Q&A: Final Fantasy bard Nobuo Uematsu

Uematsu shares his experience with Blue Dragon Plus and hints at something "big" for the Black Mages.

A self-taught musician, Nobuo Uematsu joined Square back in 1985, and in 1987 Hironobu Sakaguchi asked if he would like to compose music for a role-playing game called Final Fantasy. The subsequent success of the series launched his career as a video game music composer, eventually making Uematsu one of the most well-known video game music composers among Western audiences, often referred to as the John Williams of video games.

Nobuo Uematsu

Uematsu stayed with Square Enix until 2004, when he left to form his own production company, Smile Please. He continues to compose for video games, working alongside Sakaguchi, who left Square Enix in 2004 to start his own studio, Mistwalker. Uematsu's recent works can be heard in Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon for the Xbox 360. He also composed the main theme for Super Smash Bros. Brawl last year.
In addition to composing game music, Uematsu formed the Black Mages in 2003, an instrumental rock band that takes his original Final Fantasy compositions and arranges them into rock music. The group has released three albums: The Black Mages, The Black Mages II: The Skies Above, and their most recent album, The Black Mages III: Darkness and Starlight," which was released last year.
In 2004, Uematsu made an appearance at Dear Friends--Music From Final Fantasy, the first-ever video game music concert in the United States, which was held in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Due to its success, another follow-up concert was held the year after in LA, titled More Friends--Music From Final Fantasy. This was also the first time that the Black Mages performed live in the US.
Since then, Uematsu's work can be heard live in various concert series, such as Video Games Live and Play: A Video Game Symphony. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Final Fantasy, AWR Music Productions is currently presenting a concert world tour titled Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy, with performances scheduled across multiple cities in the US as well as Singapore.
Amid all the excitement with the concerts, album releases, and video games, Uematsu shared his thoughts with GameSpot through an e-mail interview about composing for the upcoming Blue Dragon Plus on the Nintendo DS and talked about his band, the Black Mages.
GameSpot: What is it like to work with Sakaguchi again at Mistwalker?
Nobuo Uematsu: Business as usual, but his ability to get things done never ceases to amaze me. Achieving goals is just second nature to him.
GS: What will the music be like in Blue Dragon Plus? Is it similar to the previous Blue Dragon?
NU: There are slight variations in the arrangements, but it's more or less the same; plus, there's one new track.
GS: What challenges did you face when composing for the Nintendo DS versus a current-gen console?
NU: It was just that it had been quite a while since I last worked with internal sound hardware.
GS: What kind of process do you go through when composing a track for a specific area in the game?
NU: After I draw inspiration from the scenario and artwork, I just let my imagination take me along for the ride.

Midi tunes aren't Uematsu's only forte.

GS: After composing hundreds if not thousands of different tunes, how do you manage to continue to stay original?
NU: Actually, all of my music sounds the same to me, to the point I get fed up with myself sometimes.
GS: What is your band working on now? Are you working on another album?
NU: There's the DVD of the live concert we did in August; it's coming out next year. I'm thinking of doing "something big" for the end of 2009, but I can't really say anything at this stage. You'll just have to keep your ears peeled.
GS: How do you select which pieces to use for your album? What are some of your favorites to perform?
NU: I draw up a list of things, and then we all get together and decide which ones we're going to do. I have fond memories of all of my music, so picking out favorites is difficult. But the live concert we did this year featuring "Maria and Draco" was fully accompanied by a drama ensemble; this was a first for us, so it was really exciting.
GS: When will we see the Black Mages again in North America?
NU: We don't have any plans as of yet, but we're definitely looking forward to another performance overseas; the sooner the better.
GS: You've been able to travel across the United States for the Dear Friends concerts as well as Distant Worlds. What has the experience been like? What has been the most memorable moment for you?
NU: It was really gratifying to receive such a thunderous ovation from all the people who came out to our concerts overseas. I truly felt thankful that I was born. The fact that people from different countries all over the world can experience the same universal joy from the same music...Doesn't that inspire you to believe there's hope for a world of peace, free from war and conflict?


Credit

• By Sophia Tong, GameSpot

HAWX Updated Cooperative Hands-On

We hit the unfriendly skies in a pair of brand-new missions set above American soil.

Just last week, we brought you our first hands-on look at the co-op feature found in Ubisoft's upcoming air-combat game HAWX. Based on a gameplay session at a London press event, we told you about the basics of piloting a jet fighter in a team of four and how the game ties into the greater Tom Clancy universe. Recently, though, Ubisoft held an event in San Francisco to give American press a chance to experience a few brand-new co-op missions: Washington DC and Chicago.
Before jumping into co-op, we acclimated ourselves to the game's controls by taking a sneak peek at the public demo, due to be released in February. This mission takes place in the skies above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and offers a tutorial on the game's accessible control scheme. You're guided through the basics of moving through the sky and firing your weapons, plus a few advanced techniques such as drifting (which is essentially a way of performing a midair U-turn). It's all pretty simple stuff, at least on the default difficulty. However, you have the option to move to advanced difficulty, which makes piloting your jet substantially more challenging because it removes the various assists that keep your plane on the right track.

The Pentagon could use some help right about now.

