Martin Gumucio

Ubisoft are a pack of bastards.

In the credits of their new exercise program My Fitness Coach, you can read that it is “Inspired by an idea from ResponDesign”. This is what could be called the understatement of the year, what Ubisoft means by “inspiration” is using the graphics, the music, the textures, the animation from the game Yourself! Fitness.  Yes its a port of an old PS2 game, and boy does it show. No anti-aliasing for you.

Also for some reason they decided to ugly up the model of maya by about 80%, so where she before looked completely natural, she now looks like a character from the zombie game House of the Dead. What I miss the most, and the feature I was really looking forward to was the simple change to metric units in the weight charts. But no, its as untouched as the rest of the game. A couple of the workouts are different, but in essence the same game that looked ok on the xbox 1 now comes to your Wii, blooming out into all-out ugly.

Of course the game is not about it looking good, but about making YOU look good. And in this area the game delivers big time. When you get tired of Wii Fit, this is the real deal. It is still a great product despite getting no love at all from Ubisoft.
So go buy it and get to work!

I thought I’d do another post about the MSSIAH cart, since its by far the most interesting piece of hardware in my studio at the moment. For this months rcc I wanted to do something with the bassline application. In contrast to my previous explorations this time I came fully prepared, printed manuals at the ready.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The bassline is of course limited in the amounts of sound it can produce, as it is meant to mimic the classic TB-303. The “Transistor Bass”, while being a great synth, is possibly the most cliché thing any studio doing electronic music could feature. I’m not very interested in how accurate the cloning of the sounds are, as every instrument is and should sound different. But I can say this: They successfully transferred the things that are fun about the TB-303 to the MSSIAH.

The best thing about this cart is of course the whole idea of making new software for a 25 year old hardware platform. Some corners have to be cut of course, and 8-bit ventures do a great job of navigating between the flaws in the c64 computer while keeping the cart easy to use in the hands of non-technical musicians. The whole sampler application (another review for another day) is for example built around a bug in the SID-chip. It wasn’t intended to work as a sampler at all..

You get a wide array of different ways to play and use the synth. You can hook it up to your midi sequencer and just play notes, while still being able to do glides and accents, or you can trigger patterns from the midi sequencer, OR most interestingly of all you can let Bassline do its thing and only slave it to the midi clock. This is perhaps the most interesting mode of them all, since it allows you to control every parameter of the synth with CC midi messages from your midi sequencer. Transpose the pattern, turn up the accent. Tweak the filter, fantastically useful.

On the other hand if you prefer to keep things hands-on you can also run it competely stand-alone. If you feel like doing some light soldering you can even add potentiometers to the top of the casing of the c64 and use them to control the synth realtime as it plays.

So in essence, this is a geeks wet dream. 8-bit ventures have done their homework well.

It has been way too long since I posted updated pictures of Aron. Here we see him playing the piano and singing at his grandmothers house. He is very talkative and can now differenciate between a car, a bus, an ambulance and a truck. You might say his special interest is cars, very noticeable at his recent eye exam, in which he scored a much higher scores when trying to find cars compared to any other objects.

This is our last week in Fålhagen by the way, next week we will be moving to a bigger apartment a bit out from the central parts of town. The only bad thing about the move is that kids daycare does not move so easily. Its going to be interesting to cart him across town in the mornings..

I have a lot of friends that are doing serious work for this, and time is running out for them.
The least I can do is to push for the project here on my blog. Go click!