This year I had the pleasure of attending my first HAL-MODE FESTIVAL (aka HMF), a yearly event that my school holds in order to showcase the portfolios of its graduating students. Attendees are a mixture of current students, their friends and families, prospective students, and a more generalized audience. This year’s theme was “Made in Japan,” so all the groups chose a Japanese product that they felt was representative of Japanese industry. For instance, one of the CG groups chose Cup Noodle as their theme and created a commercial for it.
Touring the Booths
Although the booths encompassed projects from all the programs (in addition to games, HAL has programs such as robotics, web design, music, and computer graphics) as well as graphic design, fashion, and makeup — our sister school, MODE, is a design school — for obvious reasons I’m going to focus on the projects from the game programmer and development programs.
The thing that impressed me most about the booths as a whole was that every group came up with innovative and interesting controls for their game. The most common style of control was to have their booth be a larger-than-life version of their chosen product and to have that be the controller. One group chose a specific brand of ball pens and they had you use a huge version of the pen as a joystick, while another chose a sewing machine, having one player work the foot pedal (it was huge so you had to stand on it, like a balance board) while the other used a turntable disguised as the fabric under the sewing needle to steer.
The level of difficulty of the games varied between groups. Some games were intuitive with no explanation necessary, while others I still didn’t understand even after going through the explanation screens and listening to the group members’ directions. One game that I would term “easy to play, but hard to play well” was a game where you used a conducting stick (sort of like a specialized Wii remote) to conduct a robotic symphony. The shape that you made with the conducting rod determined how fast or slow they played, but even with the explanation sheet I wasn’t sure how to get a good score with it.
Because the booth viewing only lasted for a little over than an hour and a half, I wasn’t able to play nearly all the games that I wanted to. The lines for the more interesting games were long, so I was only able to play a couple before time ran out. Of the ones I did get to play, the ones that really stood out to me were Piko-piko Hammer and Megastar II cosmos. Piko-piko Hammer, as the name implies, was a game that you play with a squeaky hammer. The style of game reminded me of House of the Dead except instead of a gun you have a squeaky hammer and three different colored panels to hit. The group members were marketing it as “stress relief,” which I thought was amusing but apt. There’s nothing like smacking the crap out of really cute enemies with an equally cute squeaky hammer to make your day. The cosmos one used the principle of reversing the Wii remote and sensor bar, having you put on goggles and use your body to move around asteroids that were formed by a planet that was destroyed. While I was waiting in line for it, one of the group members handed out cards that talked about astrological signs. Unfortunately, the text was so small I had a hard time reading mine, but it was cute nonetheless.
Fashion Show, Awards, and ET King
Once the booth viewing part of the day was over, we cleared out of the stadium level and went to our seats. The fashion show aspect was interesting, if not terribly relevant to gaming, although I thought it was pretty awesome that one of the groups chose Japanese RPGs as their theme. Influence from Final Fantasy was pretty heavy; I recognized both Cloud and Terra-inspired outfits.
After the fashion show came the awards ceremony. For the HAL portion there were first a bunch of awards from various companies — Microsoft among them — and then the bronze, silver, and gold. For the second-years, a team from the video game program won an award for their crane-themed building game. The object of the game was to stack parts of famous buildings in the right order in order to build them. The controls reminded me a lot of a UFO catcher game. For the fourth-years, a team from the game programming program took the silver. Their game was about a lint roller, where you went around a room picking up all the lint. Sort of like Katamari Damaci except played with a huge version of the lint roller and without the huge ball of stuff.
To wrap the event up there was a concert by ET King, whose songs I recognized only because they’ve been playing in the elevators since April. Still, you could tell who came to the festival simply because of the concert; they were the ones who went directly to their seats without viewing the booths at all (their loss) and then rocked out the hardest during the songs.
Final Thoughts
I know that there is a lot of skepticism regarding the quality of video game graduates from technical schools, but the projects that I saw on display at the HMF were pretty impressive. They were innovative, generally good-looking, and fun to play. While obviously some groups had better projects than others, I have to say that every group had a product that they would be proud to put in their porftolios.
Ultimately, I had lots of fun and was able to get a glimpse into what I’ll be doing in four years right before I graduate. I am definitely looking forward to the next festival.
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