Tag: Nintendo Switch

#WeeklyGameMusic: Discothéque Rouge, After Hours (Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Need a little more chiptune in your life? The absolutely talented Chipzel has you covered with this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic. Her remix of Discothéque Rouge, After Hours, from Pocketwatch Games’s multiplayer heist game, Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is some of the tastiest gems out their to savior. Enjoy it…while it lasts…

They can’t keep us locked in! Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine begins with a group of criminals breaking out of prison, and sneaking out. The triumph is short-lived, however, when the company realizes they’re penniless and wanted. After much deliberation, the party comes to a decision: escape to Monaco, by every means possible. Thus begins their long journey of gathering more criminal connections to assist their freedom.

Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is an award-winning cooperative heist game. You and three other skilled thieves infiltrate heavily guarded buildings to — what else? — steal everything valuable. The innovation kicks in when every player realizes they’ll need to share information between each other as they deal with each character’s limited vision and hyper-specialized abilities. It’s pretty normal for something to go wrong during the heist: alarms triggering, guards taking notice, etc. After all, much of the fun is trying to figure out how to deal with the escalating situation amongst your group of friends.

Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is released on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Switch. It’s also available on Steam.

Leave a Comment on #WeeklyGameMusic: Discothéque Rouge, After Hours (Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine) | Categories: #WeeklyGameMusic

#WeeklyGameMusic: Noisy Notebook C (Snipperclips – Cut it Out, Together!)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

I said we’ll likely revisit Calum Bowen’s wildly creative compositions. And here we are: this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is an arrangement from Noisy Notebook C levels in SnipperClips – Cut it Out, Together! by SFB Games. Like many other games with fantastic adoptive soundtracks, SnipperClips changes its arrangements as situation changes in this cooperative puzzle game for the Nintendo Switch: below is just one composition that plays at one specific moment in gameplay in what is otherwise a very complex music.

While SnipperClips itself doesn’t have much in way of a story, its development is far more interesting. A London indie team put together a prototype known as FriendShapes during a short game jam session. Much like the final product, it features two shapes with legs that can cut each other out, creating a new collision shape. After winning the GDC Europe Innovative Games Showcase, SFB Games attempted to pitch the product to various publishers. As it turns out, Nintendo took the most interest in the game, and of course, sold it as a launch game for their latest console, Nintendo Switch.

This thoroughly English title is a puzzle game where two players control each shape, Snip and Clip, to handle a number of tasks. These challenges can include cutting each other out until they make a specific shape; moving a ball into a hoop; and blocking specific circuitry in a web of wires. As mentioned earlier, both players are armed with the ability to cut each other out using their own shape, as well as reforming themselves back to the original shape if needed. Complexity is added in later levels when certain objects reacts not only to your character’s shape, but your own controller input.

SnipperClips is available on the Nintendo Switch. No other ports exist as of this writing.

Leave a Comment on #WeeklyGameMusic: Noisy Notebook C (Snipperclips – Cut it Out, Together!) | Categories: #WeeklyGameMusic

#WeeklyGameMusic: Octo Eight-Step (Splatoon 2)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Yet another #WeeklyGameMusic from the cultural icon that is Nintendo. This week, I’d like to introduce the bizarre mish-mash of music genres, Octo Eight-Step by Toru Minegishi. A remix of the single-player campaign track from the prior game, this fresh track sets the player up to the Japanese company’s take on the 90’s Nickelodeon slime covered aesthetic in their kids-friendly shooter, Splatoon 2.

With the inclusion of Octo Expansion DLC, Splatoon 2 has two parallel stories occurring in the same Shibuya-like universe. The first follows the former pop-star and all-around snarky Inkling, Marie, searching for where her singing partner and cousin, Callie, went. Upon revisiting Inkopolis two years after her stardom, she finds the metropolitan’s power source, the Great Zapfish, missing again. Her secret-agent instincts kicking in, she recruits you — yes, your very own customized squid-kid avatar — to go defeat her old nemesis, DJ Octavio and his Octarian army.

The second story starts decidedly more grim. You — yes, another, new customized avatar; this time of octopus-kid variety — wake up as an amnesiac Octoling. But rather than in a bright, bustling city like Inkopolis, you’re trapped in a grimy subway with a crusty old veteran named Cap’n Cuttlefish. After the two explore a bit, they come upon a telephone that mysteriously informs them about “the promised land” that’s only reachable if a series of test chambers are completed. Without any further means of escape, the two agree to take on the challenge by hopping onto train, leading them to a world unknown.

