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DJing Gets a Truly Great, Authentic Video Game Adaptation with 'Fuser'

24 November, 2020 - Syndicated News | 0 Comments

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] The era of the music game’s mainstream popularity might seem firmly in the past—junkyards and pawn shops across America are littered with Guitar Hero controllers and Rock Band drumsets. But this month, Harmonix—the developer of the first two Guitar Hero games, the Rock Band franchise, and a litany of other rhythm games—takes another crack at the genre with Fuser, in which players take on the role of a DJ at a music festival and attempt to win over the crowd with new combinations of old songs.

Informed by the dizzying, day-glo aesthetic of massive EDM festivals like Ultra Music Festival and Tomorrowland, Fuser’s visual style feels reminiscent of an earlier moment in the last decade, the era of Spring Breakers and “Turn Down For What”—not to mention that the crowded and close-proximity world of music production is literally a fantasy at the present time. However, your virtual “record crate” contains much more than just conventional dance music, from reggaeton to Rage Against the Machine, from pop-country to The Cranberries. Fuser is obviously very different in many ways from actual DJing — it’s not actually so easy to isolate vocal tracks from the rest of a recording, or to perfectly sync multiple songs together — but it encourages the same kind of creativity and quick instincts you need as a real DJ.

I would know, because in addition to my work as a writer and critic, I’m also a DJ. It started innocently enough in 2014—I hosted a rap show on my college radio station, and a friend asked if I’d be interested in providing the soundtrack for a party she was throwing—but it soon became one of the great loves of my life. Since then, I’ve played clubs, weddings, house shows, business openings, political fundraisers, pretty much any kind of space or event you can think of. At first it was fun enough to get to choose what songs people heard at a party, but the more I practiced my mixing and the deeper I got into dance music and DJ culture, the more I realized the unique power you hold in your hands as a selector. As the song says, a DJ can really save someone’s life.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] Though sometimes your work goes unnoticed and unacknowledged, you are an integral part of a night out, and you can make your audience’s evening absolutely unforgettable if you do your job right. DJing is an inherently social relationship, as you observe the crowd, read cues from their bodies, see how they respond to certain tracks. It goes without saying, but beyond the occasional Twitch stream, DJing isn’t something I’ve been able to do publicly in almost a year, and how I miss it so. Thankfully, Fuser recaptures so much of what I love about being a DJ: the pressure of the crowd’s eyes all being on you, that simultaneous adrenaline rush and anxiety attack of knowing your whole mix could crash and burn at any moment, the absolute euphoria of dropping the right track at precisely the right time and winning your audience’s undying devotion.

Of course, this isn’t the first time games have taken on the art of mixing—Neversoft’s short-lived DJ Hero franchise tapped into the mash-up culture of the early 2010s by allowing players to “create” new remixes by bringing two iconic songs together (“All Eyez on Me” vs. “Bittersweet Symphony,” for example). Though Harmonix didn’t develop the DJ Hero series, it’s hard not to compare the two properties, both because DJ Hero grew out of the Harmonix-originated Guitar Hero franchise and because it’s the most widely-known DJ game. Like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, DJ Hero essentially adapts each song into a level that’s relatively straight to the point; the only way to move ahead is forward, and there’s minimal room for variance across multiple performances. The only real motivation to replay is to fix your mistakes, work on your timing, and earn a higher score. Fuser, on the other hand, almost takes an open world approach to the art of DJing: there are guideposts and challenges, but they only provide a rough blueprint from which to build your mix. The specific details are, for the most part, up to the player, and each attempt at a level can offer wildly different sonic outcomes.

