Face '83: The Packman

So, a quick leap over the Ike & Tina Turner reissue, and a grudging 'yeah, I guess' to Thriller - you couldn't review 1983 without mentioning it and... if you skip the weaker tracks... I suppose that's one in The Face's favour.

Back at the start of this adventure I was puzzled by the presence of The Pacman on this list, and a helpful comment suggested this might be the song I was looking for:



Whether this is the song The Face intended or not, it's hard to see how 'pretending to be PacMan' would ever create a song that stood up to the test of time. And if it was this song...

... well. It's a miracle The Face even had the confidence to publish again.

The Face 22; history 17.

[Part of The Face's best recordings of 1983]

Incubus fight fans with two-bit, 8bit game

Incubus have started promoting their new album by releasing a computer game. It's an 8-bit style game in which you control the band as they, erm, punch people trying to leak their album in the face.

I'm guessing they've gone with an 8-bit look for the game because their music also sounds like it depends on ideas which were briefly in vogue in the late 1980s.

The punchline to their attempts to sell albums through violently patronising fans is that the record has, erm, already leaked. Perhaps Incubus should spend less time punching fans in the place, and look a bit more closely at their own security, eh?

[Thanks to @ttfb for the tip]

No Doubt v Activision: Game on

Courtney Love's much-tweeted threat of legal action against Activision seems to have fallen by the wayside, but Band Hero has still had a run-out in court.

No Doubt sued because they say that although they signed up to be in the game, nobody gave Activision the right to make Gwen sing in a bloke's voice, or the band dance "unnaturally".

Activision counter-sued that this was a breach of free speech (because the Founding Fathers really foresaw this question when they framed the constitution), calling for the lawsuit to be thrown out.

Billboard reports:

As usual in these sorts of disputes, the question becomes whether the speech -- in this case, the game -- amounted to a "transformative use" of the celebrity's image, in which case it falls under First Amendment protection. The California Appeals Court says that Activision's use of No Doubt isn't sufficiently transformative, finding that the images in the game were nothing "more than literal, fungible reproductions of their likenesses."

The case is now going to move to trial - but before No Doubt can level up, Activision have a right of appeal.

It doesn't feel like there's an Erin Brockovich style movie waiting to be made here, does it?

Viacom splits from the RockBand

Having realised that there wasn't really any synergy between MTV and the RockBand game franchise, Viacom have flogged off their games studio, Harmonix.

But, hey, it isn't a humiliating climbdown - they made $25m over what they paid, and are able to push out a press release with a bit of dignity:

"Harmonix has and will continue to create terrific video games, but for us, it is about focus. The console games business requires an expertise and scale that we don't have," chief executive Philippe Dauman said.

Of course, we could have told them that back before they bought in.

MIDEM 2010: MTV plan future for music computer games

Highly recommended is PaidContent's interview with MTV’s games SVP Paul DeGooyer. He's firstly trying to put a brave face on the decline in sales of Rock Star type games - "not as sharp" as we might think, apparently; then he ponders where the future might lay:

“Songs and music games need to be a part of people’s self-expression. Developments in terms of console interfaces are going to make it, literally, more gestural to interact with music.”

Literally more gestural. My self-expression will literally be more gestural. Frankly, I can't wait for the future.

It turns out what he means is that you might not need a crappy plastic guitar shaped thing. In effect, he's picturing an air guitar which makes a noise.

You, too, can have your song in Rock Band

We can't all wait for our widow to sign papers to make a mis-shapen version of our heads appear in a computer game, but there's good news if you're desperate to be part of the Rock Band world. MTV is planning to allow people to upload their own music to the game.

The idea is simple enough: Rock Band gets boring quite quickly when you've only got a limited number of tunes. But developing new songs is costly, and doesn't actually make any new money for the franchise.

Solution: Invite people to upload their own songs. The catch?

