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

Tiny Q&A: Gaijin Games’ Chris Osborn (BIT.TRIP: BEAT) part 2

Here’s the continuation of our interview with Gaijin Games’ Chris Osborn about the highly punctuated WiiWare rhythm game BIT.TRIP:BEAT.

Other BIT.TRIP games are also rhythm-based. Will they all feature the same kind of graphical theme, or are you traveling through different eras of game history?

The BIT.TRIP series plants itself right of the middle of the “second generation” of video games, which includes not only the Atari 2600, but also Intellivision, ColecoVision, and even the Atari 5200. Plenty of games out there have humped the NES era, so we decided to up the retro ante and go even farther back for BIT.TRIP. Even though BEAT is based on the early part of the Atari era, expect to see other BIT.TRIP games touch on some of the later era stuff too.

Can you tell us about the custom BIT.TRIP shoes found on the Gaijin Games website?

Sure, those suckers belong to Mike Roush, the artist behind the BEAT. You too can get your own BIT.TRIP shoes from converse.com. We want to see an army of them on the streets, so please send us your pictures! Some NIKEiD ones would be rad too…

What kind of reaction did you receive to the “Commander Video” ARG? Do you think it improved the profile of the game? Did you get any especially weird responses from fans?

Dude, I can safely say the viral marketing was a success! As we are but three men working in an office/closet (along with the help of our awesome publisher, Aksys Games), we couldn’t afford a massive marketing push for this game. So the viral thing started out of necessity.

Originally, we didn’t plan on doing anything beyond the video itself, but once we saw the enormously positive reaction to it, along with all the speculation, we decided to take everyone a bit further down the rabbit hole. By and large, everyone in the various forums that followed the campaign loved playing along and trying to piece together all of our clues.

We didn’t get any especially weird responses from the fans, but we sure underestimated how resourceful they’d be. Several people tracked down our CEO/Designer Alex Neuse’s “CommanderVideo” profiles on stuff like XBLA and YouTube, which we certainly didn’t expect!

The Gaijin Games logo recently changed. Do you think the new logo is stronger? Were there any perceived issues with the old logo? Is it weird that I’m asking questions about the logo?

Whoa, enough about the logo already! Geez. Well, since you asked, yeah the new logo is stronger. The old logo, while a fine piece of graphic design, just didn’t fit our company brand. The Japanese influence is apparent enough in our name, so the rising sun/red/white theme was a bit heavy-handed. Also, we don’t just make violent games, so it doesn’t make sense to have a blood spatter as the logo. In fact, we’ve only made one game so far, and it’s rated E for Everyone! The new hotness hits on our company value in being green (reducing office waste, lowering carbon footprint, etc.) and being a humble, small studio.

So yeah, Gaijin Games wants to thank JC and Tiny Cartridge for taking the time to make this interview happen. Now onto MY questions for YOU! What do you, dear readers, want to see in the BIT.TRIP series? Fire up the comments with your own ideas! CommanderVideo is watching…

JC and Tiny Cartridge want to thank Chris and Gaijin Games for their time and consideration!

tags / aksys, / bit trip beat / gaijin games / jc / wiiware

Tiny Q&A: Gaijin Games’ Chris Osborn (BIT.TRIP:BEAT)

Chris Osborn from Gaijin Games was kind enough to answer some questions about the developer’s upcoming WiiWare retro rhythm-Pong game BIT.TRIP:BEAT, which I’m pretty dang excited to get to play sometime this month. The first part of the interview appears below, and the rest will go up tomorrow!

Tiny Cartridge: First off, is there any news on the release date? Is it still slated for this month? How much can we expect to pay for it?

Chris Osborn: Onto the juicy bits right out of the gate! I admire your gumption. Unfortunately, there’s no firm release date. The game is in the final testing stages as we speak, so it’s not far off from being released into the wild. With a little luck, it should be out by the end of the month. As for the cash monies, it will be less than 1000 points.

Are there any specific vintage influences? It looks very 2600-esque, but did any one game inform the gameplay or aesthetic?

Yep, we are definitely under the influence. The first installment of BIT.TRIP harkens back to the era of paddle-based Atari games. Pong is obviously the primary inspiration, specifically Ultra Pong and Video Olympics. Breakout played a close second fiddle in the Influence Orchestra.

Was Nintendo/Skip’s Bit Generations series an influence?

Hell yeah! Everyone here has been a fan of the bitGenerations games for quite some time. dotstream is my personal fav. What a rockin’ soundtrack on the GBA! Even the menu system is all kinds of awesomeness.

When we first got the idea for BIT.TRIP a while back (waaaay before we started Gaijin Games) it was basically a marriage of the bitGenerations aesthetic with “modern” retro chiptune music. Over time, we moved a bit away from the minimalistic art style the Art Style games and towards a more in-your-face Geometry Wars sort of thing.

Early on during the development of BEAT we were super stoked to see the first Art Style game on WiiWare, which of course are ports of the bitGenerations games. From a business perspective, that showed us there definitely was a market for tight, retro-inspired games on WiiWare.

The video recently posted on Joystiq looked really frenetic and difficult. Does the video show a later level, or is that roughly indicative of BIT.TRIP: BEAT’s difficulty throughout?

Dude, you have no idea. The recent video from Joystiq showed a bit from Level 2. However, the difficulty you see there is nothing compared to what you get later in that level, not to mention Level 3.

From the start, we designed BEAT to be a very hard game. Games these days are just too easy. They are meant to be “content experiences” rather than challenges, and that’s all fine, but damnit, gamers need their ass kicked once in a while too.

Back in the day, there just wasn’t enough memory in the game systems to push a lot of content, so the designers had to rely on difficulty to keep the players playing. For BEAT, we wanted to stick with that old-school approach.

Come back tomorrow for part 2!

tags / gaijin games / wiiware / rhythm / retro / bit trip beat / tiny q&a / jc