It was odd to be back in Moscone for my fourth WWDC. I was too busy draining my laptop battery and breaking my fingers for the benefit of my colleagues during the keynote, but now that I’ve had a few hours to digest, here’s some more nuanced thoughts.
E3 has just ended, and if you’ve been reading any of the major gaming blogs this week, you’re probably tired of seeing the same names over and over. Halo. Gran Turismo. Mario. Castlevania. Modern Warfare. Metroid. Metal Gear. Final Fantasy. Wii Sports. Project Natal.
I find that every year, I get far more excited about the titles at E3 that slip by quietly – the niche games, the ones that only get two seconds during a montage on the screen. The games that may not get a formal press release or even much of a mention.
Allow me to point you at some of the things you may have missed at this year’s E3, both good and bad, across all major platforms.
For all the things they get right – mass market appeal, price points, easy to understand interfaces – Nintendo occasionally gets things terribly wrong. Among their transgressions against the gaming world: failing to localize (translating + releasing in the US) great games that have appeared in Japan.
But sometimes, the good games make it through. Earlier this year, Nintendo of America came to their senses and released Rhythm Heaven. A localization of Rhythm Tengoku Gold, Rhythm Heaven is a collection of over 50 rhythm-based mini-games for the Nintendo DS. A typical game will see you rocking out with a ghost band, filling robots, playing ping pong, picking turnips, and joining a monkey dance party.
It’s extremely weird, but also extremely fun. Even Beyoncé likes it.
Today, I discovered that by not actually looking at the official Rhythm Heaven site, I missed something fantastic: a free iTunes visualizer, using artwork from the game.
Installers are available for OS X, Vista, and XP. (In case these links break, you can find the downloads through the official site on the left hand side.)
A quick install and iTunes restart later, and even an average song can be made amazing through the addition of trippy visuals from the game.
The visualizer isn’t perfect – I’m not really feeling a lot of “sync” with the music I tried it with, and sometimes the artwork clips oddly – but watching the assembled mass of ghost drummers, duck drill sargents, and lab assistants rocking out to anything you throw at it is a thing of beauty.
Download this, before Nintendo shuts down the site and we’ve lost the archive for this glorious piece of software forever.
(Many thanks to Offworld for tipping me off. If they’re not on your feed reader, they should be.)