It's that bit about it being costly to make the Rock Band version of a tune:

Rather than deal with Harmonix directly, artists and labels will submit songs to a community of Harmonix-trained freelance game developers and other interested programmers who will prepare the tracks for "Rock Band." Additionally, labels can either hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house.

Spong calculate the cost of doing this conversion is about $500 a minute. Now, the resulting songs will be sold, but between 50cents and $3 dollars, from which the person making the tracks will make just 30%.

Larger bands, then, might manage to turn a profit, but smaller acts? Not much. It might look to an outsider that MTV is trying to expand the playability of its game but at other people's expense. Certainly, only they are guaranteed to be making money on the deal.

The end of the Final Fantasy

Yes, yes, it's era-end days for your Wogan and your O'Grady and your More4News. (Don't you hope Catherine Tate will pop in to the More4News studios to run through a best-of bits as she did for O'Grady?)

But another era is also being wound up, as Owen Pallett is no longer going to be trading as Final Fantasy. At legal gunpoint:

riends,

I began playing solo violin shows in 2004. Although it was essentially a solo project, I named the band Final Fantasy, as the experience-- and the tone of the material-- was reminiscent of the hours and hours I had spent as an adolescent playing those epic JRPGs.

But the laws of trademark infringement exist for good reason, and so I am voluntarily retiring my band name. In the new year, my record Heartland is coming out, and it is my first to be released in many territories, including Japan. With this in mind, I feel it is in my own best interests to definitively distinguish my music from Square/Enix's games.

So, I am no longer playing shows as Final Fantasy. Subsequent releases, including Heartland, will be issued under my own name, Owen Pallett. Prior releases will sometime soon be re-packaged and re-issued.

I thank Square/Enix their kindness and support, and I thank you all for your understanding.

Salud!

Owen

Yes. We can see how people might get confused between a one-man band and a slightly sexy computer game. Well, I say "people", I mean "lawyers". And I say "get confused", but I mean "try to make some sort of case that people get confused".

Martin Gore: Forensic alienation expert

Erik Estavilo is upset with World Of Warcraft. Upset to the point of issuing lawsuits:

Estavillo believes that the game's monthly subscription fee is too high and that its various other charges are too numerous, and he also believes that the game contributes to his sense of alienation.

It's not clear from reports if he's happy to be alienated providing that he doesn't get overcharged for it, or if he doesn't expect to be alienated paying prices like that. You'll have stood behind people like this in queues at customer services in Sainsburys.

This would be none of our concern, were it not for the expert witnesses Estavillo is calling in. Winona Ryder has been subpoenaed, but so has Martin Gore:

He's subpoenaing Gore "since he himself has been known to be sad, lonely, and alienated, as can be seen in the songs he writes."

Plus, he's from Basildon, which means Gore can talk about alienation with a degree of authority.

It could be the start of a whole new career for Gore - Forensic Alienation Expert, ready to be called in whenever society is being put in the dock by those it has shunned.

[Thanks to @simonth for the link]

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: NME best of

Sweeping The Nation turns the NME best-of into a game.

Feargal Sharkey helps the gamers

If I were the games industry and keen for ideas how to protect myself in the face of digital rights meltdowns, I'm not sure I'd turn to the music industry for tips.

They have, though, getting Feargal Sharkey in for his ideas. (The Independent piece is a bit vague about who, exactly, it is who asked him.)

Sharkey takes pride in what he has done, mind:

"We still haven't cracked the problem," he said. "Then again, we're six years ahead of, say, the games industry."

Bloody hell, if the games industry is six years behind the music industry, what must their approach to piracy be like? Putting labels on boxes claiming "drawing your own Battleships board is killing games"? Sending previews of Sonic around on consoles glued up so you can't take it out?

It's important, though:

"The UK entertainment industry is worth £16bn and so it needs to be protected."

Given that the industry is worth £16billion after ten years of file sharing, you might argue that it looks like it doesn't really need very much in the way of extra protection. Indeed, that it's thriving.

Feargal then starts to go a little... well, odd:

"So what we all have to do is ensure that we find out where people get their games, music and films from and ensure that artists and publishers get money from that."

