Yoostar surprised the world when it proposed the concept of ‘movie karaoke.’ Everybody thought that we were all Singstar’d, Guitar Hero’d and Rock Banded out to deal with more reasons to engage in living room shenanigans. Turns out everybody was wrong, and plopping yourself right in the middle of a famous film scene would be buckets of fun.
Fresh on the back of Yoostar 2’s release, Blitz Games has announced a deal with MTV to exclusively develop Yoostar on MTV for the Xbox 360. Seems a bit of a strange decision, given the release on PlayStation 3 for the last title, so the first question I asked director Shawn Rosen was, “Why?”
“Well, we just felt that the Kinect peripheral was the right tech to really take the Yoostar brand forwards,” he said. “For future Yoostar titles, you never know. But for this one and the deal with MTV, we just decided that we were going to do Kinect exclusively.” Fair enough.
The benefits of sticking with Kinect include the opportunity for Blitz to really improve on the Virtual Green Screen (VGS) technology that it pioneered back with the first Yoostar game. Rosen is going as far as to call it VGS 2.0, owing to improvements in reading bodies and interpreting them into official movie scenes without any technical issues.
“If you look at Yoostar 2, it looks good in the right lighting, but without the right lighting your body’s all pixellated around the edges and your head drops out,” Rosen explains. “So we’ve come a really long way from our old technology.” He demonstrated this by jumping into a scene from abhorrent reality drama Jersey Shore.
The show itself was absolute toss, but the capture of Rosen was of very good quality. I tried it for myself by acting out ‘that’ scene from 300. The graphical fidelity was something beyond anything I’ve seen on Kinect so far. While Yoostar on MTV will come with the technology improvements already in the game, Yoostar 2 players will also get a title update so they don’t miss out on the good stuff.
When I noticed that VGS really does go further than anything Microsoft has done with Kinect, I asked whether there was some Kinect-heavy trick that I just wasn’t aware of. According to Rosen, it’s practically all Blitz’s own tech. “In February Microsoft released [tools for] advanced segmentation [on Kinect], and... I would say it wasn’t very good. I mean, it was good for what Microsoft needed it for, but it wasn’t good for us.
“We’ve actually taken that as a basis and grown on it exponentially in the last year,” Rosen added, noting that everyone who’s seen the tech has been incredibly impressed - including Microsoft. “They flew out after we put it together and were blown away. They actually asked if we wanted a job!”
It’s not just the tech that’s turning heads. The deal with MTV has allowed for music videos to be featured in the game for the first time, along with the potential for TV programmes such as Cribs to be included. What I do know though, is that there will be 300 scenes both on disc and available to download by the Summer.
There'll also be a host of community options that allow players to leave comments on videos, contribute to leaderboards and earn virtual currency. There’s also an eight-week long promotion for the best video, with a grand prize of $50,000.
But Rosen isn’t feeling complacent. “We still have a long laundry list of things to do to make it even better. The image quality will get better and there’s a whole bunch of filters that we want to try using. We’re actually working to get rid of the white halo around the body too. It’s a first step in a pathway in the right direction.”
Fresh on the back of Yoostar 2’s release, Blitz Games has announced a deal with MTV to exclusively develop Yoostar on MTV for the Xbox 360. Seems a bit of a strange decision, given the release on PlayStation 3 for the last title, so the first question I asked director Shawn Rosen was, “Why?”
“Well, we just felt that the Kinect peripheral was the right tech to really take the Yoostar brand forwards,” he said. “For future Yoostar titles, you never know. But for this one and the deal with MTV, we just decided that we were going to do Kinect exclusively.” Fair enough.
The benefits of sticking with Kinect include the opportunity for Blitz to really improve on the Virtual Green Screen (VGS) technology that it pioneered back with the first Yoostar game. Rosen is going as far as to call it VGS 2.0, owing to improvements in reading bodies and interpreting them into official movie scenes without any technical issues.
“If you look at Yoostar 2, it looks good in the right lighting, but without the right lighting your body’s all pixellated around the edges and your head drops out,” Rosen explains. “So we’ve come a really long way from our old technology.” He demonstrated this by jumping into a scene from abhorrent reality drama Jersey Shore.
The show itself was absolute toss, but the capture of Rosen was of very good quality. I tried it for myself by acting out ‘that’ scene from 300. The graphical fidelity was something beyond anything I’ve seen on Kinect so far. While Yoostar on MTV will come with the technology improvements already in the game, Yoostar 2 players will also get a title update so they don’t miss out on the good stuff.
When I noticed that VGS really does go further than anything Microsoft has done with Kinect, I asked whether there was some Kinect-heavy trick that I just wasn’t aware of. According to Rosen, it’s practically all Blitz’s own tech. “In February Microsoft released [tools for] advanced segmentation [on Kinect], and... I would say it wasn’t very good. I mean, it was good for what Microsoft needed it for, but it wasn’t good for us.
“We’ve actually taken that as a basis and grown on it exponentially in the last year,” Rosen added, noting that everyone who’s seen the tech has been incredibly impressed - including Microsoft. “They flew out after we put it together and were blown away. They actually asked if we wanted a job!”
It’s not just the tech that’s turning heads. The deal with MTV has allowed for music videos to be featured in the game for the first time, along with the potential for TV programmes such as Cribs to be included. What I do know though, is that there will be 300 scenes both on disc and available to download by the Summer.
There'll also be a host of community options that allow players to leave comments on videos, contribute to leaderboards and earn virtual currency. There’s also an eight-week long promotion for the best video, with a grand prize of $50,000.
But Rosen isn’t feeling complacent. “We still have a long laundry list of things to do to make it even better. The image quality will get better and there’s a whole bunch of filters that we want to try using. We’re actually working to get rid of the white halo around the body too. It’s a first step in a pathway in the right direction.”