Review: Frederic: Resurrection Of Music (Switch eShop)
Nintendo Switch’s music rhythm games thus far have been stellar editions to the console’s library. Whether it’s the raw power of Thumper or the serene ambient songs of Deemo, the genre fits the hardware well, using either the touchscreen or traditional inputs, and with Frederic: Resurrection Of Music, developer Forever Entertainment bring a fresh take on a selection of songs by renowned classical Polish composer Frédéric Chopin to the console, after previously releasing on iOS, PC and Wii U.
Our titular pianist hero has been brought back from the dead as a savior to rid the world of soulless, mass produced pop stars sapping music of all its creativity. With the help of a miniature piano and a golden flying horse-drawn carriage, Chopin travels across the globe to duel it out with opponents by playing remixes of his own music and restore peace and decency to our musical tastes.
Bonkers story notwithstanding, Chopin duels it out with 12 wacky musical villains of our time, all providing a tidbit of exposition as to why he was brought back as he goes. The exaggerated handdrawn style and vivid color schemes add a distinct identity to each location, from the streets of downtown New York to the green fields of Ireland. There are even a few sly popular culture nods scattered around for extra humor. There is over an hour of fully voiced animated cutscenes utilising the larger than life characters, even if the voices vary in quality and the scenes themselves do outstay their welcome on occasion.
The new versions of Chopin’s compositions are mostly enjoyable. While the original song titles themselves might not be exactly memorable, there some more recognizable work to mainstream audiences, but some genre choices don’t quite fit. A particularly interesting highlight is Piano Sonata No 2 in B flat minor (better known as ‘The Funeral March’) played as a bluegrass ditty against a surly county sheriff that raises as many eyebrows as it does smiles.
There are initially nine songs and four difficulty settings on offer here, but going from easy to normal (and beyond) is not only a fairly sizable jump- on easy, it is almost too forgiving, while completing a song on the hardest setting is brutally tough and requires a lot of practice. Cascading notes fall in a Guitar Hero like fashion, and a successfully timed press will fill the bar at the top green. When it’s full, your foe is beaten.
In addition to using the obligatory touch controls, the seven piano keys are also mapped to face buttons. While on the left Joy-Con, left, up and right, with Y, X and A mapped to the right, the centre key is curiously assigned to ZL. This is functional, if not ideal, and takes a fair bit of getting used to (so much so you might be more likely to resort back to touch controls). This in turn brings another issue, as upon filling the orange gauge on the left-hand side of the screen, Chopin will be able to use a special attack. This is triggered by pressing both of the shoulder buttons at the same time. If you are holding the console in one hand, its okay, but playing in tabletop can make this a hassle. Since the amount of time you have to use it is brief, it turns in to a ‘catch 22’ of jeopardising your combo or missing out on a devastating blow.
Upon completion, you’ll get a breakdown of your ‘musicality’. A pretty standard three star rating system, an accuracy percentage and combo count. A defeated foe will confess all and it is on to the next location. The animation and hand-drawn style are bold, quirky and fittingly eccentric, but the ratio of gameplay to cutscene is so disappointingly even it’s hard to ignore.
Conclusion
Frederic: Resurrection Of Music has plenty of personality to its name, even though the lack of content stops it from being the headline act when compered to other genre titles on the eShop. Still, seeing maestro Chopin coming back with a magical piano to play remixes of his own work and battle against rapper gangsters is certainly an interesting angle. The overall presentation visually is decent, even if the voice acted cutscenes are cheesy and overly long. An intriguing curio that simply needs more content considering the asking price.
The Steam Winter Sale has begun, on now through January 4th!* Save big on thousands of games for Windows, Mac and Linux!
The start of the Steam Winter Sale also marks the beginning of voting for The Steam Awards! Come back every day from December 21st to January 2nd to vote for each award, and find out the winners on January 3rd.
Voting kicks off today with The “Choices Matter” Award. Here are the finalists:
Dishonored 2
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Life is Strange: Before the Storm
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Remember to check back every day to see the new category and cast your vote!
