BUY AUDIOSURF

I am so late on this, but Steam is offering Audiosurf this week for a mere $2.50 this week only. I'm pretty sure anyone reading this will either: not play it because almost half of the contributors of this blog have Macs and I don't think you can play this on a Mac unless you do some magic(not computer savvy at all), or you'll scoff at me and say C'mon Spiz! This shit came out in Feburary! OLD! However if you're in the minority like I am, I implore you! If you like the music games as much as I do you really need to check out this game, especially at that price.

The game works like this. It's part rhythm/part puzzle. You take any MP3 you got on your computer and the game will create a track based on what the song sounds like. The track will rise, fall, curve to the beat. Now the basic object of the game is to stack colored blocks into clusters to clear the board and score points. The video above is like the most basic mode(think it's called Mono) where you only have to worry about one color, but you have to dodge the grey blocks or else you're stuck with those blocks on your board. Like most good puzzle games, very simple concept, but there's strategy and depth hidden. Like in that mode you can hit grey blocks on purpose to stack blocks to create bigger combos for more points. People throw around the term synesthesia for experiences like this(see Rez) and yeah, I get totally sucked into the visuals and the music. It's such a time sink right now.

The sheer fact that you can just input any song and play it in the game makes this an amazing game. This isn't like Rock Band where I get to rock out to "Pump it Up" by Elvis Costello and then cover my ears when that fucking Disturbed song comes up. The one where the lead singer goes OOHWAHAHAHAH which is all of them. My point is I fired up "Trojan Horse" by Bloc Party as the first song on the demo and after that I was sold and played till 3am. The freedom, oh the glorious freedom. I have no clue how the developer got away with this, but all music games should allow you to use whatever music you want. This is easily going to be on my Games of the Year list.