{What I Love!}
Hello! I’m Scruffy, and today, I’m discussing some fun bits of adaptive audio in Wii Play,
which was a Nintendo party game from 2006 designed
to showcase the features of the Wii’s flagship controller, the Wii Remote.
It was a cute little game, kinda felt like an arcade, with these nine minigames with very small
gameplay loops, and the goal in each one is just to get a high score. But nearly every one of them
had some little gem of adaptive music, music that responded to gameplay conditions. For instance,
one minigame was just a table tennis volley, with electronic music that sounded pretty bouncy.
[electronic music plays]
But as the volley got faster, so would the tempo of the music. Since it’s all played in real time
with virtual MIDI instruments, that tempo could change fluidly. Another example would
be the billiards game, which featured this jazzy tune between electric piano and bass.
["Billiards" theme plays]
And if you pocket a ball, this brush snare gets added…
["Billiards" theme plays with brush snare]
And that all dynamically goes away on the beat when it’s the next player’s turn.
Really cool stuff. But I think the most complex system comes from the last game in this selection:
Tanks! In Tanks!, you play as a little toy tank on a wooden floor, facing off against waves of enemy
toy tanks. You need to fire little pellets and lay little mines as you negotiate the increasingly
challenging AI and attacks of each color of enemy tank. These tanks also determine how the music
sounds, and since the music is played with MIDI instruments, it can change on a dime as soon as
a tank is dispatched. So let's break down the surprisingly intricate system governing this.
When a stage starts, you hear the following intro,
and then it leads into a very short loop. Here goes:
[An arrangement of the "Tanks!" theme plays]
And that's it, really. A little pastiche of military fanfare with a toyish snare drum
and flutes, and only four measures to the loop.
It's the layers that are added or subtracted that make this interesting.
On stage 1, you'll hear no difference. The brown tank,
which stays in place and fires at the player very seldom, doesn't change the music on its own.
In stage 2, you meet a grey tank, which moves around...
and fires very seldom. It adds a little metronome sound layer to the music.
["Tanks!" theme with metronome plays]
Now in stage 3, we jump up to two grey tanks and a brown tank, which introduces another feature
of this system: the number of enemy tanks in the stage influences what timpani pattern gets added.
These three tanks together add this timpani part, which I’ll call “timpani A.”
["Tanks" theme with timpani A plays]
If you defeat one of these tanks, timpani A goes away. The same with stage 4, where there are two
brown and two grey tanks. Get the number of tanks below three, and timpani A goes away.
But notice that the grey tank is taking priority here: we can still hear its metronome in the mix.
That’ll be important too, this idea of priority: it scores whichever tank is the most dangerous.
And in stage 5, the most dangerous tank is the teal tank, two of them in fact. They fire rocket-powered pellets
that travel extra fast. Where the brown and grey tanks were “regular” tanks, the teal tank is a
“special” tank. Firstly, just one of these teal tanks on stage is enough to activate timpani A.
But if you have three or more of them, then you’ll get timpani B, an alternate timpani pattern that
focuses on offbeats. You can also hear that these teal tanks introduce a layer of cymbal crashes.
["Tanks!" theme with cymbals and timpani B plays]
And finally, “special” tanks like these do something unique to the music when there
are fewer than 3 tanks left. I call this “boss mode,” as though this tank
becomes the final boss of the stage. For teal tanks, when the last remaining tank is teal,
the snare drum is removed, leaving just timpani, metronome, and cymbals for percussion.
["Tanks" plays in teal-tank boss mode]
Somehow that feels more… final? Climactic? Anywho, you’ll see that appear from now on as
we go through more powerful “special” tanks. And, without looking internally, I can’t really extract
a pattern here, it seems kind of custom-made for each tank. But I’ll make a chart at the end.
So, next comes the yellow tank, which doesn’t shoot much, but moves fast and lays mines often.
These add a bass drum layer that works well with its other layers:
cymbals, metronome, and timpani A.
