Cho’s rules also come with a permission to bend them.
Noiz2sa dreamcast code#
This allows anyone to take his code and repurpose it, packaging his games into the repositories of GNU/Linux distributions.
Noiz2sa dreamcast software#
Cho is a Free Software practitioner whose works are released under Open Source licenses. Any programmer in the world could port Noiz2sa to that hypothetical e-paper book/console. Kenta Cho plays by his own rules, but he lets others play too. Sooner or later we will have consumer-grade electronic paper displaying full-colour animated graphics at twenty-five frames per second, and one of the first games to be ported, maybe after Tetris, will be Noiz2sa, for no game is fitter for a paper-game reflected-light medium.
Cho’s Noiz2sa scenarios are flat and staunchly geometrical, with only a hint of 3D parallax scrolling in the background to suggest motion against what looks like a sheet of paper. Noiz2sa is pure abstraction, a distillation of shooterness played against the pastel doodles of a hyperactive six-year-old draughtsman with Asperger’s. The game’s muted colours-on-white background palette is reminiscent of the final level on Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez, minus the synaesthesia, the quantisation of the shots to the music, the story and the figurative graphics.
Noiz2sa’s visuals are also different from the usual shoot-em-up’s. By comparison, rRootage would be Cho’s Art of the Fugue, a work which is more focused in a single form (the succession of game Boss battles) and on the red/white alternation by player and adversary. Cho’s BulletML library is to him what the modern chromatic scale was to JS Bach. These constraints also happen to be his main enablers. It is Cho’s Well Tempered Clavier, in which he challenges several of the aesthetic assumptions of the genre, showing off a talent for composing dizzyingly varied game stages out of a self-imposed set of constraints.
Noiz2sa is an early study in the art of bullet barrages and playing strategies. Yes, just as Tim Berners-Lee created a language for describing how hypertextual pages reference each other in a distributed Internet of independent servers, Kenta Cho has created a notation for describing the geometric dance of barrages of bullets, their shapes, their colours and game-play. Anybody can study Cho’s rules, because he writes them in a particular mark-up language called BulletML. His works are instantly recognisable as shoot-em-ups, genre pieces following the conventions laid out in the halcyon days of arcade gaming history: rRootage plays out the Ikaruga theme of good-and-bad bullets, Torus Trooper is a shoot-racer descended from Tempest and Zero-X, and even more recent and weird games like Mu-cade or Tumiki Fighters can somehow fit into the commercial game taxonomy without much shoehorning.īut the genre framework underlying every game of Kenta Cho’s is dressed in the trappings of the rules he makes for himself.