This seems to be a slightly different line from the one we've previously heard from UK Music, which has been 'find out where people are getting things, close it down, and make sure they return to us.'

"The likes of iTunes is great but it's not the sole outlet - games also has multiple outlets. We need to identify them all and, when it comes to those who steadfastly refuse to pay, hit them hard."

Fry and Laurie once had a sketch which suggested the SAS existed mainly as a masturbatory aid for Tory backbenchers; I'm starting to think three strikes might serve a similar function for UK Music.

Beatles >= Jesus X

Of course, it's only a bit of fun, but simply because there were more searches for "Beatles" than "Jesus" on Google for a couple of days doesn't mean that "the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

Mainly because people don't type the things they like into a search box. Otherwise I'd be constantly harrying Google for coffee and kisses.

And because The Beatles had something new-ish out, you'd probably expect that to have happened. If Jesus had just issued a remastered version of The Bible, or a computer game ("feed 5,000 people using your Wii..."), maybe he'd be doing better.

Not to mention that doing a Google search on one term doesn't mean you have to forswear your love of the subject of another possible search term. Searching on "King Kong" doesn't mean you'd have to abandon your love of "Godzilla".

Still, the Telegraph report does have this interesting paragraph:

Though the graph clearly shows that The Beatles caught the imagination of more people during September than Jesus did, video games experts point out that The Beatles Rock Band has not fared as well in the shops as expected with rival music game Guitar Hero 5 outselling the Fab Four's version.

So, the albums sold nowhere near as well as expected - for all the excuses we keep hearing - and the computer game didn't sell well, either. Perhaps all those searches were people trying to work out what all the fuss was about?

Yoko has high hopes for The Beatles game

The Beatles computer game isn't all about making more money for The Beatles and their estates, you know.

Oh, no; it's going to usher in a new era of world peace, says Yoko:

She explained: "I think game is the second revolution. In the beginning they made a splash with their music; with the video game we're going to create a planet of music and art.

"Music and art are both very interesting healing vibrations, and with that vibration we can create the world we've always wanted, a world of peace."

You only have to look at the love and peace that's broken out over on the other franchise, where Kurt Cobain channels Bon Jovi, to see just how right Ono is.

It's what Kurt really would have wanted; or at least what Jon Bon Jovi would have wanted

No, really, there was a line in the suicide note which said "my only regret is that I die before I get the chance to take part in a tribute to Bon Jovi; if only there was still a way". Genuine fact:



Everett True responds to this delightful desecration:

Um. Grohl and Love sanctioned this one for the new Guitar Hero. So respect due to Grohl and Love then. Fucking corporate cock-sucking memory-destroying fret-wanking MTV-supporting fame-chasing money-grabbing grave-turning publicity-loving vacuous spoiled jaded cunting rock whores.

Apart from the question of whether it should have been attempted at all, there's a wider question of if the people who made this confused Kurt Cobain with Fred Durst.

That noise? That's Yoko ringing up the Rock Band people with a great idea for next year...

Bill Wyman doesn't hold with all these computer games

Somewhat ironically, considering he was talking at a charity Beatles event piggybacking on the hoopla around Beatles Game, Bill Wyman has been grumbling about Rock Band style games:

[He claimed] they will lead to fewer young people taking up real instruments.

"It encourages kids not to learn, that's the trouble. It makes less and less people dedicated to really get down and learn an instrument".

"I think it's a pity," he said, speaking at Abbey Road studios while recording a charity Beatles song for Children in Need.

Yeah, young teenagers shouldn't be playing computer games; they should be enjoying their time dating elderly rock stars, eh Bill?

Nick Mason - who was hanging about - nodded:

"It irritates me having watched my kids do it. If they spend as much time practising the guitar as learning how to press the buttons, they'd be damn good by now".

Naturally, the makers of Rock Band style games deny they're a bad influence:

But Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems, which created the Rock Band series, refuted the musicians' claims.

"We're constantly hearing from fans who were inspired by Rock Band to start studying a real instrument," he said.

It's true. After a couple of months using the guitar-style button keypad, many young people progress to the three-button joystick or the fully-programmable trackpad.

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Beatles and games - together at last

HMV still sells records to people who still buy records. It really, really wants to start becoming a place where kids come to buy their computer games.

For HMV, Beatles Computer Game is like the pulsing heart of a intersected Venn diagram. Gennaro Castaldo is delighted:

"I think this (the game) is significant because it will enable the music to be heard by a new generation of fans," said Gennaro Castaldo of music and gaming retailer HMV in London.

"It just keeps the Beatles mythology growing and growing, so that's why it is so significant."

Yes, it's true. Nobody under the age of 24 has ever even been able to hear a Beatles song before, as their ears are incapable of hearing any sound that doesn't get processed by a games unit.

A cynic might wonder if flogging all your songs off to a computer game really does grow your mythology very much. If the Loch Ness Monster kept popping up on Strictly Come Dancing, he wouldn't really be quite such a myth, would he?

The Beatles: Now a bit like Sonic The Hedgehog

The appearance of The Beatles on Rock Band - uniting the world's most over-rated band with one of the most perplexing toys - is about to unleash its hypewave over us, starting with a massive chunk of Wired reporting on the process of turning The Beatles songs into games:

At the end of the video presentation, the two surviving flesh-and-blood band members, Ringo Starr, 69, and Paul McCartney, 67, take the stage for a surprise appearance. Standing side by side, the pair look slightly befuddled by the moment. For these been-there, done-that rockers, flogging a videogame is a first. "We love the game, it's fantastic," McCartney says. "Who would've ever thought we'd end up as androids?" No one, perhaps, except a few ambitious executives at MTV.

The constant suggestion is that The Beatles doing anything related to commerce is unusual - ooh, you persuaded The Beatles to make even more money; how cunning. It does, though, fly in the face of the evidence of Beatles tea towels and shoelaces that shows that the question is never about the idea of a deal, just a debate over how much cash we're talking about.

Still, at least the MTV team who made the game really understand The Beatles, don't they?

[A]lthough Martin and Rigopulos had figured out how to marry the Beatles' music to the Rock Band format, the developers still had a long way to go. The original Rock Band let players assume the role of a generic rocker and gradually gain experience and a bigger repertoire, thus accessing more fans, cooler clothes, bigger venues, a larger entourage, and all the other accoutrements of rock-and-roll stardom. "Right away, we realized this wouldn't work for the Beatles," Rigopulos says. "They had all that stuff—fans, money, stardom—almost from the beginning.

Eh? Right from the beginning? Well, I suppose if you ignore the bit between 1957 and the back end of 1962, they did.

Still, at least there is something realistic in the game's make-up: it's been buggered about by Yoko Ono:

By spring, the Harmonix crew had completed a rough build of the entire game. Yoko Ono, whose involvement up to then had been minimal, decided to fly to Boston to provide her own distinct brand of input. "She gave the designers hell," DeGooyer says.

"She's an artist," Rigopulos adds, "so she was very concerned with the look of the game. She really held our feet to the fire." Ono made specific suggestions, like proposing that the game's final scene—the Beatles' infamous rooftop concert on the Apple Corps building in Knightsbridge — look windier.

Her criticism sent Harmonix scurrying to improve the graphics. At that point, the E3 conference and the game's debut was just three months away. "We were like, oh, gee. Thanks," Rigopulos says. "It would have been nice to know that six months ago, but yes, thank you very much."

They did hold fast in the face of her proposals that the digital version of John Lennon should actually quit the digital version of the band and instead make songs about how it's terrible having money from the top of a massive pile of money.

Still, the fans will surely be falling over each other in order to get what they believe is the finest body of recorded work from the finest band which ever lived, in order to see how much better it would have been if they'd played bass and Larry's girl from over the road was on drums instead.