Every stage in DJ Hero was, essentially, a relatively simple mash-up of two songs, each combination created and recorded by the game’s design team, as well as superstar DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Z-Trip. Fuser goes so far beyond mere mashups and actually makes you feel like you’re creating something original and new—you can even export your own mixes for other Fuser listeners to hear. Because it still relied on a physical controller, DJ Hero was tied to the idea of turntables as a kind of analogue instrument, which limited its conception of mixing to little more than crossfading back and forth, scratching a record, and pushing a few buttons. Don’t get me wrong—DJ Hero is mighty fun, but mostly because of its mash-ups, not because it makes you feel like you’re actually creating something new.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] Fuser treats music as something fully digital, a series of layers and filters that can be peeled apart, manipulated, and assembled into an almost infinite number of new combinations. There’s so much more to the game than just syncing two tracks together: you can alter the tempo and key of your mix, trigger sound effects and filters like flanging and distortion, and even create original loops of your own from a variety of beat pads and keyboards. Though Fuser wants you to create smooth, stimulating combinations that will please your virtual crowd of festivalgoers, it’s hard not to fully take advantage of the game’s potential and unleash Neil Cicierega-style cacophonies on the world.

There’s no one right way to be a DJ, in real life or in games: there are lifelong, successful DJs who simply play one song after the other, never approaching the kind of complicated mixing Fuser gestures toward. Because there’s such fluidity to the artform, Fuser replicates the learning curve of DJing for novice non-DJs by essentially being a game-length tutorial. You start off with the basics: syncing up drums, instrument tracks, and vocals, and learning how to time it so you drop a record perfectly on-beat. From there, almost every stage teaches you a new skill, like how to cue up a track so you can drop it without shuffling through your record crate, how to mute or solo specific songs, and how to incorporate audience requests into your mix. But the game doesn’t require you to become an expert in every aspect of the gameplay—you can still beat a level even if you ignore requests from the crowd and only use effects sparingly—which allows for the development of your own distinct style as a DJ.

You have so much control that it can at times be almost overwhelming, with so many plates spinning that it’s hard to think very long about what tracks to drop or effects to apply—Fuser rewards immediate, instinctive choices. Sometimes you’re switching tracks so frequently that it can sound inhuman, or unlike anything someone would actually want to dance to. But in that emphasis on instinct, Fuser captures the artform’s reliance on gut reaction. As a DJ, you’re always riding a thin line between engaging your audience and losing their attention: fade in a track a second too late or too early and your entire mix might sound awkward and offbeat, let a track play too long and minds and bodies might start to wander. You have to be incredibly careful and attentive, but there’s also minimal time to second guess yourself.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] It’s tough for a video game to have the same unique social relationship that exists between a DJ and their audience, but Fuser perfectly captures what to me is the true joy of DJing: taking two songs that people would never expect to hear together and making them one seamless whole. In Fuser, just like in an actual DJ set, when you put two or more unexpected tracks up against each other — let’s say, the vocals from “Killing in the Name,” the guitar line from “All Star,” the steel drums from “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” and the piano riff from “Clocks,” an unexpectedly winning combination I hit upon early in the game — you can reveal new connections between disparate forms of music, changing how your listeners react to and interact with songs they already love. Though concerts, raves, and festivals might be a distant memory at this point, Fuser recreates the special kind of serotonin boost that can only be caused by a perfect drop.

'Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity' Presents a Bloody, Zelda-Focused Epic

19 November, 2020 - Syndicated News | 0 Comments

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] The Japanese name for Dynasty Warriors 2, the oldest and first "Warriors" game, is "Shin Sangokumusou" (真三國無双). That last word in the title, "musou" (無双) means "without equal," and thus "Musou game" is another term for the genre, one so pervasive that online Japanese dictionary {LINK REMOVED} as an alternate slang definition of the term.

"Musou" as a term is the perfect encapsulation of the genre's approach. In a Musou game, the player controls a warrior who is intended to be a one-person army, standing above all others with no equals. It's the power fantasy of power fantasies: the ability to stride alone onto a battlefield and wade through enemies until there's nobody left and you stand victorious. It's no surprise that the genre's roots are a game about the Three Kingdoms, a Chinese historical novel and period thick with heroes with larger-than-life personalities and deeds to fuel the game's playable cast.

