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Harmonix's Fantasia: Music Evolved is made of pure magic
I can name the exact moment that I fell in love with Harmonix's latest game, Fantasia: Music Evolved, at this year's E3. Periodically throughout the game, you're presented with an on-screen globe, and you can wave your hand over it to create a tune. The science of how it works isn't exactly clear (you're adjusting the pitch and rhythm of a tone somehow), but the tool is simple, it works, and the game will periodically play back your creation to you, and then allow you to redraw it over if you don't like it. Once the tune is set, you can swipe both your arms outward to zoom out to the game's "overworld" level, which in this case was a beautifully rendered, very animated robot factory, with various pipes and pistons jumping up and down in time with a rhythm. This was the moment Fantasia showed me just how magical it was. As I tried to navigate around the stage and solve a problem by manipulating the world with the Xbox One's new Kinect sensor (a group of robots needed to get into a small doorway, so I had to swipe over some magic to shrink them down to fit), I suddenly realized that I recognized the tune that the pipes and valves were dancing to in the background. It was the one I'd just made, subtly mixed into the rhythms of the stage itself. %Gallery-190255%
Fantasia: Music Evolved ties back to legacy with 'Night on Bald Mountain'
Harmonix's Fantasia: Music Evolved will include "Night on Bald Mountain," one of the most iconic segments from Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia. "It's one of the first songs we're announcing from the heritage of the Disney Fantasia film, bringing some of that music into the track list that runs the gamut from the original classical music from 1940 to contemporary pop today," said John Drake, head of communications at Harmonix. "Music is a living, breathing thing and we want to respect the entire canon of music, that's what Fantasia is all about." It's not entirely clear how "Night on Bald Mountain" will be used in the game, whether it'll be a standalone track or used as a part of hub world. Harmonix is going for a different type of music game experience with Fantasia and Drake tells us the reactions have been all across the spectrum, saying some folks during the E3 presentation actually cried.
Harmonix and Disney delve into 'Fantasia: Music Evolved' for Kinect
Harmonix is teaming up with Disney to develop Fantasia: Music Evolved, a new motion-driven audio game for Kinect on both Xbox One and Xbox 360. It's not an overt adaptation of the 1940s feature film, but a contemporary, interactive take on Fantasia's evocative melding of music and visual artistry. Nix "Night on Bald Mountain" for Bruno Mars and you're halfway there. You complete songs in Fantasia: Music Evolved by responding in rhythm to on-screen symbols and willing your feeble sausage arms into various pushes and directional swipes. You can also augment the music and its accompanying input pattern at several points by seamlessly swiping into one of two different possible remixes. In a demo shown to press, I was able to switch to an oddly formal but pleasant orchestral rendition of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Harmonix has also included a strong freestyle component in Fantasia, reflected in abstract but intuitive symbols that allow further augmentation of the current track. Drawing shapes on a sphere with your hand, in one example, can create new instrumentation and layer that on top of the active track. Once a song is completed, it spills into the level hub and gradually enriches the environment. One such hub, "The Shoal," is an aquatic playground for fish that becomes more dynamic as you complete songs and prod the scenery back to life and sound. The musical progression, so perceivably tied to the gorgeous environments, does conjure memories of Fantasia, even though the two share no characters – save for a certain wizard. Fantasia: Music Evolved is currently set to debut in 2014. In the meantime, you can enjoy the game's first trailer (above), in which a bunch of gyrating Bieber-mages duel to the max. The track list as announced thus far is right after the break.%Gallery-190255%