*Discounts end January 4th at 10pm Pacific, unless otherwise indicated.
Parents, make sure to register for GDC 2018 childcare!
Game Developers Conference organizers are proud to continue their partnership with leading childcare provider KiddieCorp and offer GDC 2018 attendees access to an on-site children’s program.
So if you’re planning to bring kids with you when you attend GDC 2018 in San Francisco next March, please note that the advance deadline to register for the program is February 20th, 2018 — less than two months away!
You want to register early, because registration is handled on a first-come, first-served basis. It’s also possible to register on-site, but there is no guarantee KiddieCorp will be able to accommodate on-site registrations and doing so is not recommended.
The perennially popular KiddieCorp children’s program is for children ages 6 months through 12 years old and will be situated within the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.
The KiddieCorp team charges an affordable hourly rate for their services and snacks and beverages will be provided, but meals do need to be supplied by parents each day.
Plus, the KiddieCorp team will engage your children with activities they want to attend, providing you with that critical peace of mind so you can attend your sessions and events worry-free. Activities include exciting themes, arts & crafts, group games, music & movement, board games, story time, dramatic play, etc.
KiddieCorp provides actvities appropriate for each age group, using safe and sturdy equipment. Children can make their own choices within KiddieCorp’s program.
To learn more about the service and register your child as a participant, head over to the KiddieCorp GDC 2018 children’s program registration page. Again, make sure to register early as availability is limited and handled on a first-come, first-served basis.
This partnership is of course just one of many ongoing GDC efforts aimed at making it easier for a broader variety of game industry professionals to attend and speak at the conference.
When making a sequel, you will eventually have to answer the question of how much to add and what to keep from the first game. Some improvements were easy to decide upon. More content being the most obvious one. The Warhammer world is immense and multifaceted and we have still only scratched the surface of all the places and creatures you may encounter in it. Other improvements we knew we wanted were better bot and enemy AI, better network code, offline mode, volumetric rendering and new weapons, to just name a few.
But we also knew that we had to keep some things from the first game. We chose to stick with the characters from the first game, as we felt they really connected with our audience. The story of our dysfunctional band of heroes had not been fully told. This bickering bunch of misfits simply had to stay for the sequel. For Vermintide 2, however, we gave you as a player more options for them as you are now able to choose career path and use passive and active abilities, unique for every character.
Warhammer has a very dark, gritty and visceral lore. It is a game world which shines when you have enough hardware power to do the visuals and audio justice. The Xbox One X version has allowed us to set the bar for the visual content even higher, something you will notice when you explore the burning streets of Ussingen, readying yourself for the incoming charge of a Chaos Spawn. You can see some of the improvements through our recently released patch for Vermintide, making the game Xbox One X Enhanced with 4K textures, better AA, improved frame rate and much more.
Having already reported for duty on mobile platforms and other consoles, you’d think that Tiny Troopers: Joint Ops XL had seen enough tours to earn itself a little extended leave. But the top-down, ‘roguelight’ shooter has donned its camo paint one last time as it guns its way onto Nintendo Switch.
This being a port of a series that first entered the theatre of war in 2012, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to learn this little package feels quite dated. From the slow firing speed of its weapons to the budget South Park look of its titular characters, this XL collection does very little to hide the cracks of time. But what it lacks in visual allure it certainly tries to address in sheer content.
Much like the Joint Ops versions that hit other current platforms in 2014, you could consider this a definitive edition of the entire Tiny Troopers series, packing in the campaigns of the first two games (that’s over 60 missions in total) and a series of zombie modes in both Horde form and one more akin to the objective-based setup of its regular military fare.
On the surface its twin-stick, ‘squad of soldiers dropped into the heat of battle’ shtick smacks of the likes of Cannon Fodder, but it doesn’t take long for the repetitive nature of its core mechanics to reveal itself. Having lots of bite-sized levels in one place suits Switch down to the ground (most last between three-to-five minutes a pop), but the cycle of kill all enemies/destroy all buildings/protect the hostages grates when presented ad infinitum.
