Guest Review: Bit.Trip: Beat
Gaijin Games’ Bit.Trip: Beat basically overloads my mind whenever I play it. My eyes go out of focus about five minutes in, and after I finally fail out (the inevitable conclusion), I can’t think about anything at all, much less evaluate the experience. Luckily, indie superstar and recent Game Over/Continue? game exhibitor Anna Anthropy contributed this wonderful review.
We call them “videogames,” but video isn’t the only form of feedback these games give us: there’s audio. In fact, since the game screen is often busy with visual information, sound - entering our perception through a different channel - conveys even more information, because it only conveys the important things: that our shot has connected or our hundredth coin earned a 1-up.
It’s telling that one of our most seminal games, Pong, is named after the sound the ball makes when it hits a paddle. That sound effect is no less than one of the game’s most important elements: it announces to both players (and any onlookers) that contact between the paddle and ball has occured, that the game will continue. It punctuates every interaction in the game.
What Gaijin Games has done with Bit.Trip: Beat is created an entire game from that punctuation. You are a paddle, you catch balls: this interaction is marked by a note that matches the music that’s playing. Catch all the balls and you’ve played a melody. It’s a less contrived use of music than, say, Guitar Hero, because your goal isn’t to hear a recorded song by playing a game of Simon: your goal is simply to catch the balls. The melody emerges from playing well.
Since your objective is just to have the paddle in the right spot when a ball reaches the left of the screen, much of the game’s challenge relies on deception and on faking the player out. This feels unfair at first, but then an interesting thing happens: you begin to rely on the music to predict the patterns in which the game expects you to move.
Then again, I haven’t finished the game yet, so I could be wrong.
See also: Tiny Q&A: Gaijin Games’ Chris Osborn
tags / bit trip beat / gaijin games / wiiware / jc / review / tiny review
