phren
First of all, nice readme, gave me the info I wanted in a well-written package. Very stylish menus. The syncing didn't really work for me - the notes continued staying off-beat. Very cool and subtle humor involved. :P
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD11 → Cowbell Hero
By jovoc
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 23 | 3.41 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 23 | 3.24 | 21 | |
| Theme | 28 | 3.82 | 22 | |
| Fun | 34 | 2.86 | 22 | |
| Humor | 5 | 3.90 | 20 | |
| Graphics | 8 | 3.82 | 22 | |
| Audio | 11 | 3.47 | 19 | |
| Polish | 21 | 3.32 | 22 | |
| Technical | 11 | 3.41 | 22 | |
| Journal | 22 | 3.29 | 17 |
First of all, nice readme, gave me the info I wanted in a well-written package. Very stylish menus. The syncing didn't really work for me - the notes continued staying off-beat. Very cool and subtle humor involved. :P
I like the idea, get top points for that. The random song it chose was Wagner's Tristan und Isolde overture. The beat wasn't quite right, but oh how that cowbell was.
Go-go Beatronome! Not really a game but I have to credit the awesome music selection that was in it.
"You may notice that every song in your music library sounds better with cowbell.
This is scientifically proven."
Brilliant Idea! The whole premise had me giggling, very good humour in the game. Unfortunately it didn't work particularly well, the music drifted out of sync regardless of how accurately I tried to sync it with shift. The little note things appeared to have a pattern depending on the state of the music, so something must be going on under the hood there, it's just not quite right yet.
Overall, great premise, I'm expecting a fully functional version!
Very nice idea, and a great use of the theme... but the song syncing didn't really work all that well. It fell off beat after a while. Also, I wasn't quite sure if the notes were generated from the song or if it was a premade pattern. (I guess the fact that I couldn't quite tell at least tells that the pattern must've been pretty well made)
If the syncing worked right, this would be a really fun game.
Awesome idea. I wish the syncing worked! I laughed the whole time. I almost gave you a 5 for music too... Seriously though, 5 and a trophy for Humor.
Fix the syncing and release it again.
i tried a bunch of songs, i couldn't get the game to go in sync with the music. not sure why the player has to set the bpm manually. the graphics look great though. im not sure if this fits into the theme except its a one button game
syncing never worked for me either, but the idea is perfect and the technical attempt, even if it doesnt work quite right is impressive. hilarious.
Love the idea and humor. And great music! But synching didn't work for me either. Either it's faulty or I sucked at it. With some auto analyzing of the song this could be great, though I fully understand that isn't included in a minimalist 48h game.
Well, if the beat detection/syncing had worked it would probably have been fun to play :P
It's completely random, isn't it? Had nothing to do with the song being played, just sort of trying to sync up with the shift-tapping (time between last two taps maybe)?
Anyway, it makes for a rather surprising amount of fun actually. I loaded up a few tunes and "rocked out", imagining that the triggers were actually related to the song in some complex way ;)
I guess the main issue with these games is that you have to spend a lot of effort to input good patterns for all songs. Even if there's great beat detection going on it would still be hard to automatically generate an interesting and relevant string of triggers... although it's kind of an intriguing problem, might have to play with it some day :)
Have you seen Cowbell Hero before? I saw the youtube video of it months back ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=QlqLLZQLNiA - but wow, there are lots of other ones there too!). I can't decide if you lose innovation points for that, I guess it would depend on if you conceived this individually or not!
Anyway, it's basically something that could be awesome if it did what it was supposed to... that would've been quite a technical achievement too! Scoring and proper syncing and patterns that make sense would've made it a winner you could sell to a world of cowbell-starved patrons.
There was one point in a Green Day song where it suddenly was just perfect, adding little counterpoint cowbells to each measure... but then it went way off track again. Still, a sublime moment.
Nice idea, screenshots got my hopes high, but it was a letdown in practise. I guess tuning the beat detection to be fun is a bit much to ask in 48 hours..
The music detection thing crashed when I tried it at my full music dir, so I had to copy some mp3s to a dir of their own to make it work.
Anyway, managed to sync it up to some demoscene music pretty well for a little while there, but it kept slowly drifting off. Was fun while it lasted though =)
I love the variety this theme has produced. Who would have thought of a GuitarHero clone? I hope you work on it more.
Nice game. Cool idea!
Beethoven is definitely better with cowbell. I noticed that the beat didn't always seem appropriate, but it worked. Now to make it for the XBox 360, PS3, and Wii.
Nice, funny idea, fits the theme, but the actual gameplay didn't really seem to work well for me. I used a techno track with a strong beat, but pressing shift just made the scrolling thing jump around a lot. Graphics were technically impressive, and the sound was nice since I chose it :) Integrating the musicdb.py script to be launched by the actual game (some users are shy of the commandline) would be nice too .. but hey, I know all to well how hard it is to do _everything_ in 48 hours :)