The past two years has seen a seismic shift in the way the music industry views music-based videogames.

Mostly this is thanks to the staggering sales figures of Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the ongoing revenue stream created by digitally-distributed add-on songs.

Bands and their record companies are only just realising that licensing their material for use in a rhythm action game (whereby players play, for example, the guitar part of their song in the game) is not only a sensible thing to do but increasingly essential for survival.

Piracy’s not only killing music (at least, music by the major label definition) but also the radio and, as a result, the traditional ways in which young people encounter new songs and artists have to change.

If an up-and-coming band manages to secure one of their tracks on Guitar Hero they net an audience wider and greater that they could ever otherwise reach. In addition, their song will receive multiple repeat listens (much like a single in high rotation on a radio station) as players approach their track as if it were a level meriting repeat play regardless of how much they like the music itself.

But this time last year the music industry at large was only just waking up to these truths. As a result the bank of hit songs available for use in rhythm action games was quite small, with Harmonix, Activision, EA and Konami all tussling over which tracks they could secure for their respective releases.

To fill out the song list games like Guitar Hero also feature a raft of songs by unsigned artists. While the bands are unknown, these songs act as bonus levels for players who have exhausted the hits but still want something else to play along to. They’re cheap to buy in and, of course there’s always the chance that one of these artists will go on to become well known, earning the game’s publisher kudos for being ahead of the curve.

Nowadays these unsigned artists are usually competition winners and suchlike, amateur bands who earn their place in the game by virtue of their material (at least, as judged by the game maker). But for the first release of any rhythm action series there’s no established brand to run a competition off, so the unsigned bands featured usually end up being friends of the developers or their own side-project bands.

The people who work on rhythm action titles have often been hired because they are music fans, amateur/ failed musicians or part-time promoters. As such there’s an abundance of unsigned material that people on and around the team want to get into the game – not least for the royalty payments that a successful placement lands the writers and performers.

It’s something that irritates me no end and I’ve been trying to work out why I feel so strongly about it. Having a record deal is neither an indicator of base ability or quality and, as the way in which new artists emerge and gain popularity continues to shift and change, the old system holds less weight and importance.

Besides, most of the music I enjoy is written and performed by people who have to work a day job on the side to make their music project financially viable. Something that makes the kind of ‘professional’ snobbery I feel seem at odds my own listening habits.

But there’s a difference between amateur and niche. Niche acts who cannot afford to be musicians full time may look ostensibly the same as unsigned amateurs but there is a discernible if perhaps intangible difference. Moreover, from my perspective it’s obvious that these bonus songs are principally small favours to friends and family, vanity inclusions based on who the artist knows rather than what they have to offer. To me it reeks of nepotism and again signals an industry yet to mature. Who has played any of the unsigned bonus tracks in Guitar Hero more than once, if that?

I understand that Guitar Hero is a videogame pastiche of the rock industry (a parody aesthetic that uses the rock drama as a way to soften the ridiculous reality of what players are actually doing) and that A&R and unsigned acts are a big part of that industry. But even so, I’d take the slick, narrow professionalism of Singstar over the broad, inconsistent standard of Guitar Hero’s sprawling song list. I wonder if I’m alone in thinking this?

Kudos to Eurogamer for even entertaining the idea of this piece, and then going on to publish it in full. It’s atypical of the site’s usual content but I like that. Gamasutra, PC Gamer, The Escapist and Edge publish this kind of content occasionally but for a mainstream site to tackle a contentious issue surrounding an obscure homebrew PC game (albeit one in the US news recently) takes guts. While the ensuing reader comments thread is lengthy and lively, it seems as though the readership are enjoying wrestling with some of the issues the interview throws up. I hope you do too.

In September 2006 Al-Qaeda became a game developer.

Its first release? First-person shooter “Night of Bush Capturing”, a game free to anyone with an Internet connection and an open mind. Its six-mission campaign is constructed from genre features familiar to any gamer: work your way deep into enemy territory, shoot enemy soldiers before they shoot you and assassinate the leader.

Only, in this case the territory is America, the enemy soldiers are US troops and the leader in question is George W. Bush. Oh, and the developer is a notorious Islamic militant terrorist alliance.

Programmed by a team from Al-Qaeda’s Global Islamic Media Front, Night of Bush Capturing is in fact a modded version of an older, US-made game, Quest for Saddam, released by Petrilla Entertainment in 2003. Al-Qaeda’s coders swapped out the artwork and textures of this earlier game – made with the Torque Game Engine – replacing the crude representations of Arab soldiers and anti-Islamic propaganda for equally crude versions of American soldiers and anti-American propaganda. This straightforward re-skin turned what was intended to be a rallying, pro-Iraq war game into a diametrically-opposed (but curiously symmetrical) attack on George Bush, his foreign policy and the nation behind his presidency.

Bilal is no stranger to controversy. In May 2007 he locked himself in a room in Chicago, set up a paintball gun, a webcam and a website called ‘Shoot an Iraqi’ and allowed viewers to fire the gun at him over the Internet. According to Newsweek, viewers shot the gun 40,000 times in the project’s first two and a half weeks.

At first neither game attracted much media attention, the former seen as little more than a basic, home-coded game that typified the popular American anti-Arab atmosphere of 2003, the latter a cheap and cheeky knock-off response from an international terrorist organisation. But recently both games found themselves at the forefront of a global debate on freedom of speech, artistic expression and the importance of story and setting in videogames.

Wafaa Bilaal is an Iraqi American artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His latest artistic creation is a hacked version of Al-Qaeda’s Night of Bush Capturing, in which he integrates himself into the game’s narrative to present his own commentary on the conflict. He renamed the game ‘Virtual Jihadi’ before presenting it to the world as a piece to challenge viewers and inspire debate and conversation on some difficult issues.

In real life, Wafaa’s 21-year-old brother, an ordinary Iraqi citizen, was killed by shrapnel during a firefight in Najaf. In his game the lead protagonist, upon learning of his sibling’s death, is recruited by Al-Qaeda as a suicide-bomber, joining in the hunt for George Bush. Through his work Wafaa intends to “bring attention to the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians, highlight racist generalisations and stereotypes promoted in videogames, and demonstrate how British and American foreign policy is pushing Iraqi citizens into the arms of violent groups like Al-Qaeda”.

It’s a bold and broad purpose and one that saw Wafaa invited by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to present a lecture and exhibit on this work at the end of February 2008. But the exhibition was only open for an hour before it was shut down by city officials. According to newspaper reports, the decision came after the College Republicans called the Arts department “a safe haven for terrorists”. Eurogamer caught up with Wafaa this week to unpick the drama and examine some of the issues that have been raised by his game under these unusual circumstances. We started by asking him why he decided to use a videogame to get his message across.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Late last year fierce videogame opponent and Miami-based attorney Jack Thompson was prosecuted for Florida Bar misconduct (i.e. trolling).

As the case approaches a verdict, Game Politics is running a series of transcripts from the nine-day trial.

Despite the fact that near everything written about the man these days is tired and tiring, these transcripts make for compelling car-crash reading not least because, for all Thompson’s faults, flawed arguments and graceless conduct, he oozes self-belief and seems to be able to think on his feet quickly.

Nevertheless, having spent the last couple of weeks playing through Rockstar’s 360 conversion of the PlayStation 2 game ‘Bully’, I found Thompson’s accusations aimed at the game in today’s post super annoying.

While Thompson failed to get the game classified as a ‘public nuisance’ last year (his outrageous treatment of the presiding judge following the case’s failure is in part the reason for this Florida Bar trial) it’s his outright lies in continuing to portray the game as a dangerous tool of violence and destruction that stings.

In reality the game is curiously redemptive. You start out as an outsider, a young teen from a broken home dumped in a no-hope school by a disinterested mother.

From the start of the game you are ostracised, each of the school’s distinct and familiar pupil cliques shunning your every advance and interaction. It’s caricature and pastiche of school life but there’s a ring of truth and authenticity about these first days in your virtual correctional school experience.

The game is divided into chapters, each one populated by missions that have you slowly win over each social subset one by one. You start by siding with the weakest and most vulnerable of these groups: the nerds, acting as their champion, defending them against the attacks of the older, bigger, prettier, more popular boys and girls.

Despite Thompson’s grim characterisation of the game experience, Bully is based upon a strict moral code, rough justice meted out by the school’s endlessly patrolling prefects. So much as bump into a girl and you face instant detention and most violence in the game, while almost always aimed at defending the weak when instigated in missions, is punished if witnessed by a member of school staff.

While bringing about justice by turning violence back against perpetrators isn’t something I agree with, at very least it indicates there’s an ethical code underpinning this game. Thompson describes Bully as a ‘Columbine Simulator’, a shocking accusation when viewed through the lens of the game’s deeper moral framework*.

It’s the inability to perceive or acknowledge the subsurface point a game (or book, film, joke) is making that typifies Thompson’s attacks as well as the shock-horror media tactics of the wider moral majority. Failing to understand an artist’s intent (especially when it’s plainly obvious to anyone who has properly engaged with the content) leads to would-be attackers picking the wrong targets in their moral crusade.

For example, few objected to the film Home Alone (the 1990 picture starring Macaulay Culkin as a young boy left home alone to defend his house from would-be thieves). But whatever that film’s merits it’s hard to argue that this is not a story that glorifies and delights in meaningless violence. However, the Aryan poster boy Culkin combined with the feel good Christmas aesthetic caused the moral police to gloss over its deeper, arguably worrying instruction.

By contrast, one can list countless movies that use violence and viewer discomfort to examine, comment and evaluate deeper issues with wisdom and maturity, but which are characterised as evil-bringers because of their darker surface aesthetic or controversial premise.

Thompson is, predictably enough, a member of the American Christian Right (at least, that’s what his wikipedia page claims). The tragedy of the situation is that his outrage is no doubt fueled by a misguided belief that his vocation is to act as a moral compass for society, serving and protecting the world from the evils of modern media in the Daily Mail vein.

The reality is that Christ – he whom Thompson apparently seeks to follow – never, ever attacked the culture in which he lived. He saved all of his verbal rebukes and attacks for those who proudly proclaimed to know Yaweh and yet failed to embody any of his principles. Any attacks towards the secular environment in which Jesus lived (that is the Roman empire) were made simply via his lifestyle which tirelessly sought to demonstrate that love always overcomes hatred and violence.

If Thompson were to understand this truth, he would do far more good in this world than by pursuing his current pantomime act, something of use only to Fox New editors and parents eager for a scapegoat, any scapegoat, to explain away modern America’s violent tragedies.

*by the way, I would not defend Bully to the hilt. Ian Bogost posts an intelligent and accessible critique of the game’s triumphs and disasters over at Serious Games Source with which I wholly agree.

Kieron Gillen MSNs this morning with a link to Rom Check Fail and the assertion that it ‘may be the greatest game of all time’.

It’s certainly the purest example of 8-bit mash-up gaming I’ve played.

The game combines the protagonists, enemies, soundtracks, backgrounds and interactive concepts of most of major 1980s arcade touchstones (Pacman, Defender, Gauntlet, Super Mario, Asteroids etc) to create a Wario-Ware style, hyper-distilled, micro-gaming gauntlet.

Developer Farbs explains the core idea as taking each of the disparate graphical, aural and mechanical elements of these classic retro titles, putting them on separate, concentric roulettes, before spinning them to see what the resulting game looks and plays like.

As a result, one moment you might need to stomp on the heads of Pacman’s ghosts. Then five seconds later you’re cast as Link hacking your way through a Goomba horde. You earn points for the levels you clear and there’s no penalty for those that you don’t.

Occasionally the random combination of assets and mechanics results in certain death but then, as Kieron points out, ‘such is the wheel of fortune of the great videogame gods’.

As with Wario Ware this reduction of videogaming’s first principles cuts away the clutter, storylines, motivations and over-complex control schemes that now encumber our games to produce something slight, perfect but also somewhat disorientating.

If nothing else it reveals just how ingrained into our muscle memory these characters and their associated behaviours really are.

‘Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.

But the one who has love, courage, and wisdom moves the world.’

Ammon Hennacy, Catholic Activist, 1893-1970.

Hope you have a very happy Easter.

An incredible little documentary on the making of HBO’s pre-CGI title sequence which was used throughout the 1980s.

The use of miniature cities is still commonplace in contemporary films (the recent Star Wars prequels combined scale model replicas with CGI to bring them to life) but there’s nothing quite like doing it all with models (see Blade Runner).

My soft spot for the cute stories behind neat practical effects has been well-documented (and challenged…) on this site but in this regard I don’t mind admitting I’m a sentimentalist and happy with it.

Following on from the Lost Odyssey review here’s an interesting interview with Jay Rubin, the Harvard professor who worked on translating novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s short stories which are scattered throughout the game.

Rubin is best known for his work in translating surrealist novelist Haruki Muarakami’s works for English speaking audience (both men pictured here).

It’s rare for someone of such literary reputation to step into the videogaming world so this interview (undertaken by friend of Chewing Pixels and Develop magazine staff writer, Ed Fear) is fascinating.

Rubin is generally opposed to videogames, a stance set by his impression that they are all about the blood, guts and violence. However, when Microsoft sent through two of Shigematsu’s stories as examples of the game’s content, he was so moved that he decided to get involved.

“The strong moral core opposed to violence, and the vivid imagery with which Shigematsu brought home this lesson for his young readers, convinced me that I should sell out immediately,” he laughs.

“No, seriously, I wouldn’t have translated a bunch of blood-and-guts slice-’em-ups, but it certainly didn’t hurt that they were willing to pay well for these fundamentally wholesome didactic pieces.”

Read the full text of the interview here.

Next-Gen posts my review of Mistwalker’s latest JRPG, Lost Odyssey, which is printed in this month’s edition of Edge Magazine. It’s a strange game, one whose flaws and tired conventions are conspicuous throughout, but a title I’m also very fond of now it’s over. Novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s short stories, littered through the game as textual interludes, are beautiful and inspiring and I think that the depth and intimacy they bring to lead protagonist Kaim has been a big factor in firing my affections.

Lost Odyssey contains some of the most tender writing ever committed to a videogame. Kaim, the game’s protagonist, is cursed with immortality. Cursed because, for all of life’s joys and triumphs, there is inevitable and equal sadness and loss.

It is these burdens – wives and children departed, homes razed by natural disaster, the unforgettable death masks of 10,000 enemy soldiers – which, when multiplied over eternity, become a weight too heavy for any man to bear.

Despite Kaim’s amnesia, that scourge of so many an RPG hero, these far-flung memories break into his consciousness by way of dreams, triggered by people, places or events encountered through the game. Each of the 31 dreams is presented by text that reveals as you read it, soundtracked by music boxes and melancholy tinkling pianos, touching and sparse vignettes of narrative that examine the human condition with keen eloquence. Penned by Japanese novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu and translated by Jay Rubin, a Harvard professor best known for his translations of Haruki Murakami’s novels, each brims with sentiment but remains shy of sentimentality. These segments of the game are special, beautiful even, but they are shining jewels set in a surround of more contentious material.

The game’s flow is predictable: explore a corridored environment while fighting random battles, face off against a boss.
This, the second Xbox 360 RPG from Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker, is almost as traditional as the first. The genre’s most recent journeys into innovation are all forgotten here in favor of a framework reminiscent of the nine-year-old Final Fantasy VIII. The game’s flow is predictable and orthodox: explore a corridored environment while fighting random battles, face off against a boss, and finally trigger the next narrative interlude. Save for the fact that the protagonist is past his petulant teenage years (although making him 1,000 years old was perhaps overkill in answering complaints) the game conforms to all the genre’s strengths and weaknesses, yet more evidence that it’s Sakaguchi’s departure from Square-Enix that has freed the rival company to explore the interactive story’s modern potential.

You can read the rest over at Next-Gen here.

It’s possible that the proliferation of piracy devices for the Nintendo DS has been overstated in recent times.

But even if the actual user number of these devices (which allow owners to play downloaded Nintendo DS ROMs simply and easily) is nowhere near the alarmist estimates, there’s no doubt that four years into the system’s life, their use is relatively commonplace.

While the chipping of console systems has almost been eradicated by a combination of simultaneous worldwide releases (eliminating the attraction of importing games ahead of domestic release) and iterative firmware updates (increasing the fear of having one’s console rendered useless by a manufacturer’s update), piracy in handheld devices seems more rife than ever.

Developers and publishers either accept the fact that their software is going to be played for free by a portion of gamers (either as a kind of gratis ‘demo’ service ahead of paying out for the retail version, or as a straight up ‘theft’) or enter into the cat-and-mouse game of devising security measures to best the piracy carts’ firmware. Of course, as anyone who has worked in copy protection will tell you, it’s usually only a matter of days before hackers find a workaround and either release a firmware update to circumvent these new fences or else write a patch to make a specific game work.

However, this week’s release of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, has revealed a different approach to the problem, such that it is.

If the game detects that it’s being played on a DS piracy device then, after 10-20 minutes of play, it cuts off and displays the above image. While it didn’t take many days for hackers to provide an IPS patch to disable the message (known affectionately as ‘the Moogle Bomb’) and open the full game up, I still think it’s been a canny move by developer/ publisher Square-Enix.

Rather than shutting down the ROM right from the off, the dev team allow people who are using R4 devices to sample the game as a kind of extended demo before presenting them, not with a heavy-handed ‘piracy funds rapists!’ style message, but rather a cheery, ‘Thank-you for playing: if you like what you see why not go and buy the full game?’.

It’s an interesting demonstration of how a device’s underground culture has directly influenced a development decision. Without an Xbox Live-style demo service for Nintendo DS, it seems like a sensible move on Square-Enix’s part (particularly as they seem confident about this game’s quality), even if downloading ROMs of full games to ‘try-before-you-buy’ isn’t likely to be endorsed by Nintendo anytime soon.

Just prior to Christmas I reviewed the videogame adaptation of The Golden Compass for Eurogamer.

It’s one of those reviews that you know you’ll be commissioned to write if you just ask because nobody else will want to do it.

Movie tie-ins are usually a tiresome slog to play through, are difficult to talk about in an interesting way and moreover, the readership mostly doesn’t care.

I worked really hard on that review. I mean, really hard because, spending some of my time working with movie studios on interactive adaptations of their IP (albeit for the web), means that I have a soft spot for the teams who have to work on these difficult projects.

I know that, in an ideal world, one would work ‘really hard’ on any review – after all, every game represents thousands of man hours of work – but you always naturally pay most attention to those titles that are of interest to the largest number of readers. I don’t know the stats but I doubt many people clicked on this piece – a children’s tie-in of a children’s book (no matter how good the source material) isn’t really the type of game to fire up Eurogamer’s core demographic. So I only mention it because I guess the amount of effort I put in considering the circumstances was unusual.

The game itself is difficult, frustrating, unpolished and ropey, problems that are tempered somewhat by some genuinely good ideas that obviously weren’t given enough time in the tight production schedule to blossom.

So, when Gamasutra posted an interview with Dalan Musson, the freelance writer who wrote the adaptation of the Golden Compass from movie to videogame this week, I was interested to hear if my speculations in the first two paragraphs of the review were accurate. The QA is interesting in its examination of the challenges that face any development team in trying to translate a tightly scripted linear story into a fun videogame and makes for good reading.

However, further down the interviewer asks Musson about his reaction to the game’s generally poor ratings, to which he answers:

I was reading the reviews and looking at the ratings of the game. Of course, you get a little bit defensive, because you’re in love with this project, because you worked on it and blah blah blah.

I feel like that having adult reviewers review a game that, in its core, is created for younger kids, you’re not really getting…you know, the reasons that you and I are playing video games are completely different from the reasons that a ten-year-old is playing a video game.

25 and 30-year-old video game reviewers aren’t really our core audience, so the things that they’re looking for in that game, their sensibilities are completely different.

I also feel like — and this is not a slight at any reviewer, specifically — I feel like they have to knock at least a few games to make it seem like they’re doing their job. You can’t just give everything an 8.5, because that’s not really interesting, either.

So if a game comes out that is for younger kids and most of your readers aren’t going to buy anyway, I think it’s sort of safe to give it a lower review.

Now, I understand how it stings when something you’ve worked hard on gets critically panned, but these accusations are unfair. As if a reviewer/ critic has to be in the target demographic to be able to comment insightfully and meaningfully on it? Ratatouille, anyone?

And how patronising is the opinion that kids have different expectations of games? 25 to 30-year-old reviewers – the good ones at least – are looking for solid mechanics and confident execution that lead to enjoyable entertainment. The things that make a good game when you’re ten-years-old are, in that sense, no different to the things that make a good game twenty years later. Super Mario is universally appealing, Miyamoto doesn’t make games for different age brackets.

My initial reaction to his final point – that the game received low scores because it’s an easy target (readerships don’t care about, so panning the game is a cheap and easy way to make your publication appear balanced) – was yet more incredulity. But then again, perhaps he has a point. It costs nothing to slam a game like The Golden Compass. The associated PR knows it’s going to get a kicking and there will be no subsequent fallout from the readership whose expectations are immovably low.

So perhaps in some cases he’s right, even if from my perspective, he’s wide of the mark.