If you look for reviews of other Musou games, you will also often find some variation on the term "button-mashing;" the popular conception of the titles is that all you need to do to win is hammer that attack button over and over again. Those same reviews will often say "but that's fine, because it feels good to just kill people over and over again," too.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] These supposedly opposed concepts—that Musou games are enjoyable action games but are mindless and simplistic to control—don't actually interact that way, however. It's not that a Musou game's controls are built to be mindless. The truth is they're built to be unobtrusive. Rather than build a combat game full of precise timing decisions and fiddly controls, the best Musou games have gameplay mechanics built to get out of the way, so that the player can focus on the important bit: whirling through the battlefield like some sort of murderous tornado.

In those terms, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is largely a success. Viewed in relationship to its licensed Nintendo Musou game ancestors, Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors, Age of Calamity is a good step forward on the "smoothly get out of the way so I can double-backflip-murder mooks in peace" front. It's got its kinks, flaws, and drawbacks to be sure, but if what you're looking for is the affective payoff—that feeling of "oh god this is rad" as you dance across the map and scythe your way through enemy armies—then Age of Calamity delivers.

The original Hyrule Warriors was a bit of a "dream crossover" of various Zelda properties. It took place in a Hyrule unconnected to the mainline titles and prominently featured a combination of time and dimensional travel that brought heroes and villains from all across the franchise together to fight (or be) the forces of darkness. Age of Calamity, on the other hand, sets itself directly in the world of Breath of the Wild, exploring events in the past that are only hinted at by the various "forgotten memories" Link encounters throughout BotW's world.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] It's easy to see the skeleton of the first Hyrule Warriors undergirding this game. Most of the key systems from the first game endured to this new one. You still get weapon drops from finishing maps that can be enhanced, reforged, sold, or fitted with additional special effects. You still collect a seemingly infinite array of raw material from battlefields that can be traded for incremental upgrades to your characters. There's still pre-battle consumables that give you temporary bonuses.

Age of Calamity simply gives these things a Breath of the Wild-oriented spin. The weapons you pick up are all taken from BotW, meaning Link in particular can waltz into combat wielding everything from a giant gleaming claymore to a rusty soup ladle. Rather than the bits and bobs dropped by bosses in the original Hyrule Warriors, in Age of Calamity the list of upgrade-providing materials is taken directly out of Breath of the Wild's item book. Rather than chugging potions for temporary battle buffs, you turn some of those materials into the same recipes you'd scarf down as Breath of the Wild's Link.

Drawing on Breath of the Wild as source material also provides Age of Calamity with some really fun and enjoyable characters. Being able to finally play as lightning oneesama Urbosa is a real treat, for me, and her fighting style involving big, loopy scimitar sweeps that erupt in green-white lightning feels exactly like what I expected from her. Character movesets in general are exceptionally well done; every character feels distinct from the others, with a different approach and different abilities. Even the Sheikah Slate runes differ slightly between each character. While vanilla hero boy Link just tosses Remote Bombs one after the other, Mipha makes bombs drop from the sky like a hailstorm and Sheikah ninja Impa causes them to burst up from the ground into fireworks.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] Every character's range of moves is huge, colorful, and kinetic. Even Link, the game's representative "boring main character" type, can and does go completely ham with his various moves (a strong recommendation to try out the two-handed weapon moveset for him in this regard). The far and away winner of the "using their stuff just feels incredible" sweepstakes, however, is Princess Zelda. Being the nerd that she is in Breath of the Wild, her moveset is based entirely on using the Sheikah Slate runes to attack. This means everything from conjuring a gigantic Remote Bomb that she rolls into the crowd before detonating it on command, to using Magnesis to dredge a metal boat out of the ground before riding into the enemy hordes like a chariot. Her gauge-dependent special attack involves her quite literally taking a picture with the Slate's camera and then tearing it off to delete it, damaging everything she photographed in the process. How can you not stan a princess whose weapon is an iPad and its various apps?!

Capping off this aesthetic of excessive might are the few missions where the player can directly control Breath of the Wild's four Divine Beasts. Compared to a typical Musou game stage, the closest analog to the Divine Beast stages is the type of World of Warcraft quest where you're put in a tank and told to blow up 900 enemies, since that is very much what one literally does in these stages. They are a nice change from the typical game flow, and if you're looking for that power trip thrill, controlling a four-story elephant that fires homing ice lasers is hard to top.

