MahMusic: a series of YouTube uploads showcasing a bunch of random music I like. I never cared much for the point-and-click adventure game itself but the music was pretty remarkable.

Seeing how Katy’s open plea to Harmonix to make a K-Pop Dance Central continues to be one of our most active posts I figured it was our civic duty to talk about K-Pop Dance Festival. Developed by Skonec, it’s a very Just Dance-like game with vividly colored live action dancers showing you the moves to mimic with the Wii remote.

It was released exclusively in Korea for the Wii at the end of April and I expected to buy it as soon as it popped up on Amazon or Play-Asia… only it never did. I dug around again this morning and haven’t been able to find it anywhere outside of a lone listing on eBay at $50. Then I dug a little more and was reminded that the Wii is region locked.

That makes for a pretty hefty barrier to entry but we can at least check out the tracklist below and Skonec has been posting videos pretty regularly on their YouTube channel of the songs in the game and people playing it.

2010 and newer

• “Gangnam Style” from Psy
• “1, 2, 3, 4? from Lee Hi
• “Beautiful Night” from Beast
• “Fantastic Baby” from BigBang
• “You and I” from IU
• “Shanghai Romance” from Orange Caramel
• “Apgujeong Nallari” from Sagging Snail(Lee Juck, Yoo Jae-Seok)
• “Shake It” from Chulssa(Noh Hong-chul, PSY)
• “Roly Poly” from T-ARA
• “Ma Boy” from SISTAR19
• “Supa Dupa Diva” from Dal Shabet
• “Shy Boy” from Secret
• “I Don’t Care” from 2NE1

2000′s

• “Mister” from Kara
• “Superman” from Norazo
• “Nobody” from Wonder Girls
• “Look only at Me“ from Taeyang
• “10 Minutes” from Lee Hyo Ri

1990′s

• “Festival” from Uhm Jung hwa
• “To my Boyfriend” from Fin.K.L.
• “Tell Me” from Jinusean
• “Honey” from JYP
• “Kungttali Syabala” from Clon
• “In Summer” from Deux
• “I Know” from Seo Taiji and Boys

1980′s

• “Last Night Story” from So Bang Cha

I legitimately love this game, no joke! Trespasser has taken a lot of hits over the years but it remains a very unique first-person survival/exploration game that’s worth preserving. In Part 06 we single-handedly represent the raptor population’s number one cause of (re)extinction.

Join me as I delve back into my favorite PSP game, R-Type Command, and see how IREM took their own 2D shooter franchise and turned it into a turn-based, hex grid, strategy game. It doesn’t look it but this is thrilling stuff! In Part 21 we split up the team to bypass a black hole and get smacked in the process.

MahMusic: a series of YouTube uploads showcasing a bunch of random music I like. You hear about 8 seconds of each track from Fantavision before the nonstop stream of fireworks explode across the screen. This is what caused a lot of reviews to ignore the soundtrack but it’s one of my favorites, and this one of its best tracks.

I legitimately love this game, no joke! Trespasser has taken a lot of hits over the years but it remains a very unique first-person survival/exploration game that’s worth preserving. In Part 05 we find out our invincibility cheat code has stopped working!

Join me as I delve back into my favorite PSP game, R-Type Command, and see how IREM took their own 2D shooter franchise and turned it into a turn-based, hex grid, strategy game. It doesn’t look it but this is thrilling stuff! In Part 20 we’re, umm… well, I’m not sure where this is… underwater?

Ryan and Shawn pour over the last few days of gaming news straight from the mouths of the marketeers.

I originally wrote this one year ago today but it’s something I’ve just recently been thinking about again. And as no new examples have come up since I think it’s worth reposting.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier is definitely not the first time I’ve seen “cold breath” in a game but it’s been such a long time that the effect really caught me by surprise. Watching Giant Bomb’s Quick Look of the multiplayer beta I kept focusing on the effect after thinking to myself “wow, I’ll bet that guy’s cold”.

‘Smell’ and ‘Feel’ are two of the hardest senses to convey in any form of media but games have it hardest. Showing that an actor is sweating from heat takes almost no work at all. Doing the same to a player character requires immense feats of visual programming. Given a third-person perspective it’s work we might not even notice outside of a deliberate cutscene. What can help is the spoken word — a simple comment by a character about a smell or a change in temperature — but that relies heavily on the voice actor’s performance and a good bit of planning from designers and writers.

Approaching a lab that has recently been “decontaminated” with the staff still inside, one of your squadmates in Mass Effect 3 exclaims “what’s that smell?” and the otherwise sterile room takes on a whole different feel. It’s the only scene like that in the game and all it took was a tiny voice file and a note in the script to make a simple puzzle room memorable.  As the voice acting talent pool deepens and we move on to new hardware with power to spare these are the kinds of “sensory effects” I hope to see much more of in the future.

M