TECH GOES RETRO

Antique-looking sound + gaming graphics + top smartphones

IF YOU HAVEN’T played Cuphead yet, here’s what will happen the first time you do: while battling a malevolent potato the size of a minivan, you will become so distracted by the extraordinary detail of the watercolour pastoralia behind it – the subtle rotation of a tyre swing in the wind, the word Acme stencilled on a bag of fertiliser – that your avatar, a personified latte mug with a ridiculous barbershopstriped straw sticking out of it, will get hit in the face by one of the realistically textured dirt balls the potato spews continuously and the words YOU DIED! will flash across the screen like a title card in a Charlie Chaplin film.

This will happen to you because it happens to Chris Charla, director of Microsoft’s Independent Developer programme, all the time, and he’s been playing Cuphead for years. “Even now, I’ll find myself so entranced by some beautiful animation that all of a sudden the ‘Oops, you died’ screen will pop up,” he says.

Cuphead is so distractingly beautiful ful because it is the first video game to employ the same cel animation tech- niques that studios from the 1930s used to make those trippy, strangely y macabre cartoons in which devils and cats and mice caper to great jazz z tracks. Canadian brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer drew every frame e of the game by hand, painting the backgrounds in watercolour and then arranging everything into a fever dream of gameplay over the course of four years. The result is a ludicrous romp through carnival rides s and old tattoos that – among the hyperrealistic first-person shooter games that are the normal output of the gaming industry these days – feels a bit like Jack White reissuing classic blues tunes on vinyl.

So how did they do it? When you play

a game like Cuphead, the computer refreshes successive images of “sprites” (characters) over a background (which is also refreshing) to create the illusion of motion. The sprites also refresh in response to commands from the controller. “As you hit, say, the right direction on the keypad, the computer knows, okay, every tenth of a second, change the background frame and also erase the main character and redraw him three pixels to the right,” says Charla. The Moldenhauers had to create movement sequences for every character, then draw frame after frame of the characters making every motion. “On average it might take 15 minutes to draw a frame, and then that frame has to be inked, and that takes five or six minutes,” says Chad. “I think there are close to 60 000 total frames.”

That’s 60 000 drawings of Cuphead jumping, crouching and running. Of an hourglass dancing and a war-hardened pig with an eye patch talking and a mermaid with a dead octopus for hair squeezing beta fish out of… a giant sea bass? Of an angry cupcake mansion spewing airborne waffles and rolling peppermints and jellybean soldiers, and then, crawling zombielike towards Cuphead on candy pink hands. Honestly, if you saw all the Moldenhauers’ Cuphead drawings tacked up in a friend’s kitchen, you might offer said friend the number of a psychological professional. “There’s a reason no one has attempted this before: it’s nuts,” says Jarred Goro, director of North American licensing for King Features, the company that owns classic cartoons including Betty Boop and Popeye. King found Cuphead so exciting that it partnered with the brothers to create merchandise. (King Features is owned by Hearst, which also owns Popular Mechanics.)

“If we’d known it was this much work, I think it would have scared us away,” says Chad. But it didn’t, and teaser videos of the animation the brothers posted online in 2013 generated so much excitement

Beats Studio3

Looks like what Dr Dre would’ve worn while producing Straight Outta Compton (the 1988 record, not the movie), except with Bluetooth and noise cancellation that adapts as you go from the coffee shop to the sidewalk. We’ve dismissed previous Beats products as marketing compensating for a bad soundquality-per-rand ratio. The Studio3 changed our minds. The only gripe: if the battery’s dead, the wired connection doesn’t work at all.

Mighty music player

This year, Apple stopped making the ipod Shuffle and Nano. For those who miss using a dedicated music device, there’s the Mighty, which holds more than 1 000 songs from Spotify. Good news for joggers, because these big phones are annoying to carry in an armband.

Imagine Dragons

A normal high-end speaker system will have a low driver powering all the low sub; kick drum, bass guitar. The mid-driver is for the vocal-type stuff, and the tweeter gets the high hats, sibilance, all that. Geithain took another approach: it took all three drivers and literally stacked them on top of each other. Somehow, the waves don’t cancel each other out. I don’t know how they did the maths on that, but the result is incredible. It’s such a focused and concentric sound. And the bass is cardioid, meaning, it’s being pushed right to you, so you’re not getting all these unwanted frequencies that are being combed and masked. For musicians, for people who have to do this kind of stuff for a living, it’s pretty exciting. And these guys, Geithain, are the only ones I know of that do it.

Red Hydrogen One

It’s hard to say right now because it’s still not out, but from what I’ve seen demonstrated, this is a device for a cinematographer. It’s for someone who already has a daily phone and wants another device with imaging capability. For sure, this phone is concentrated on the camera.

Google Go Pixel 2

Th This doesn’t solve the old Pixel’s outdated de design, but it has great fea features. There’s a squeeze control like the HTC, an OLED display, and one of the best cameras out there. So along with Google Lens augmented reality, you’ll get really good photos.

Oneplus 5

I used this for a long time off-camera because it was one of my favourite phones of the year. Just a great, fast, doit-all performer. If you’re okay with the big front bezels and a front fingerprint sensor – which you actually still have on phones like the iphone 8 – you’re getting a really good deal.

LG V30

Excellent display, great camera, wireless charging, waterproof, and a fingerprint reader where it’s actually reachable. It also has a special audio converter behind the headphone jack, making it one of the only phones still catering to audio enthusiasts.