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Soundfight Review

Rating:

I'm always excited to review experimental concepts - its never about they achieve, but what they discover. Soundfight is a game that does this in an attempt to pit songs against each other in a shooter framework, but loses much "game-ness" in the process.

Full Review

Soundfight is an experimental game developed by RPM Collective for the Experimental Gameplay Project's theme for April - Repeat. The game basically allows players to select two songs from their hard drive and pit them against each other. The game will then determine a "winner" from the remaining pieces after 10 seconds of firefight. For a more detailed explaination of what is going on, here's a description in their own words:

Each sound clip will generate a field of units, based on the beats-per-minute of each octave subband. If the music has a strong rythym (if it repeats itself regurlarly) then it will have more and stronger units. After building, the sound clips then repeat, simultaneously, with each powering its field of units. The winner is determined by counting the special units corresponding to the final octave levels of each clip.

While this is a truly interesting concept, there isn't really much gameplay in this title. Although I can imagine people pitting songs from their personal mp3 players against their friends like Pokemon, I suspect most of the enjoyment comes from just passively watching the firefight. Probably some elements of changing songs tactically against a computer opponent's song arsenal might be a possible direction for further development.

The graphics of this game reminds me of Space Invaders, which is an apt analogy to use for the shooter-based conflict that dominates this game. There is quite a lot of visual variety that keeps the game graphically appealing in terms of color, unit shapes, and a well-integrated user interface. The two chosen soundtracks play simultaneously in the background during the firefight, on top of all the shooter sound effects, which creates total aural chaos - which is kind of the point in this case.

Although this title isn't really a game, and cannot be given a high rating as one, but it certainly is entertaining to watch. If you are interested, the game can be download from RPM's website.

Posted by Zhou Xuanming on April 30, 2010 Comments (0)