dictates the mood and tempo of the song – something games haven’t done yet.
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein on Sony’s miraculous piece of PR at the Playstation 3 launch last Friday. The Japanese hardware giant gave out free 46-inch Bravia W series televisions worth £2000 to the 125 people waiting in the queue at the London launch event thus turning the next morning’s headlines (in lazier publications) from “Disastrous turnout for Playsation 3 launch event” to “Sony rewards patient gamers“.
“An online game operator has demanded that banned players donate blood to be allowed back into the game. Moliyo, which runs a 3D massively multiplayer online game in China, made the demand after banning 120,000 players who attempted to hack the game, according to gaming news website, 17173.com.
More than 100 players had already signed up to exchange half a litre (1 pint) of blood for game accounts, 17173 reported (in Chinese). The company has also offered free accounts to ordinary players who give blood, the website claimed.
Chinese hospitals have had increasing difficulty attracting blood donors in recent years after scandals in which tens of thousands of donors and blood recipients contracted HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. Blood donors in China are usually paid about 12 dollars per donation.
Moliyo arranged the event in an attempt to “create a civilized society, and enhance online gamers’ appreciation of social responsibility and public welfare,” according to 17173.com.
I like the idea that virtual cheaters must atone for their online sins with real body matter.
Of course what happens in the world of zeros and ones always has physical implications in the world of atoms and oxygen but rarely are cause and effect seen so close to one another.
Anyway, a pint of blood seems like a pretty generous entry fee in the light of World of Warcraft’s minimum requirement of brain stem and soul.
I’ve been so excited about this game ever since it was first announced as coming to the 360′s Xbox Live Arcade system. I was even banging on about it on a forum because I didn’t think I was going to have to write about it professionally. It wasn’t until late last night I got an e-mail through asking if I’d review the game for Eurogamer. Thankfully I’d had a few hours of playing single-player multi-player with my friend Robert Howells (rules: you both play the single-player game but have live chat on so you can talk to each other as you’re playing the same bits – it’s completely awesome).
Anyway, it was a bit of a surprise to get the review – especially when Kristan asked if I could get it done for this morning. This is without doubt the shortest turnaround I’ve ever had on a review – and possibly the first time I’ve played through a game without knowing I was going to have to review it first. It was certainly exhilarating if nothing else. I hope the finished critique doesn’t feel rushed.
Even in 1997 this was an anachronism. Videogames’ bright new horizon was three-dimensional and Sony’s first console wunderkind the only viewing tower worth climbing. The PlayStation future was all about Lara Croft’s curvaceous polygons, Gran Turismo’s reflective bonnets and screen-filling Tekken sucker-punches. It was the Chemical Brothers serenading Wipeout races and the Designer’s Republic packaging. Aspirational pixels backed by aspirational music promoted by aspirational faces; not much room for two-dimensional gothic oddities in this too-cool-for-school marketing vision.
As such, Symphony of the Night, with its dank 2D walls, brooding orchestral soundtrack and Street Fighter-esque special moves stole across videogaming’s busy vista mostly unnoticed the first time round. But not completely unnoticed. Those with eyes to see its exquisite design, extraordinary scope, aesthetic elegance and coherence were quick to evangelise. The game’s underground following bustled and grew until copies of the game were changing hands on ebay for £60 and upwards. Symphony of the Night had made the celebrated canon and every discerning games player wanted a look.
And that, in short, is why Microsoft’s been so keen to accommodate this, the Castlevania series’ debated highpoint, tripling the 50MB size restriction of all its Xbox Live Arcade games specifically to allow it into its line-up of mixed importance. Symphony of the Night is to action-adventure fans what Mario 64 is to platform lovers, Monkey Island is to point and click autistics or Final Fantasy VII is to incurable geeks. It’s important, beloved and, crucially, it expands XBLA’s remit to include fan-favourite console titles as well as those arcade classics such as Pac-Man, Defender and, er, Teenager Mutant Ninja Turtles.
“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
Don Delillo responding to Sony boss David Reeves’ pre-emptive spin that the PlayStation 3 not selling out upon its release this Friday would be a good thing.
In the usual spirit of these thing I’m not sure the best one came first but, even so, all of the winning images in Wikimedia’s Commons picture competition are pretty and interesting.
Plus, of course, it’s an idea that deserves everybody’s urgent support and, with only 658 voters bothering to click in this year, hopefully the competition will only rise and rise in profile and scope as time goes on. Pop along to the winners’ list and see what you missed out on.
