Kanoguti's Music Games
Posted by ithamore Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:52:00 GMT
Below are several music games akin to Electroplanton. However, they are free and playable in Windows, so you can more easily use a streaming audio recorder to save any enjoyable, random music you might generate.
Kanoguti’s most spectrally encompassing of them is Mono World (pictured to the right). It contains 10 gameplay variations (aka worlds) that can be selected at the top of the menu screen. The mouse is used as the main inface (left-click adds to most worlds and right-click usually resets a world). Pressing “enter” returns to the menu. Note: the download link is at the bottom of Freem’s page next to the drive icon that has an arrow pointing down into it. In other words, look for the link with this icon to its left: 
A few of Kanoguti’s similar games are Glass Park (No71), Seasons (No66), and Q.q (No84). Then there are Wave Searcher, Sound Collage Wave, and Sound Collage Electron, each of which only have one form of play, but the wave files they use can be augmented or replace, which makes them more customizable. The controls are usually similar amongst all these games: some use “esc” instead of “enter” to return to the menu and the last part of Glass Park uses the left mouse button to select creation points while the arrow keys are used to spawn musical elements.
Check the extended for images of the other games.
Edit: Since the direct downloads didn’t work, the post has been changed to help those who had trouble figuring out how to download Kanoguti’s games from his software page. Also, (for those who had trouble with the description for finding them) here are the links to the auto-download pages of Kanoguti’s games on Freem: Mono World and Wave Searcher.
Glass Park: Chapter1 (No71)
Seasons: Snow (No66)
Q.q: 1 (No84)
Wave Searcher (No88)
Sound Collage Wave (No74)
Sound Collage Electron (No59)
You actually posted direct download links from Geocities?
Are you crazy?
I am not rz. Or am I?
That’s what I get for being lazy. I’ll have to fix it when I get home.
Hmm.
Is it just me, or is the FREEM site link full of naked magna females lacking genitalia?
Somehow, I find them way more threatening than the Vector Tiger. I’m terrified of clicking the wrong link for fear of ending up at a cartoony, virusy pr0n site.
id love to make use of these in some music but im running monoworld and theres no sound at all, help?
meatsim1, try turning the volume up. It is really really really quiet. really.
tried turning up the volume to no avail, but i started it again when i happened to have my midi keyboard turned on and it started playing through the midi out to that. which is pretty neat, except that my keyboard sounds like shit on its own and doesnt have all the right instruments. i changed the midi playback device to the microsoft software synth and its working right.
Although Mono World has more variety, I prefer Glass Park in terms of style (except for Chapter2 even if it might be useful for playing with arpeggio loops), and the Snow part of Seasons also has a pleasant atmosphere, but I wish I had more control over the sounds that are used (and the same goes for all the others that have everything packed into the exe). I guess I’m going to have to settle with fiddling around with Wave Searcher.
Ow, Smithy, the naked Magna Females!
A fearsome breed indeed O:<
That’s exactly what I’m always searching for. Sound games are still a vast field to explore… Electroplankton and these toys aren’t real games, I know - but they could be!
I’m always facing the same problem with such toys: There’s no aim, but the range of expression is still to narrow to be equal to real instruments, like a keyboard or a pencil. The behaviour is focused on an obvious cause and effect relationship what makes it much easier to play with it. That makes sense, because it would take too long to learn all the techniques to play a real instrument or to use a powerful software tool. So there’s the dilemma of all toys.
But when I compare the handling of a normal game with an instrument there’s no big difference at all. Their well known rules and control schemes could be simply adapted to be used as a container for sound games with much complexer controls of the sound and there’s still an aim and ‘action context’. Executed that way, we have the problem with the scoring of ‘musical actions’. Should they just be a by-product along the path (rez, everydayshooter), or being scored like combos in a fighting game?