It’s an issue not helped by some consistently slow and stupid AI, as well as level designs that are often too large in size and too low in enemies to kill or objectives to destroy. The sheer number of collectibles does try to balance this issue out (honestly, how many dog tags and medals can you lose in the battlefield before someone gets a court marshal?), but it’s an issue that never stops reminding you of its existence the longer you play.
Some modes fare better than others – the general level design of the Spec Ops mode is a little more varied than the campaign from the first game, and the Zombie Campaign can be a hoot when you’re trying to dodge foes that rise out of the ground (which makes them far more interesting to take on than the soldiers who amble into view in the game’s main missions). Character levelling and upgrades are also persistent across all modes, a welcome choice that enables you to consistently improve (and consistently risk) your characters in battle.
Then there’s all those features from other genres that have been lightly sprinkled into Tiny Troopers for taste. There’s the ballistics of a twin-stick shooter, the permadeath of a roguelike and the high-score chasing setup of an arcade title all squeezing themselves into its diminutive fatigues. The only problem is none of these elements feel substantial enough to justify their presence.
The twin-stick shooting always feels slow and cumbersome, making every gunfight an exercise in perpetual bullet time, while the permadeath aspect (which sees your chosen soldiers potentially dying forever, their levelled up skills perishing with them) never embraces the true potency of its danger since you can revive lost squaddies after every mission. The fact that the currency required to resurrect your war-torn pals is so scarce simply makes the system feel redundant, while simultaneously attenuating the very system it’s meant to complement.
So yes, it is a little dated – and yes, it isn’t going to change the landscape of gaming any more than it did on countless other platforms it’s appeared on – but there’s still plenty of enjoyment to be found in its simple remit. Ideally suited for use in handheld mode, and perfect for five minute bursts of play, Tiny Troopers: Joint Ops XL’s ported collection will help scratch that twin-stick itch while you wait for something a little more memorable to enlist.
Conclusion
There’s no denying Tiny Troopers Joint Ops: XL offers a lot of bang for its buck – over 60 main missions and a ton of undead-slaying quests see to that – and its bite-sized nature fits Nintendo Switch down to the ground, but ultimately it’s an exercise in quantity over quality. There’s fun to be had in its caricature take on war, but its light sprinkling of other genres and low-rent presentation is retro for all the wrong reasons.
It’s the final North American Nintendo Download Update of 2017, but with most businesses still enjoying the Holidays it’s a much quieter line-up than we’ve seen in recent times. That’s not to say there aren’t some extremely tempting options, with the Switch doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Let’s get to it.
Switch eShop
SteamWorld Heist: Ultimate Edition (Image & Form, $19.99USD) – A fantastic title that previously graced the 3DS and Wii U, it offers a twist for the series with turn-based strategy that’s combined with manual shooting and skillshots. It’s unique and an excellent game all around, with this Switch version including all of the previous DLC; we sang its praises in our SteamWorld Heist: Ultimate Edition review.
Arcade Archives VS. Super Mario Bros. (HAMSTER, $7.99USD) – The latest ‘Arcade Archives’ Nintendo release, this brings the arcade spin of the NES classic into our homes. Fewer Warp Pipes means you can’t warp your way to the end as easily as in the original, there are also less power-up blocks and more enemy placements. In addition you’ll find six new levels that were unique to the arcade before later being reused in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. We enjoyed this in our VS. Super Mario Bros. review.
Guns, Gore & Cannoli(Crazy Monkey, $9.99USD) – Ideal for ‘shooting zombie freaks on the go’, this run and gun title is set in a comedic and highly stylished take on 1920s America. You play as mobster wise guys and shoot everything in sight; it’s fun if a little repetitive, as we explain in our Guns, Gore & Cannoli review.
Woodle Tree Adventures(ChubbyPixel, $4.99USD) – Described as an ‘old school platform game’ with eight worlds to take on, it goes for a bright and cheery look for its 3D platforming. We’ll see whether it’s worth picking up in a review.
The King of Fighters ’96(HAMSTER, $7.99USD) – The third entry in SNK’s lead fighting series saw some major improvements, namely the ability to fake smaller jumps, a perfect way to trick your opponents and avoid committing your fighter to a precarious situation. You can also charge up your POW bar and execute dodge rolls, nice touches and quite different for the time; naturally this ACA release will have the usual extra options and goodies, too.
Style Savvy: Styling Star(Nintendo, $39.99USD) – For fans of fashion, modelling or just cutely stylised games about clothes, this series is often hard to resist. This latest entry has some new tricks and styles to show off, and we loved it in our review.
The Steam Winter Sale has begun, on now through January 4th!* Save big on thousands of games for Windows, Mac and Linux!
The start of the Steam Winter Sale also marks the beginning of voting for The Steam Awards! Come back every day from December 21st to January 2nd to vote for each award, and find out the winners on January 3rd.
Voting kicks off today with The “Choices Matter” Award. Here are the finalists:
Dishonored 2
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Life is Strange: Before the Storm
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Remember to check back every day to see the new category and cast your vote!
*Discounts end January 4th at 10pm Pacific, unless otherwise indicated.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-29-2017, 09:06 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Video Game Deep Cuts: That HQ Donut County Trivia
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This installment includes a look at indie standout Donut County, the potential dystopia behind HQ Trivia, and lots more besides.
Well, this is the penultimate round-up of the year, with a smattering of ‘best games of the year’ lists included (sorry I didn’t get to all of them – there’s so many!) As I just noted on Twitter, Super Mario Odyssey is my personal game of the year – being warm, welcoming, polished, and non-judgmental about length of play time.
But there were so many more games to love – many of which I didn’t get to because I was busy compiling these lists, ironically. Still, I’d rather you all had information than I finished another game – which is how my brain works, luckily for your ability to read lots of cool stuff in one place. Happy holidays!
No Man’s Sky Players Had Their First War And It Killed An Entire Civilization(Gita Jackon / Kotaku – ARTICLE) “No Man’s Sky fans can’t exactly play with each other, but they still like to come together to celebrate their communities. Somehow, a new player-created holiday became a story about conflict, betrayal and the disappearance of an entire civilization.”
The best video game levels of 2017(Various / AV Club – ARTICLE) “You’ve already heard from us about our favorite games, but we also wanted to dig deeper and applaud some of the most memorable sequences that helped make 2017 such a tremendous year. After all, every game contains multitudes of moments and decisions, and even a mediocre release can occasionally come together into something transcendent.”
Magic Leap: Founder of Secretive Start-Up Unveils Mixed-Reality Goggles(Brian Crecente / Glixel – ARTICLE) “The last time the company spoke publicly in any great detail was about a year ago, when it invited Wired magazine to its South Florida headquarters to see the tech in action, but not to write about what the hardware looked like. Earlier this month, Glixel received a similar invitation. [SIMON’S NOTE: An extremely in-depth look at the tech from Brian Crecente – basically, it’s Hololens with somewhat bigger field of view. Which is… fine?]”
The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook – Neil Druckmann(Ted Price / AIAS / Libsyn – PODCAST) “Neil Druckmann from Naughty Dog sits down with Insomniac Games’ Ted Price to discuss trailer reactions, The Last of Us, narrative vs gameplay, and the drive to create something meaningful. Neil Druckmann is the creative director for The Last of Us, Uncharted 4, and the upcoming sequel, The Last of Us Part II.”
‘Donut County’ is a love letter to LA(Jessica Conditt / Engadget – ARTICLE) “From 2002 to 2014, Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t exist in Los Angeles. Hell, during that time there was just one Dunkin’ store in all of California, at a military base on the state’s southern tip… In fact, it was one of the first things independent game developer Ben Esposito noticed when he made the move from New York to LA.”
Saving the History of Video Games(Waypoint / YouTube – VIDEO) “Waypoint meets Frank Cifaldi, the founder of the Video Game History Foundation. The history of video games are in danger of disappearing. Not just the games itself, but the packaging, the culture, and the experience of the players. We join Frank on his quest to save these relics.”
Women In Video Game Development in 2017: A Snapshot(Lucy O’Brien / IGN – ARTICLE) “Several months ago, I asked 55 female and non-binary game development professionals from around the globe about the moment the light bulb switched on for them, the moment they thought video games are for me. Each answer was unique.”
Indie Games You Missed in 2017(HeavyEyed / YouTube – VIDEO) “It’s that time of year again! Let’s go over some indie games you missed in 2017. Thank you all for this amazing year, I can’t wait to see what 2018 has in store.”
HQ Trivia Is a Harbinger of Dystopia(Ian Bogost / The Atlantic – ARTICLE) “That all sounds great. So why do I feel such dread when I play? It’s not the terror of losing, or even that of being embarrassed for answering questions wrong in front of my family and friends. It’s the dread that the app represents some awful, plausible future not yet realized, but just over the horizon: one where expertise isn’t measured by knowledge, but by instinct tripped out on illusion.”
Revisiting Anamanaguchi’s ‘Capsule Silence XXIV,’ Music Gaming’s Most Revolutionary Misadventure(Zane Warman / Billboard – ARTICLE) “Taken at face value, Capsule Silence’s creation packs a story of shadowy, blue-chip gaming developers who exploited a growing band’s money, talents and identities, cheapening them by presenting the wider world with a bloated, corporate rendering of their art. [SIMON’S NOTE: this was one of the weirdest things in a long time – great to see a deconstruction of it.]”
Creating ‘Burgle Bros’: The Fantasy of the Heist(Tim Fowers / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO) “In this 2017 GDC talk from the Board Game Design Day, Fowers Games’ Tim Fowers discusses how games are ultimately a test of character and how he used rogue-like mechanics to drive players to critical choices that create emotion and tell unique emergent stories in Burgle Bros.”
Are lootboxes the slot machines of video gaming?(Adam Goodall / The Spinoff – ARTICLE) “Lootboxes have embedded themselves in the gaming industry – and audiences are not happy about it. Adam Goodall talks to a free-to-play developer and a public health expert about why lootboxes were inevitable, and how we can change the direction they’re taking the industry.”
Mom, ‘Final Fantasy’ and the Language of Gaming(Rami Ismail / Glixel – ARTICLE) “I grinned, and halfway through my amusement I suddenly realised that while my mother could read up on the games news, there was another language that my mother did not speak: the language of games. For all her enthusiasm and knowledge of the medium, she had never once held a controller, or booted up a video game.”
The best games you might have missed in 2017(Clayton Purdom / AV Club – ARTICLE) “In 2017, “indie games” (I’ll stop using the quotation marks) are a commodity, almost a genre unto themselves. All three major consoles have touted themselves as the true home for independent developers, sometimes creating massive marketing campaigns around games made by smaller, non-traditional teams.”
Memory Matters: A special RAM edition of Dirty Coding Tricks(Brandon Sheffield / Gamasutra – ARTICLE) “Memory constraints are a thing of the past, right? Turns out they’re not. Not only do many off-the-shelf engines manage memory poorly, many platforms still have some rather aggressive memory requirements. Then there are disc and cartridge-based size limitations on top of that.”
A month on the road: My indie developer road trip (Blake Hester / Polygon – ARTICLE) “”What the hell does this have to do with video games,” I asked myself. I was staring up at Provo Canyon in the middle of Utah, jaw dropped at the scale of it all. There was no cellphone reception, no technology and certainly no video game in sight. [SIMON’S NOTE: this is a CRAZILY big road trip article talking to indies, and is wonderfully humanizing about the people behind the games – take the time to read.]”
Horizon Zero Dawn Documentary(Noclip / YouTube – VIDEO) “How does a studio known for linear first person shooters design one of the most well regarded open world games of the generation on their first attempt? Noclip travels to Amsterdam to talk to Guerrilla about their epic journey bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to PlayStation 4.”
Is Secretive Virtual Reality Startup Magic Leap Dreaming Up the Future of Music?(Marc Hogan / Pitchfork – ARTICLE) “Our tech overlords have come to a realization: The internet is as ambient as the air we breathe. Confined first to computer screens, then phones, tablets, and watches, online information may soon be seamlessly embedded into our lives like never before. [SIMON’S NOTE: The Sigur Ros project is strictly not a game, but lots of interactive elements, of course.]”
How a counterfeit NES console opened up the Russian games market(Alex Calvin / Eurogamer – ARTICLE) “Back in the 90s, if you had mentioned the names Nintendo and Sega to a kid in America, Japan or Europe, their face would have likely lit up… But if you said these words to a child in Russia, they’d have looked at you blankly. These companies were not present in the region at the time. Say ‘Dendy’, however, and you’d invoke that same kind of magic.”
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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-29-2017, 09:06 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Learn to better critique game projects at GDC 2018!
The end of the year is nearly here, and today Game Developers Conference organizers want to quickly let you know about one of the great talks taking place at GDC 2018 in March!
This session, part of the GDC 2018 Educators Summit, will see Carnegie Mellon’s Jessica Hammer and Broken Rules’ Martin Pichlmair explaining how you can more effectively critique games and game projects.
Their talk “Improving Critique of Game Projects with Expert and Peer Feedback” presents best practices, common challenges, and successful formats around providing critique. In addition to providing material on expert-led critique, Jessica Hammer and Martin Pichlmair will share two experimental approaches for improving peer feedback on game projects.
Plus, considerations for selecting and implementing appropriate critique methods will be discussed. While originating from education, the presented techniques are applicable to a wide range of design areas, from game design to visual arts; make time to check it out, and you’ll walk away with skills you can use in your own work!
Plus, we have plenty more GDC 2018 announcements to make in the coming months. For more information about GDC 2018 visit the show’s official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas
Killing Floor 2: Krampus Christmas Seasonal Update Arrives on Xbox
Hi, I’m the new game director at Tripwire Interactive on Killing Floor 2. I’ve worked closely on this project from the very beginning as the creative director, so I’m excited to be heading up Killing Floor 2 content updates for the foreseeable future. Enough about me though — let’s talk about this amazing update arriving just in time for the holidays on the Xbox One family of devices!
Killing Floor has always been known for its seasonal events which started years ago with the original Twisted Christmas update on PC back in 2010. Now with Killing Floor 2, we’re looking to take our annual Xmas-themed event to the next level with the release of the Krampus Christmas Seasonal Event!
Just like in year’s past we’ve added all-new holiday-themed Zeds complete with their own unique looks and new voices. You’ll also face off with a huge, nasty boss: Krampus! Please save Xmas and rid us of this terrible villain before he gives all the boys and girls coal… along with beating with his stick!
What would a Killing Floor 2 holiday be without a new weapon under the tree? For this update we’re excited to be adding the UMP submachine gun to the game for the SWAT perk. We also have a brand-new holiday map complete with its own demented Xmas soundtrack.
In the map you must infiltrate Krampus’ Lair and take him out once and for all. In case you weren’t aware, Krampus kidnapped all of Santa’s workers and changed them into the monstrosities that have only one mission: kill you and ruin Xmas! The map also has new objectives that, when completed, give you vault money and your very own pajamas!
We’ve also added 50 new limited time seasonal items that can only be obtained during this event as well as 100 new vault items to deck out your characters. We’ve had a blast putting this special holiday event together for Killing Floor 2 and hope that you enjoy it. The Krampus Christmas Seasonal Event is going on now and runs through to January 9. So, let’s get in the festive spirit and take back Xmas from Krampus!