["Tanks" theme with bass drum plays]
You’ll often hear it with timpani B though, as long as there are at least three tanks remaining,
and a majority of those tanks are special tanks. The yellow tank also
removes the snare drum during its “boss mode,” when it’s the only tank left.
["Tanks" plays in yellow-tank boss mode]
Next are red tanks, which move and fire often, with clever ricochets in mind. These guys disrupt
the established patterns so far. They come with cymbals, but they also come with timpani B,
even if there’s only one on the field. They’re the only ones that do that.
And now, if a red tank is the most powerful tank of two remaining tanks, the snare drum gets cut.
["Tanks!" theme plays without snare drum]
If you beat the other tank and the red tank is the only tank remaining,
add the snare drum back in. See how disruptive these tanks are?
But it gets better, next are green tanks, which are stationary but shoot rocket-powered pellets that
ricochet twice, allowing them to calculate and pull off these long-range trick shots on you. They
add cymbals, bass drum, tuba, and tubular bells, some more classic military band instruments.
["Tanks" theme, green-tank variation plays]
But they have even more special conditions. If they make up the majority of three tanks left,
switch to timpani A, instead of B. If they’re the most powerful of two tanks left, remove the snare
drum. And if the only tank left is green, remove the bass drum. So now the only low end is the
tuba, sometimes removing percussion really does increase the tension in a final moment like this.
Green tanks win priority against every other tank we’ve mentioned so far,
and also against the next tank on the list, purple tanks. They’re like red tanks but they
move faster and lay mines occasionally. And on their own they get cymbals, bass drum, and tuba,
removing the bass drum if they’re the last tank left. But if they still share a stage with a
green tank, the green tank’s music wins out. The only thing that overpowers a green tank is:
What I’m calling “super special tanks.” These are the ones you only meet far into
the game. The first ones, white tanks, are met at stage 20, the final stage of a normal game.
They turn invisible when the stage starts, so you can only see their tank tracks, pellets,
and mines. They feature metronome, cymbals, bass drum, tuba, and synthesizer, perhaps scoring
their supernatural nature. And they supersede all other tanks. If it’s among two tanks left,
remove the cymbals, but keep timpani B. If it’s the only tank left, remove the metronome,
keep the snare drum, and switch to timpani A. Whew… there is but one tank that can take priority
over this complex system. To find it, you not only have to win stage 20 and return to the main menu,
you have to go back in, get all the way back through stage 20, and now find that
there are 80 more stages to tackle. If you manage to get to stage 50, you encounter:
Black tanks. These are the most powerful tanks, traveling the fastest of all,
laying mines, and firing rocket-powered pellets at a far greater rate than teal or green tanks.
And if at least one black tank is on the stage, you get the smorgasbord of layers in the music.
Metronome, cymbals, tuba, tubular bells, synth, no snare drum for added tension, and timpani B.
It overrides everything, as it should! ...As the most formidable enemy this minigame can offer.
And is it really a “mini” game at this point? There are a hundred stages, each with a unique
progression of adaptive music simply because the strongest tank dictates the percussion, and you
defeat tanks in a unique order. You may hear the same four measures of music over and over,
but you’ll never hear it quite the same way twice. That’s why this game deserved to be talked about.
And now, here’s a chart of all the layers in this piece of music, and, to the best of my knowledge,
what tanks make them occur. Feel free to pause the video to take it in, I suppose,
and see how much variety can come from using both enemy type and enemy number as inputs in
this adaptive music system. Now, I’d like to thank my friends Wolfgang and DavoGato
for their help as always in making these videos. And I’d like to thank my supporters on Patreon,
who help keep my video-making process sustainable. If you’d like to support my work directly,
and get perks like your credit here, seeing videos early, a vote on what music I arrange,
and more behind-the-scenes content, you can visit my Patreon link in this video’s description.
And with that, I’m Scruffy, and thank you very much for watching.