Tag: music games

Project Diva X
News

Project DIVA X, or: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace Hatsune Miku as my God

Who the fuck is Hatsune Miku? Some may say she’s a Vocaloid, the poster child for the voice synthesizer software engineered by Crypton Future Media. Others may say she’s just an idol, one of the pure virtual variety, playing shows as a hologram from time to time. Others will attribute her likeness to mostly being a videogame character, appearing time and time again as the face of Sega’s Project DIVA rhythm game franchise. But I say she’s something more. Miku is a God. Dancing, singing, performing extraordinaire Hatsune Miku does not know pain. She only knows happiness, glee, cheerfulness. Except…
News

Limp Body Beat makes a musical instrument out of weird fleshy men

Playing artists Sam Rolfes’ and Lars Berg’s “fleshy music game” Limp Body Beat will probably be the closest I’ll ever get to attending one of those Body World exhibits. I hate the physical look of muscles. I cringe at the sight of gore that includes flesh-slicing. I’m not into it. Flesh and anything flesh-related is not my thing. Yet, Rolfes and Berg’s browser-based rhythmic experiment for Adult Swim Games, featuring the horrifying sight of ungodly corpuscular beings, is somehow entrancing. absurd head sizes and lumpish body shapes While the ever-travelling Body Worlds exhibition is an anatomical exploration of preserved bodies, Limp…
News

Need more Panoramical? Check out this ethereal interactive journey

With new album Yume, ambient electronica musician Helios seems to recall the beauty of lazing underneath a sun-crested sky. The music soothes by letting high notes drift out to a gold horizon. It seems to lift off from the soft fringes of grass and get carried out on a hot puff of wind. More precisely, it’s a series of airy vignettes punctuated by a dozy amalgam of lightly brushed acoustic guitar, everyday sounds echoed out as percussion, and piano melodies that seem to have been recorded underwater. A tranquil reverie is conjured, and so it comes as no surprise that…
News

Go beyond the music visualizer in today’s Playlist pick

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Panoramical (PC, Mac)  BY FERNANDO RAMALLO & DAVID KANAGA Forget the “music visualizer” that has been spinning webs of geometry on your PC since the ’90s. Panoramical finally makes it as outdated as dial-up internet or the word “gnarly.” It’s not a fleeting distraction for your boredom but an aperture into ethereal places. Here, music is transformed into bucolic alien worlds that billow into absorbing synesthesia. You can tweak the timbre, tempo, and volume and see hues warp, trees and mountains arise, clouds whiz by and moons arc.…
News

The rhythm game genre is about to get a whole lot darker

You were lured in by the sight of a skeleton astronaut, weren’t you? Or is that just me? The idea of an astronaut left to rot in space grips me as one of the horrors of the future. At the moment, as far as public records show, there are no dead people floating around in space. But we have to suppose that one day there will be. There’ll be an accident and, for whatever reason, a body will be left to drift off into the void, unrecoverable.  what makes a human a human  Laserlife is an upcoming videogame that follows…