Audiosurf (PC)

[Silvergun X]

BUY THIS GAME IMMEDIATELY.

There we go. First play all done and sorted.

...A bit more detail you say? Oh, I suppose I can spare the time between songs to do that.

It was released on Steam today and will cost you something silly like $9.95 to buy.

It's probably the best 5 or 6 quid i've spent in a long while. The idea behind the game is simple.

It's a puzzler, where you race a craft along a road that's generated by your music. You give it an mp3/FLAC/ogg/wav/m4a/anyformatunderthesun and it will scan the song, and generate a track completely based around the sound of it.

You have several different modes of play and several different rules you can play by, like Pointman which is basically a cross between Wipeout, Rez and Klax, where the 'cars' that are travelling along the road, you can pick up and store, then put them in any order you like on a grid to score points by combining the same colour.

Game modes are seperated into three categories, being 'Casual', 'Pro' and 'Elite', where Elite is where the fun begins.

The best Elite gameplay mode is 'Ninja Mono', where you only have two types of 'car' in play. Coloured, and Grey. Hit all the coloured, avoid all the grey. Every 'car' you hit gets added to the grid, chain them together to score points.



The colour of the blocks change with the intensity of the song. Cool colours for slow pieces, redder colours for more intense parts. The deeper red the car, the more points it's worth.

The video explains it better than I can. Basically, if you like music games, and you have a half decent PC, buy it immediately.

Oh, and it was practically made for IDM.

[Dogg Thang]

What's IDM?

[Silvergun X]

It's a genre of music. Stands for 'Intelligent Dance Music'.

[charlesr]

That's beautiful.

[Tig]

I was waiting for this thread to pop up. been looking forward to this game, it sounds amazing

[Silvergun X]

Indeed, it is.

Another thing that I absolutely love is the online scoreboards. It takes the artist name and song off your MP3's tags, and compares you to who else has played that song.

According to this, i'm currently the highest ranked elite player at Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers.

And to prevent scoreboard cheating, you can view the song duration and physical track of that person on the board by hovering your mouse over them, so you can see if they've cheated or not. If they have, you can report their score and it brings it to moderator attention, which I thought was very nice.

[toythatkills]

Is this available not on Steam?

[Silvergun X]

Unfortunately, no.

It was originally released standalone as a beta / demo a few weekends back but the only way to purchase or play the demo now is through Steam.

This isn't a bad thing though, as it's one of the first third party games to use Steamworks, which is Valve's stat tracking and achievements system.

Yep, it's got achievements for your community profile.

[angelx]

I will give this a go but that music isn't my cup of tea

[Dezm0nd]

Very much like aphex twin, that V snares! not my prefered genre but it's good stuff. Definitely going to buy this over Rez to be honest, it looks mint!

Get some Noisia or Prodigy on that game... aw yeah. The scoreboards sound good but surely with the variants of mp3 tags about that people will be creating scoreboards all over the place?

Looks like there's a demo on steam! Woop

[Pilotwings]

Look's sweet might get it.

Would have been excellent back in my drugster day's!

[Silvergun X]

If I can get youtube to bloody work with my Audiosurf videos, want me to stick a few Prodigy runs up for you Boggy?

[Dezm0nd]

Yeah if you wouldnt mind, it'd be good to see a good player playing the game. I'm awful at these games and I know you're a high-score mastah from reading these boards over the years!

Downloading the demo as we speak

[Silvergun X]

Any song in particular?

I'm TRYING to upload a couple of videos at the moment - Star Guitar and Due Tomorrow from Beatmania IIDX but Youtube keeps marking them as Failed and I can't understand why as I have 50+ videos on my account.

Edit: Turns out it was the codec I was using. My last vid just went live.



This is the fastest / most insane song I could find at the time. Wanted to see how Audiosurf handled it.

The quality is nerfed, that's my own fault. I'll sort that out for future videos.

[Dezm0nd]

Good stuff, how do you record videos? I remember using FRAPS in the good old days

I just tried it out and I dont think it was a good idea to play Noisia (dark Drum and Bass) at this hour.

Its mad how the levels work, when the music stops for a split second the game slows then kicks back into it! Highly impressed with it.

I have a few issues though, I get a red bar at the bottom of my screen with "PLAYBACK ERROR INIT -1"

could do with sorting it.