Riding the tunes
So you’ve spent most of your conscious life finding music, and the past decade or so compiling it into a huge collection on your computer (legally, of course, at least that’s what you thought when you and everyone’s dog was dinking around with Napster) that you brag to your friends about with phrases like “I need a few 80 gig iPods to hold my music” while sounding like a self important prick. No longer do you need to be an elitist connoisseur to enjoy the thousands of songs, most of which were listened to once, and left to roll around in the defragmenter.
I present for your approval, Audiosurf, a rhythm pseudo-racer casual game which uses procedurally generated tracks and obstacles based on beat, tempo, vocals and instrumentals of various formats of music files you jam through the engines to create curving tracks and other blocks deemed “traffic” that you either avoid or crash into with all the might your holy keys can muster…as if how hard you hit the keys actually makes a difference.
The game has a very simplistic design, and a sort of tetris style puzzle game built in as you accrue the other cars on the track that you hit in a virtual gridded tractor beam around that disintegrates them if you gather three or more matching colors in a congruent pattern. Built in scoreboards keep track of how well you do with what, and posts them in the top 10 list that can be sorted globally, locally, or just within your friends so you can beat them up next time you see them.
Bright colors, flashy lights, shiney surfaces, and assumably, a decent soundtrack unless you have piss-poor taste in music. Great way to kill a few hours instead of simply listening to music, because as everyone knows me knows, I hate non-interactive forms of media.