Having conquered the air drones terrorizing the skies of Brazil, we moved on to the first America-based mission in the game, which was Washington DC. Prior to the mission, we had the option to choose our aircraft, a process in which you need to consider the requirements of the upcoming mission against the attributes of various jets. Things such as air-to-air versus air-to-ground capabilities are key, but each plane also has attributes for speed, handling, and armor. We settled on the F-22 Raptor, a great balance of each.
This first mission gave us the goal of defending the heart of Washington from PMC cargo planes dropping ground forces. It required us to divide our attention between enemies in the sky and those below. With such a huge altitude difference, this is where co-op strategy really comes into play, given that you'll probably want to divide your team into antiair and antiground forces. Taking out enemies in the air is definitely trickier because they can dodge and juke your missiles even when locked-on. Ground forces are usually easier, in that you're required to make a quick pass over the earth below, and your only real challenge is making sure that you don't get so low that you smash into a building.
The next stage in this mission took us from defending a bunch of politicians on the ground to one very important politician in the air, given that we had to escort Air Force One and keep it safe from a flurry of Russian MiG-23 jets. In this scenario, a good co-op strategy would be to let a pair of pilots play defense and the other two offense. That is to say, some players remain close to the president's plane and the others go take on the enemies before they get within firing range. Although our group was a little more scattered and freewheeling, we still managed to keep the president safe and sound.

Beautiful downtown Chicago.

The next mission brought us to the Midwest, above the skies of downtown Chicago. In this scenario, PMCs have installed a massive radar jammer in the city. Your role is to defend an AWAC used to detect enemy units as it flies over the city. The trick here is that you have to stay within a relatively small radius surrounding the AWAC because getting too far away will wreak havoc on your in-flight instruments, turning your heads-up display into a static-filled mess. If you're successful here, you can move on to the next stage of the mission, which involves defending ground troops on the streets below. As you'd imagine, this gets awfully difficult when it involves buzzing in close to the towering skyscrapers that make up Chicago's skyline.
Thus concluded our time with this pair of America-focused missions from HAWX. Other chapters in the campaign will bring you to places such as the Middle East, South America, and the Caribbean, so there should be a lot for globetrotters to enjoy. No release date has been announced, but you can expect to see more on HAWX in the coming weeks and months.


 Credit By Shaun McInnis, GameSpot

Art Style: ROTOHEX Review

There's no escaping the been-there, done-that feel of Rotohex.

The Good

• Inexpensive price  
• Local multiplayer is fun for a short while. 

The Bad

• Derivative and forgettable  
• Some colors are too similar. 

The bar for tile-dropping puzzle games has been a high one for many years thanks to the marvelously addictive Tetris, and since that game's release, games like Lumines have kept expectations soaring. In a world where there are loads of mediocre by-the-numbers puzzlers freely playable on the Internet, it's hard to justify spending $6 (600 Nintendo points) on one. Art Syle: Rotohex is solidly conceived and briefly entertaining but ultimately tired and lacking any original hooks to make it stand out.

It's like a videogame version of a stained glass window.

Rotohex is at least a decent challenge. You aren't just matching three or four colored blocks, but rather you must combine six colored triangles into a hexagon. The game arena itself is even a large hexagon and may remind you of a Chinese Checkers board. Triangles of different colors (two at first, with four additional hues added later on) fall from above, and you rotate entire hexes at a time, manipulating up to six game pieces in the process. As colors get added, creating matching hexes can be difficult, so things will get frantic. But unlike other puzzle games, Rotohex doesn't lull you into that focused trance and get you in a groove. It doesn't help that the yellow triangles look a bit too much like the light green ones, which look a bit too much like the darker green triangles, creating an artificial visual obstacle that could have (and should have) been avoided.
As you work your way through the main solo mode, you'll unlock two additional single-player modes: Sprint and Endless. Endless mode doesn't add any new colors but keeps the triangles falling at a consistently faster clip, while Sprint starts you with a half-filled playing board and challenges you to create six hexes of a specific color. Sprint in particular is a huge challenge, even if you can zoom through the solo mode. It's the included Versus mode where you will likely get the most enjoyment, however. Here, you and a local buddy's board overlap in the middle, and as you successfully create hexes, you might dump garbage tiles on your opponent's side or add a block of additional tiles to his or her board that needs some extra attention to remove. It's good if forgettable fun, and it's the most engaging way to play Rotohex, adding a layer of strategy to an otherwise blandly functional puzzler.

Arranging all these triangles isn’t a terrible experience, but there are lots of games out there that are more fun.

If you can overlook the aforementioned color similarities, the minimalist presentation has some bright spots, like the subtle mirrored edges of the playing field and the mechanical twinkles of the soundtrack. But there is only one background (black), and there are none of the charming touches you'd find in even many of the free browser games floating about online. Rotohex gets the job done but makes little effort to rise above its Game Boy Advance predecessor, Dialhex.
Art Style: Rotohex is a basic and unspectacular game that isn't made any more compelling by its low price. It's adequate, and can be fun when you add a second player to the mix, but there are better puzzle games out there, even on the WiiWare service, and you're better off spending your money on those instead.

 Credit By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot