Nexuiz Gameplay: Nique vs. Creatures

Nexuiz Title Track: Bred To Fight

The song I chose for the Nexuiz Title Track is Bred To Fight. I obtained this track from FirstCom's website. It has an adventurous feel that displays that the player will be going through battles or whatnot. It gets the player in the mood making them ready for battle. The end sounds victorious. Forceful horns and guitar along with high pitched strings set a mood of fearlessness. 

Search Terms:

Music For: Promo/Trailer Music, Action/Adventure>Epic Adventure

Music Style: Rock>Indie/Alternative, Classical>Neo-classical, Pop>Pop Rock

Moods: Dramatic>Strong/Powerful, Motion>Building

Grand Theft Auto IV Three Leaf Clover Cutscene

Seeing how the Grand Theft Auto Series is one of my all time favorites games to play. I particularly like one of the cutscenes in the Grand Theft Auto IV game. That Cutscene is for the Three Leaf Clover Mission. This mission consists of a bank robbery that the player has to do to advance on to the next missions and is after the "Waste Not Want Knots" mission. 

"THREE LEAF CLOVER"

During this mission, Packie introduces you to his brothers and a bit of bickering goes on. After this cutscene the player steals a car and heads to the bank of Liberty to rob it. Now during this cutscene, Packie and Derrick (his brother) begins arguing. Like some of the bank robberies we see in comedy movies the robbers end up saying their where their from or that they are related and one of the victims tries to save the day and ends up getting shot. This is exactly what happened and Micheal (the other brother of the robbers) gets shot because of the victim that shot him. What I like about this cutscence is the bickering that goes on between the two while they are arguing. To me its a  bit funny.

Audio Elements:

Voices (Whispering/Yelling/Regular Tone)

Gun Shots

Door open/Unlock

Grunts

Alarm System

Medium Bomb Explosion

Slight Footsteps

item drops (money bags)

helicopter

police sirens/horns

The ambience and the volume changes as the player moves throughout the bank as well as outside. You can tell that Rockstar took a bit more time to make the ambience as well as the other sound effects more realistic and in conjunction with their environments. You can hear a bit of reverb and filters on some of the items as well. Also some of the sounds sound muffled. 

Nintendo

Nintendo is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. Nintendo is the worlds largest video game company by revenue. It was founded on September 23, 1889, by Fusajiro Yamauchi. 

Nintendo first stared off producing handmade card games, and also tried cab services and love hotels as a source of business. Abandoning these it later developed into a video game company becoming one of the most influential in the industry. Nintendo of America is also the majority owner if the Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball Team. 

Nintendo has programmers, artists, designers, all over the world even from different companies. They also have several retail stores and their products are sold just about about in place where electronics and games are sold.  

Nintendo Co, Ltd oversees the company's global operations and manages Japanese operations specifically. The company's two major subsidiaries, Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe, manage operations in  North America and Europe respectively. 

Main Headquarters in Kyoto, Japan

Nintendo of America Headquarters in Redmond, United States 

Nintendo of Europe Headquarters in Grobostheim, Germany

Nintendo Tokyo Office

Gaming Systems

Gameboy

Gameboy Color 

Gameboy Advance

Color TV Game

NES

SNES

Kirby

Virtual Boy

Nintendo 64

Gamecube

Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS Lite

Nintendo DSi

Nintendo DSi XL

Nintendo 3DS

Nintendo Wii

Wii U

...and Several Others

Games

Dungeons and Dragons

Donkey Kong

After Burner II

Pokemon

Famicom

Family Circuit

Flying Hero

Pacman

Pacland

Popeye

Power Blazer

Space Invaders

Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, 3, USA

Adams Family 

Mystery Quest

Star Wars

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Terminator

Terminator 2

Block Party 

Ben 10

Call of Duty

Crazy Mini Golf

Cooking Mama

Deadly Creatures

Deal Or No Deal

.....and Many More

Machinarium

MACHINARIUM

Machinarium is a single player, puzzle point and click adventure game developed by Amanita Design. The game is on several different platforms such as Windows, Mac, Tablets, Andriod, and Playstation 3 and Vita. 

When the game first loaded and was ready to play, I had no idea where to start even after the directions but I eventually got it .  The goal of the game is to solve a series of puzzles and teasers. The puzzles are linked together by an over world consisting of a point and click story. There are objects the player can click on helping him advance on. The game also has a two tier hint system. One is a series of mini-games which provide a walk-through and sketches that show up when clicking an object

This game turned out to be a bit fun but a bit agitating also. Agitating because at times I was completely confused. After playing the game for a couple of the puzzles I eventually got the hang of it and continued playing it to the end.  

The game opens up with an overview of the city as a disposal flier launches from its highest tower. The player, is a character called Josef (named after Josef Capek) who is is dumped on a scrapheap, where he has to reassemble himself and set off for the city. Entering the city, he discovers a plot by the Black Cap Brotherhood, which throughout the game he has to defeat and eventually rescue his girlfriend who was locked up. After all this goes on Josef the player restores his friend to sanity, dumps the Brotherhood down a drain, and frees his girlfriend. The two of them climb back up to tower, wave goodbye to their friend and fly off into the sunset. 

One of the features of the game that I love is the artwork. The game is two dimensional. Everything is detailed and in depth, not just simple drawings. All the characters are fully animated. The POV for the game is side scrolling and Isometric. 

Machinarium has also received several gaming awards. Some of the awards received were "Excellence in Visual Art" at the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival, and "Best Soundtrack" from PC Gamer in 2009. It was also nominated for an Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction  by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. 

The music of the game can be described to me as middle/far eastern. The game contains no dialogue, spoken or written, apart from a few tutorial prompts on screen. There are occasional grunts here and there but nothing more. The game instead uses a system of thought bubbles.  The soundtrack for the game was written, composed, mixed, and produced by Tomas Dvorak for Amanita Design, which won the award mentioned above.

 

Game Engine: RAGE

One of my all time favorite games to play are the Grand Theft Auto Series. Though San Andreas is my very favorite of this series I also am a fan of Grand Theft Auto IV. Grand Theft Auto IV is the eleventh title in the Grand Theft Auto series. It was developed by Rockstar North and released by Rockstar Games, in April 2008 for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC consoles. 

Grand Theft Auto IV is set in fictional Liberty City (New York City). The game follows Nick Bellic, a veteran in a unnamed war in Eastern Europe, who comes to the United States in search of the American Dream, but quickly becomes entangled in a world of gangs, crime, and corruption. Like the other games, in the series it is composed of elements from driving, third person shooters, multiplayer modes, and features open world gameplay, in which players can interact with the games features at their own leisure. 

You can steal and drive cars, boats, helicopters, planes, trains, motorcycles, etc. You can also move around freely or follow the games storyline missions. On foot the player can walk, run, jump, climb over obstacles, and swim, as well as us weapons and perform basic hand to hand combat.

Grand Theft Auto IV uses the game Engine RAGE. 

RAGE is short for Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, created by video game developer Rockstar Games. It was previously used in Rockstar Table Tennis in combination with the Euphoria game animation engine. Instead of pre-written animations Euphoria uses procedural animation to control the way the player moves, enabling them to look more realistic. The game also uses middleware from Image Metrics to facilitate facial expressions and ease the process of incorporating lip-synching, Foliage in the game is produced through SpeedTree.   

Music Supervisor Ivan Pavlovich gathered songs for the radio stations featured in the game from contacting over 2,000 people to obtain recording and publishing rights. It has been said that Rockstar paid as much as $5,000 per composition and another $5,000 per master recording per track. Record label owner and record producer Bobby Konders, who host the in-game radio station Massive B Soundsystem 96.9, went through an extra effort of flying to Jamaica to get dancehall artists to re-record tracks to make references to the the boroughs of Liberty City. 

Games Powered by Rage: 

Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis

Grand Theft Auto IV

Midnight Club Los Angeles

Red Dead Redemption

Max Payne 3

Grand Theft Auto V

Post 1990's Game: PaRappa the Rapper

My first experience playing this game was on a Playstation demo disk that included other games like Tomb Raider. Judging by the the cover and name you would assume that there would rapping going on and that the dog on the cover is the main character. Correct!!! Being a big fan of music, just the name invited me to give the game a try. 

PaRappa the Rapper is a rhythm video game for Playstation created by Masaysa Matsuura and his NanaOn-Sha company. PaRappa is a rapping dog that must make his way through each of the games six stages by rapping. To do this PaRappa has a teacher Master Onion who teaches him moves at the kung-fu dojo. To do the moves PaRappa (the player) must press the corresponding buttons on the controller in correct timing with the teachers response. There is a U' Rappin' meter displayed on the side of the screen that lets you know how well you are on beat (Cool, Good, Awful, Bad). When in Cool Mode the player can rap freely and earn large points. 

The game audio is primarily stereo. The soundtrack of the game features crazy sound effects that reflect the moves of PaRappa. The background music is a combination of a hong kong and hip hop theme fused together that allow for the PaRappa's raps to flow respectively. 

All of the characters in the game appear to be flat, two dimensional beings cut from paper while the surroundings are primarily three dimensional. 

PaRappa the Rapper 2 was later released as a sequel to its previous version on Playstation 2 in 2002.

The game was later released on PSP in July 2007. 

Pre 1990's Game: Super Mario Bro's

I have always been a gamer since I was young. I now own all gaming consoles as I have collected them throughout the years. I enjoy playing all types of games with story-line games being at the top of my list. Super Mario Bro's was one of the first games I have played when I was young but I first played it on a Gameboy. 

Super Mario Bros. is a 1985 platform video game developed by Nintendo, published for the Nintendo Entertainment System, as a pseudo-sequel to the 1983 game Mario Bros. It is the first of the Super Mario series of games. In Super Mario Bros., the player controls Mario and in a two-player game, a second player controls Mario's brother Luigi as he travels through the Mushroom Kingdom in order to rescue Princess Toadstool from the antagonist Bowser.

The player takes on the role of the main protagonist of the series, Mario. Mario's slightly younger fraternal twin brother, Luigi, is only playable by the second player in the game's multiplayer mode, and assumes the same plot role as Mario. The objective is to race through the Mushroom Kingdom, survive the main antagonist Bowser′s forces and save Princess Toadstool. The player moves from the left side of the screen to the right side in order to reach the flag pole at the end of each level.

Each time coins and items that are marked with a "?" are collected there are several sound effects to compliment them. 'With the coins, you hear a coin sound and with the mushrooms while doubling size the sound will with a pitch gain. Players are given a certain number of lives and may gain additional lives. When Mario takes too much damage, falls in a pit, or runs out of time; the game ends when all lives are lost the tempo of the music speeds up and if you die a Mario themed death tune plays. In addition there are warp zones where Mario can transport to usually located in the blue/green tunnels. The audio for this sounds like a warp sound effect. Mario and the fly traps can also shoot out fireballs/seeds and is complimented by short 1 tone sound effects.

Koji Kondo wrote the six-song musical score for Super Mario Bros. Before composition began, a prototype was presented to Kondo for the game, only to see where Mario was, as he ran through a big black area and jumped. Kondo wrote the score with the help of small pianos for an appropriate melody of this scene. After the development of the game showed progress, he realized that his play did not quite fit the storyline, so he changed it a bit by increasing the tempo. He composed his main motive in about synchronization with the control rate, which would require a new player for the game characters. The musical elements were adjusted to the expected reactions of the player.