Splatoon 2 is a third-person shooter where your cartoon sea-creature/humanoid hybrid fires brightly colored ink. The most popular mode of the game, Turf War, is a four vs four battle where each team paints as much of the stage in their own team color as much as they can. After the 4 minutes time limit is up, the coverage of each team is tallied up, and the team that covers the largest area wins. Much like any shooters, team members can use their weapons to temporarily incapacitate the other team’s players. Unique to this game is how each player can turn into a sea creature that both swims in, and perfectly blends into, their own ink color. To further add variety, the game also has two more modes: Ranked Battle, a competitive 4v4 team match on a randomly selected rule-set, usually involving fighting over a designated area or item; and Salmon Run, a four-player co-op mode where players defeat waves of computer-controlled salmon-like enemies and collect their eggs.

Splatoon 2 is released on the Nintendo Switch. As of this writing, no other ports exist.

Leave a Comment on #WeeklyGameMusic: Octo Eight-Step (Splatoon 2) | Categories: #WeeklyGameMusic

#WeeklyGameMusic: AIN’T NOTHIN’ LIKE A FUNKY BEAT (Lethal League Blaze)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Need a little more funk this week? We’ve got you covered! This week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is from Team Reptile’s Lethal League Blaze. The highlight? AIN’T NOTHIN’ LIKE A FUNKY BEAT, composed by Hideki Naganuma, of Jet Set Radio fame. Definitely keep those ears peeled, because the moment you blink, you’l-

Lethal League Blaze is a fast-paced, innovative fighting game that’s shockingly easy-to-learn (even simpler than Super Smash Bros.!), yet hard to master. First, the iconic weapons each selectable cast member wields cannot be used to hit the other opponents directly. Instead, the objective is to hit a PONG-like anti-gravity ball into three (or less) other players like a baseball. Players who gets hit will lose health: when it reaches zero, it’s game-over.

But wait, there’s more! The move-set all characters share — strike, bunt, and throw — effectively acts as rock, paper, and scissors: useful for catching your opponents off-guard. Furthermore, each time the ball gets hit, it’s velocity increases. Meaning as time marches on, the ball will get faster, and the matches become less predictable. Lastly, every character has their own special, which spices up the way they hit the ball in unexpected ways. Utilizing all these tools effectively should help you overwhelm your opponents!

Lethal League Blaze is available on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam. It’s also available for download and purchase on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Finally, the game has quite a following, including competitive tourneys. For more info, I highly recommend checking out Akshon Esports’s primer on it.

Leave a Comment on #WeeklyGameMusic: AIN’T NOTHIN’ LIKE A FUNKY BEAT (Lethal League Blaze) | Categories: #WeeklyGameMusic

#WeeklyGameMusic: Give Me a Chance (The World Ends With You)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. This time we’ll cover Give Me a Chance, composed by Takeharu Ishimoto and sung by Ayuko Tanaka and Mai Matsuda. It’s a composition from the cult-hit Square Enix game, The World Ends With You, an almost trading card game (TCG) JRPG and a banger soundtrack.

You can tell The World Ends With You is created by the same company famous for their Final Fantasy franchise when it stars an anti-social, brooding teen named Neku. This insufferable jerk eventually learns to get better when he’s suddenly pitted in a life-and-death game about fighting sound-based monsters and lazy grim reapers using a deck of shirt pins. To survive this terrifying game, this loser must make a sacrifice arbitrarily chosen by the game master (in this case, his memory, of course) and pair with a partner to fight together with. Did I mention this all makes sense in context?

Anyway, where The World Ends With You best shines is its real-time combat. Originally developed for the Nintendo DS, this game utilizes nearly every single feature in the portable console, including — get this — the closing-the-lid sleep function, as part of combat. Unfortunately for this blogger, his introduction to the game was on iOS, so he’ll describe how the combat works there instead: The World Ends With You TCG-like battle system operates by having each pin execute when a specific touch or swipe gesture is made. Multiple pins in a deck may share the same gesture; the pin placed on the top of the deck gets prioritized first, until it hits a cool-down state, in which the rest of the pins takes effect. Partners can also be summoned, using yet another gesture assigned to them: this helps build both a combo meter, and a super attack. It’s super fun, and I highly recommend checking it out!

The World Ends With You is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Nintendo DS.

Leave a Comment on #WeeklyGameMusic: Give Me a Chance (The World Ends With You) | Categories: #WeeklyGameMusic