Within a period of a few weeks gaming audiences everywhere will be inundated with two giant rhythm game releases — Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. And somewhere in between Harmonix, the company that passed the Guitar Hero torch onto Neversoft and Activision and went on to develop Rock Band with MTV Games and EA, had a little extra time to develop an iPod game called Phase.
Before today, I had never had any desire to play an iPod game. There was nothing that I wanted to play on my iPod: Tetris’s controls are too imprecise, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man’s screens are too small, I couldn’t see myself spending any extended time with Texas Hold ‘Em, and I have plenty of other places to play puzzle games. To me, the iPod’s games were just another place for companies to make money.
With Phase, I’ve changed my mind. I can see how there is some potential to develop fun games, so long as they’re designed from scratch for the iPod. The phase interface should be familiar to anyone who’s played a Harmonix title. Much like Frequency and Amplitude, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, Phase features a scrolling plane that brings you to markers indicating when you need to press a button in time with the music (the basis of all rhythm games, of course). There are only there three buttons to hit (the green dots above): forward, the center button, and backward. There’s also a “sliding movement” that you have to trace along the screen occasionally, represented by the blue trail of dots. The gameplay is fairly simple, but it works because it doesn’t try to overcomplicate what the iPod controls are capable of. Sounds straightforward, right? So what makes this game interesting?
All of the stages in Phase are procedurally generated from music you choose in iTunes. You can odd your songs to a special Phase playlist which, when synced with the Phase game on your iPod, generates a custom level with multiple difficulty settings. How can you guarantee a solid gameplay experience without crafting individual levels like all other rhythm games? You can’t. And I think that is what makes Phase so interesting.
I don’t think of Phase as a regular game. I think of it more along the lines of procedurally generated art or narrative. The computer is given a set of instructions and a set of assets, and from that it tries to put a work together in a coherent way. While these works might not always succeed at eliciting a response from the reader/audience, occasionally something striking crops up. It’s the concept of the “potential” in procedurally generated works. I’m reminded of the Oulipo, the French group who sought ways of creating “potential literature” though similar (though non-computer based) methods.
Phase’s pattern’s aren’t always inspiring. In fact, through much of the game you’re having fun just because you’re pressing buttons in-time with a song you like. Occasionally, however, your actions and the music and the game environment sync perfectly such that it seems that section of notes was carefully constructed by an active agent. “Slide-button-button-button, sliiiiiide, button button, break for chorus.” I not only play to get a high score and to click along with my music, but I play in hopes of those visceral moments of aural-tactile elation.
Tell that to someone next time they ask you what you’re doing jamming the buttons on your iPod.
Other links: [Game|Life Hands-On] [iLounge First Look] [TUAW Review]
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