Steve Moore, sat in the armchair opposite his bed with ballpoint pen and notepad, spiral bound, neat sloping capitals, each line a blue queue leaning forward, barely masking their impatience, as the book-crammed room around him pales unnoticed into dusk there on the top of Shooters Hill. Man with a foolish grin, perfectly still, as failing light adjusts to match his ash-slide hair, to match the wet-slate gleam his skin has, the South London moontan. Slowly, the defining edge is lost in grey on grey, a photo undeveloping.
The textures vanish in obliterating gloss, details excuse themselves. Fine wrinkles spreading from the corners of his eyes, curved up around the brow, curved down around the cheekbones, face like a magnetic field. All this erased and then the body outline fades, the slight frame that conspires with posture to seem even slighter, basically an Adam’s apple and its support system, melted gone into the darkness of the cosy room, the man hutch with its pagan icon huddle. Finally, the only light is of this metropolis, the great black garden of a million flowers on fire spread supine and magnificent below his rear, north-facing bedroom window. This and moonlight.
It’s been a while since I exalted Alan Moore here but reading his contribution to Iain Sinclair’s project of mixed brilliance, London City of Disappearances, and…just wow. This is the kind of writing that makes me want to snap all the pencils in my house, throw away my keyboard and retire to some remote field to lie, face down on the sod, atoning for my own lyrical incompetence.
My friend Joao admitted he too gets a little depressed whenever he reads Moore, but don’t let that put you off wading through his treacly but irresistibly exquisite prose. More on Sinclair’s collection later.
It’s easy to understand video gaming’s ceaseless fascination with the most recent World War. Games which employ modern warfare as a backdrop struggle with the complex, detached nature of contemporary combat. It’s also difficult to provide an inoffensive but believable enemy to fight against, so we’re normally left to slug it out with inexact, cop-out generics such as ‘terrorists’.
No such problem with Hitler’s bombastic Third Reich. And, as for on-the-ground fighting, 1940′s weaponry and artillery offers a recognisable form and a straightforward function – no messing about with drones or laser tagging. Despite the dark historical theme, World War II also boasts a warm (and entirely inappropriate) kind of third-generational nostalgia for us Brits, evoking Sunday afternoons spent watching stiff upper lips destroying the bridge on the River Kwai.
Whether all that justifies the relentless onslaught of WWII first-person shooters or not is debatable, but it certainly helps explain the care and vision that has been lavished on this video game, the first title in Activison’s massively popular Call of Duty series to arrive on PSP.
Sorting through the mac-cancer that is my ever-expanding iPhoto library yesterday and I found this photograph taken on a visit to London’s Science Museum. My brother is, technically speaking, a civil servant there but his day-to-day duties are more exciting than that broad and rather staid definition would suggest.
He’s an ‘explainer’ at the Launch Pad which, for those not familiar with London’s excellent museums, is a huge area where youngsters can try lots of hands-on experiments without the usual dangers of accidentally shearing off their necks with spilt acid and suchlike. My brother presents shows at the Launch Pad – and nowadays around the country in various schools as a kind of Science Museum missionary – where he demonstrates exciting feats of science by blasting Barbie dolls from small cannons or trapping small children inside giant bubbles. It’s unquestionably the best possible way to spend taxpayers’ money.
Anyhow, one recent summer we visited and were allowed backstage where I saw this amazing note pinned to the wall. The whole note is brilliant, and I love author Alan’s descriptive fervour throughout but, without a doubt, it’s the urgently scrawled post-script that makes it – as if, after printing the original notice some horrible accident with the ‘Chair of Doom’ required its immediate addition.
Technically speaking, a video game that successfully recreates a classic sport should be, by its very nature, one of the best video games. After all, sports such as tennis, football, and rugby enjoy tried-and-tested rules and mechanics that have been honed over decades of field-testing.
I like the idea that virtual cheaters must atone for their online sins with real body matter. 
Steve Moore, sat in the armchair opposite his bed with ballpoint pen and notepad, spiral bound, neat sloping capitals, each line a blue queue leaning forward, barely masking their impatience, as the book-crammed room around him pales unnoticed into dusk there on the top of Shooters Hill. Man with a foolish grin, perfectly still, as failing light adjusts to match his ash-slide hair, to match the wet-slate gleam his skin has, the South London moontan. Slowly, the defining edge is lost in grey on grey, a photo undeveloping. 
It’s easy to understand video gaming’s ceaseless fascination with the most recent World War. Games which employ modern warfare as a backdrop struggle with the complex, detached nature of contemporary combat. It’s also difficult to provide an inoffensive but believable enemy to fight against, so we’re normally left to slug it out with inexact, cop-out generics such as ‘terrorists’.