Katy Perry gets uplift from fast fingered friends

Nice little statistic buried deep inside the Christian Science Monitor:

Tim O’Brien, head of business development at Tapulous pointed to a recent track by Katy Perry, the chart-topping American pop singer. More than 250,000 users [of iPhone app game Tap Tap Revenge] loaded “Hot N Cold,” Mr. O’Brien says, and of that number, 56,000 ended up purchasing the song from iTunes.

It's a nice little extra sale, on top of the modest fee for licensing the tune. With something making a small but unexpected profit, it's probably only going to be five minutes or so before label heads start to demand larger shares of revenue and/or issuing lawsuits.

[Tip of the hat: Musically]

Music games: Passing trend rather than a revolution

More solid numbers confirming that the attraction of pressing buttons to pretend to play guitar is waning from Variety:

Fall's highly anticipated "Rock Band 2" and "Guitar Hero: World Tour" have sold well below expectations, trailing their 2007 editions by significant margins. Activision's "World Tour" has thus far sold 1.5 million units domestically, an impressive number compared to most games, but down 55% from "Guitar Hero III," which launched on the exact same day last year. MTV's "Rock Band 2" has moved only 809,000 copies.

It makes album sales seem as healthy as Gillian McKeith on a detox diet, doesn't it? And this is the top end:

The past few months have also seen a number of competitors for "Guitar Hero's" throne arise, including Disney's "Ultimate Band," Konami's "Rock Revolution" and Nintendo's "Wii Music," all of which have seen soft to disastrous sales.

Oh, dear. Music games are still the largest segment of the games market - but there are a lot of segments, and music only represents 16% of games sold. And the figures aren't going in the direction you'd hope for if you saw this a glistening new revenue stream.

It's a toss-up as to if the market was killed because it was swamped with too many, too similar games in too short a period, or if there was only ever going to be a spike-market until the novelty wore off.

Can anyone find a spark to reignite that novelty factor?

Funny you should ask. Taking time off from saving Eurovision, Andrew Lloyd-Webber is planning to try and revive music games with a simple recipe. Show tunes, show tunes, nothing but show tunes:

The shows, which also include Joseph and Cats, may seem like strange fodder for games, but the group says two industry shifts have prompted its interest - the emergence of more female gamers in the traditionally male-dominated game consumer demographic and the big popularity of singing- and music-based titles like Playstation’s Singstar and Xbox’s Lips. Guitar Hero maker Harmonix’s forthcoming Beatles performance game also shows how music brands can be translated in to play.

The first Lloyd-Webber titles will let players sing along as characters in the composer’s shows and could involve elements of “audition”, just like in his BBC shows I’d Do Anything and How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? and last year’s Lloyd-Webber-themed episode of American Idol.

A music track you sing along the words to? Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? It could be a whole genre all of its own. And you know what? I could see that going down well in Japan.

Pretending your games machine in an instrument: Game Over?

Worrying news from the world of computer games. No, this isn't about that advert for Wii with Louise WhatusedtobeinEternal in it, where she's using her Wiimote to vacuum up virtual dirt, although the idea of a piece of electrical equipment which you can use in your living room to, erm, hoover up the dirt on the floor does sound a little like they're running out of ideas of things to simulate - presumably 2009 is going to see a Wii game where the remote can be used like a remote control, turning over TV programmes which will be shown on your TV screen.

No, the news that will be worrying people in Gamesland is that the Guitar Hero / Rock Band boom is over:

Electronic Arts, publishers of Rock Band, has issued another profit warning, and reports "disappointing sales figures," while Guitar Hero is expected to see a 50% drop in unit sales.

If you need any evidence that a mildly-diverting idea has now been throttled, Metallica have just turned up at the party with their own version of Guitar Hero.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet: Mime games

I suspect this is already over the net like spray can cheese over motel nachos, but make some time in your life for The Quietus and their 'mimes recreate album covers' game. The sort of thing that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind.