Had a game idea when I happened across an article talking about Monster Rancher. Monster Rancher was a PS game which was similar to Pokemon in that you could raise a monster and train it to fight in battles and such, although the game itself was much less addictive. What made Monster Rancher so special was the gimmick it used in the creation of monsters.
To get a monster, you went to the shrine in town and scanned a monster’s DNA from a ‘disc-stone,’ which happened to be a RL (real-life) CD. This gimmick made the game much more fun as you tested every CD you had to try and create better monsters.
A while back, Penny Arcade wrote about a Square-Enix game called Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes. The game uses a similar gimmick, except the monsters (or soldiers, in this instance) were created from songs from your iPod (the game was played on an iPod). Looking back at it now, it was apparently a fun game.
I have always enjoyed my music, and have been overly pedantic at the neatness and upkeep of my music collection, solidifying my love for it in my life. I have also always enjoyed videogames; from my youth playing Chips, up to these days of playing LittleBigPlanet or Oblivion.
Technology for analysing music has really improved over the past few years, with a Winamp plugin called Gracenote or something, which analyses your musical library and categorises songs based on their make-up, allowing it to create a playlist of similar songs when a base one is chosen.
By combining all of the above concepts (except the CD one), a really awesome game could be created. Not really sure which genre, but one in which more than one player is involved (i.e. you can get an entire album of songs to participate in the game). I’m thinking a game much like Song Summoner – a tactical RPG – would be good. However, the game can do one better than Song Summoner by actually creating characters relative to the song. Perhaps this could be done by reading the song genre, looking at an online library music artists and grabbing the best fitting genre (such as looking at Last.fm), or even analysing the song itself in terms of speed and other such musical factors.
To keep with the cool gimmick, the song would always spawn the same monster, perhaps playing a fragment (user-defined) of the song when the monster comes into field of play. And by listening to the song outside of the game, like Song Summoner, the in-game monster will be affected (boosted perhaps?). This would tie in nicely with Last.fm, which records your listening habits.
Song Summoner sounds like an awesome game, but is sadly only available on iPod. A PC-based or current-gen console game that could harness better graphics and greater processing could make an even better music library-based game.
I have a feeling Sam (not me) might be interested in making such a game. If I see him, I’ll have a chat about it…
Finally, I’d love to see the monster that results from a Cannibal Corpse song such as ‘Submerged In Boiling Flesh’ or ‘Fucked With A Knife.’
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Game Idea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
12/17/08 @ 4:24 pm #
I thought all Gracenote did was give you options of what to tag your untagged music.
I can imagine an aborted foetus monster for that last one ;)
12/17/08 @ 4:26 pm #
Well, it was something like Gracenote anyway. One of the Winamp plugins from an official company.
12/17/08 @ 4:33 pm #
Actually, while I remember: the playlist generator could also be used in the game. Random enemy swarms or something could be spawned from a single track. This would result in enemy swarms that are different songs, but the same ‘sound.’
12/18/08 @ 7:24 pm #
Penis.