SP Review: wordimagesoundplay (PlayStation 2)

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Sturmvogel Prime
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SP Review: wordimagesoundplay (PlayStation 2)

Post by Sturmvogel Prime »

Art has multiple manifestations. Music, images, text, even videogames. Examples are quite common like Nintendo's Mario Paint, SEGA-United Game Artists' Rez and Ubisoft's Child of Eden, but never in a strange, abstract form like in the one I'm gonna talk about.

wordimagesoundplay is an "art" game released by Sony Music Entertainment Japan for the PlayStation 2 and developed by the british art collective TOMATO. This game is a very, very bizarre compilation of mini-games that combines images with music as a form of interactive audiovisual art.



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He's the Human Beatbox so let it be know that he's the King of the Beats on the microphone!

Phonology is the first game where you are given 8 human figures with their own set of animations (selectable by pressing up) which can be "animated" by pressing circle, each animation has a respective sound effect like a girl that makes an answering machine beeping sound or a man that says "Hey, hey" combined with a piece of music. The "objective" of this mini-game is to create your own music combining different animations and rhythms. Pressing the X button will change the way the characters are placed. Folding-fan, circular formations, vertical lines, those are your combinations to create your very own abstract ambient-themed cacophony.



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If there's a borderline between life and death, this might be how it will look like.

Miracles and Wonders is the second "game" which is seen from a 1st person view where you are on a white void an a small picture with changing text is seen in the distance. The idea is to go walking across them and stop to read the story and hear the sounds like those childrens audio-books of the 80-90's. Every pic is connected to a whole story of some sorts.



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What a branched-up remixture of randomness.

Sleeping Eyes is the third and the "Main Game" since it compiles a range of mini games and cutscenes. The selection screen is like a scrambled puzzle where you select a square by pressing circle, the pieces will shuffle and will reveal a word like "Kingdom 01" or "Flower Prayer". Mini-games are as weird as the rest of the game: "Flower Prayer" starts with a song as dots appear on a tree along with a specific word of the melody, once it ends the dots will fall and you have to pick them, but there's dots that can't be picked with the cursor, those can be "selected" by pressing circle. For instance the word "Galaxies" will send you to "Sea" and Neroli to "Kingdom 01". where you can pick one of the circles which contain random text like "inner space, the female, the femenine", "Sodium chloride a crystal" and there's a circle with nothing there. Selecting it with the Circle button will trigger another mini-game called "Lake".

"Lake" is a game where you control a "Glock" pistol that can shoot on the comma after "KINGDOMS,", the period on "CHASMS." or the square in the bottom left of the screen, hitting any of those will trigger (you guessed it!) more mini-games. Hitting the square leads you to "Bullet" where you have to pick all the dots within a bullet to slow it down until it stops, leading to "Maze". On "Kingdom 01" you can play with the borders of a black hexagon and that's all you can do there until you leave the game and go back to the puzzle-select screen.

There's cutscenes with childish sculptures of a horse and a rabbit like in "Advice from a Horse" and there's "Love Story". I found Love Story very disturbing 'cos the poems (if we can call'em like that) looks more like the thoughts of an insane person or a sick pervert rather than a love story, combined with engrish-like nonsense like "thighs split light spectra her inner space" and triggering a video called "The movie" with more scenes of the horse and rabbit sculptures and random words followed by even more sicker things which I'm not gonna write here because they're quite explicit, even for an "Art" game. Such screwed up words makes me wonder ¿WHO CAME UP WITH SUCH THINGS?, What the hell were the guys at TOMATO thinking when they're writting their "poetry"? and how the [EXPLETIVE] Sony Music Entertainment Japan allowed those things to make it to the game? There's no way that can be considered artistic or poetic.



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This is a crossed mess of random words.

Latlong is the final "game" where you have to match specific horizontal and vertical words to trigger different music and background effects from monochrome to color until you get tired of it. Nothing short of poetry.



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Unreleased footage from ClayFighter.

Everything in this game is basically photography and random footage, so there's not too much to talk about graphics since some of the games are shadows, simple shapes, sculptures and white dots aiming on Minimalism art. The maze mini-game is pathetic, you are controlling the word "horse" rather than having a sprite or something. That's not minimalism, is the bottom line of creativity or as if it was a rough idea. But my major complaint is not the abstract and weird nature of the game, it's the use of monochrome in 90% of the whole game. Aren't colors one of the greatest ways to appreciate the arts?, color is what gives life to any form of physical art and without it the whole thing looks sad and depressing. The engrish also ruins the artistic expression unless you're trying to lead to unintentional humour. The music is mostly based on the "Ambient" style with the exception of the Flower Prayer which is like a school rhyme with random words.



CURIOSITYTRVIAFUNFACT

- Phonology means "Sound of Speech". It is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds.
- TOMATO worked in commercials for Chevrolet and designed the type fonts for 007: Quantum of Solace, one of the final films of the Sony-MGM era of James Bond's filmography.



In the end, wordimagesoundplay looks like a mindless experimental game that can only be appreciated by art enthusiasts who really can understand and appreciate abstract and surrealism and spend most of their time in museums than watching TV and playing videogames. But if you ask me it's a strange mess that doesn't seem to have a justified reason to exist, except for being one of the rarest PlayStation 2 games out there.



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Unable to rank the game.
Reviewer has lost his Ego Border after playing this game.
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