These stages aren't perfect in execution; while the weapon controls for each Divine Beast are sharp, the movement controls can be stiff and clunky. These missions are also usually timed, and the sluggish movement can make finishing them in the allotted time difficult. Thankfully, these missions are infrequent, and half of them are purely optional, so players looking for a different kind of mass murder can saddle up a lightning-blasting sandstone camel mecha, while those who are less into that aren't forced to unduly.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] Rather than the Divine Beast pilots, however, it's Princess Zelda that's at the center of Age of Calamity in numerous ways, particularly its story, another legacy it has inherited from the first Hyrule Warriors. Rather than being the center of the narrative, Link is a viewpoint character, silently serving as Zelda's bodyguard as she attempts to master her powers and prepare for the coming Calamity. As events unfold, it's Zelda's actions, her point of view and her emotional journey, that form the core of the story.

Age of Calamity is about Zelda coming to grips with her self-doubt and the potentially catastrophic consequences of not fulfilling her potential. This is a welcome direction, one that promises to fill-in a lot of the gaps left by Breath of the Wild's flashbacks and that game's focus on Link. Sadly, Age of Calamity tends to short-change its character and narrative. Most story content comes in the form of cutscenes before and after battles, or—much as it was in Hyrule Warriors—in narration over image stills.

This means that the game's lively and interesting characters don't often have much chance to interact in more than incidental ways, which is a shame. The four Divine Beast champions have a cute, ragtag team dynamic that emerges now and then: Daruk as the dumb but cheerful jock, big sister Urbosa, quiet and supportive Mipha, and Revali, who I can only describe as "that guy everyone in the friend group is telling to shut up but they love him anyway." A young version of Breath of the Wild's Impa consistently serves as a supportive and encouraging voice for Zelda, even providing a bit of tough love when it's called for.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] Aesthetically, the game is nice to look at, drawing as it does on Breath of the Wild's various art assets. The game's world is colorful and striking, visually, though at times its similarity to Breath of the Wild works against it, because unlike BotW, the frame rate in Age of Calamity is pretty choppy. On some level this is unavoidable in a game where so much is happening on screen at any one time, an albatross of the Musou genre, but while playing the game docked it can often feel jarring, even taking that into account. In handheld mode, this is less of an issue; the few times I played that way, the choppiness was less noticeable, but that's not the same as "not there."

These problems are made worse by the camera, which routinely has big issues when fighting a large enemy you need to lock on to. In those situations things often go to hell, with the camera rotating around into solid objects that block your view of everything, or coming absurdly close to your controlled character and obscuring your view of everything but Link's (or Daruk's, we don't judge) finely sculpted ass. This isn't always the case, but it seemed to happen an awful lot, and these types of fight are both a very frequent occurrence, and represent the times you most need to pay attention to both what you're doing in combat, and on the state of the battlefield around you. If the goal of the mechanics is to get out of your way in a Musou game, the camera is definitely letting you down in these instances, and as the game progresses, fighting multiple large enemies simultaneously becomes more common, exacerbating the issue further.

More than the visuals, though, I really appreciated the game's soundtrack. Some of its tunes are drawn directly from Breath of the Wild, but many are new compositions in that same style. This is a sharp departure from MASA and co.'s soundtrack for the original Hyrule Warriors, which remixed classic Zelda tracks with MASA's typical "let's add some rock guitar" approach, as seen in other Musou titles. The use of Breath of the Wild's soundscape for the game's soundtrack gives it a very distinct feel in the genre and was a nice change of pace, and a few of the tracks were just great fun; I'm a big fan of the music used in most missions taking place in Gerudo territory.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] Wrapping this all up is the game's actual gameplay flow, which is markedly different from Hyrule Warriors. The original game had a relatively short and to the point story mode following the main narrative, but then opened up a truly nonsense level of additional gameplay that was shifted into the game's "Adventure Mode." Adventure Mode is where Hyrule Warriors put all the "side content:" unlocking new characters that weren't in the main story, acquiring more powerful weapons, bonus stats, and the like.

Comparatively, Age of Calamity throws it all at you in one mode. The game is navigated through a zoomed out version of Breath of the Wild's Sheikah Slate map of Hyrule, which becomes increasingly peppered with icons as you progress through the story's chapters. There are larger icons for story missions, and then there's smaller ones for everything else: material turn-ins to power up your characters, combat side missions to provide tutorials or experience and materials, and services like the weapon-forging blacksmith or the military training field where you can pay to level up characters that are lagging behind. Every new story mission completion or new character recruitment then adds more icons to the map, providing more power ups, more side missions, and so forth.

On the one hand, I like this approach a little better than Hyrule Warriors slamming everything all at once into the complicated and sometimes messy Adventure Mode. Each little "quest" to turn in for new character abilities comes with its own short text story, which was a nice (if minor) narrative touch. It would be easy to say "Impa turned in these macguffins and learned a new move" without ruffling player feathers, but Age of Calamity took the time to craft a little story about how she was inspired after helping a homesick Kakariko Village girl be reminded of home. Many of these little micro narratives feature familiar faces and names from Breath of the Wild, as well, making them a pleasant callback to that game for those who've played it.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] That being said… by the time I had reached the endgame, my Hyrule map had full-on Ubisoft Syndrome: there were almost more icons than there was map, at that point, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but anxiety about a map full of unexplored icons was the reason I stopped playing The Witcher 3. Thankfully, the game does sort the icons into a series of text-based lists you can access which group them into categories, so accessing various quests doesn't always require sifting through an increasingly icon-choked map.

Age of Calamity's other strict improvements on mechanics it inherits from Hyrule Warriors are more unqualified successes. Hyrule Warriors' set of standard Zelda dungeon tools (the boomerang, hookshot, etc.) were largely used on the game's various mid-bosses and bosses to open up weak spots and provide openings to attack them. Breath of the Wild's Sheikah Slate runes serve the same purpose in Age of Calamity, but their ease of use compared to the tools in Hyrule Warriors is magnitudes greater

Hitting the R or L buttons in Age of Calamity brings up a sub-menu corresponding to the A/B/X/Y face buttons on the joycon, and immediately puts the game in a temporary "slow time" mode, similar to aiming an arrow mid-jump in Breath of the Wild. From those menus, the player can then select and aim the right Rune (R button) or consumable items (L button) without the rushed panic of using them in real time, as Hyrule Warriors asked players to.

[img]{LINK REMOVED}[/img] By the time I had reached the game's final hours, I felt… sated. Everything I had more or less wanted from Age of Calamity going into it, the game had provided. I'd enjoyed unlocking characters and trying their new movesets out, waded into battlefields full of expendable mooks and run them down repeatedly. Many of the more enjoyable things I found as the game wore on I can't discuss in this review, except to say that there are fun surprises in store for players who keep up with the side missions and upgrade quests. Even in the game's latest stages, there was a relatively constant stream of new things that kept me interested.

It's hard to recommend a Musou game or not, really, because it's often a genre where you either get it, or you don't. I wouldn't say Age of Calamity is going to win over someone who's never played a Musou game before, and I'm not sure that a Breath of the Wild fan who's never played a Musou game will completely get the Zelda experience they might be expecting from it.

What Age of Calamity does provide is a largely smooth and flashy Musou experience, one that will be familiar to players of Hyrule Warriors but is perfectly accessible to those who have not. My "dude, that was sweet" moments of mass digital murder were frequent and overall, my moments of wanting to hurl my Switch out a window were few and far between. While I wish Age of Calamity had spent more time and care with its narrative content, it still provides a broader look at Hyrulian history that Breath of the Wild only hinted at, while providing the chance to spend some time with characters that many players of BotW fell in love that were largely incidental in that game.

For a player who's interested in seeing a Zelda take on the Musou approach and is willing to meet the game on the genre's own terms, Age of Calamity offers plenty to meet their needs.