It’s always good to see innovative, interesting, or just plain offbeat steps taking in the gaming world, and Cloud seems to be all three of those things. Cloud is a free game that comes from the University of Southern California’s Game Innovation Lab and it certainly looks promising so far. In the game you control a young boy who can fly around and gather clouds. Simple enough. Some levels have you trying to create vast pictures in the sky out of the clouds, while others have you pitting the clouds you’ve gathered up against ominous black smog clouds in an attempt to clear the skies (doing so produces rainstorms and lightning). While the game currently feels a little more like a sandbox environment than a complete game, it seems like they’ve got some good ideas. Flying around and playing with the cloud physics is a lot of fun and while the graphics aren’t anything ground breaking they’re nicely stylized and fit the game well. One of its best features though is the impressive score which is symphonic and lends the perfect atmosphere (ha!) to zipping around in the clouds. This one is definitely worth checking out, and its a work in progress so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
A new tool I’ve just stumbled across in my Galactus-like quest to consume more and more of the musical universe is Pandora, an offshoot of the ambitious sounding Music Genome Project. They seem to offer a different approach to the typical “recommend-if-you-like” method of comparing artists. Rather than trying to just say “this artist sounds like these other artists”, Pandora tries to go a level deeper and actually examine the fundamental characteristics of individual songs to more accurately help you find music similar to other music that you like. It then creates a station that plays a stream of that music. For example, it lists a song by The Arcade Fire as featuring “basic rock song structures, punk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, and major key tonality” and then finds other songs that match many of those characteristics. That’s a pretty tall order, and while it’s obviously not possible encapsulate every thing that makes up a song in those terms, it does seem to do a decent job of finding similar stuff. Not everything is spot on, but considering what a subjective experience music enjoyment is in the first place that’s only to be expected. All that really matters is that I’ve already found a couple of new things that I like and it never hurts to have another tool for finding new music.
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