Audiosurf: Ride Your Music

I lied. I can't resist blogging about this. I have to tell the world how great this game is.

It's a game that I've always dreamed of creating. A game where you can take in an MP3, CD music or WMA, and generate some sort of gameplay based on it. Of course, I'm completely inspired by games like Vib Ribbon and Rez.

Now someone beat me to it, with Audiosurf, released by Invisible Handlebar. It became the IGF 2008 Seumas McNally Grand Prize finalist. Just bought it online yesterday for 10 bucks. Clearly, the best investment I've made this year.



It's a beautiful game where you choose a music track in your hard drive, then a superb psychedelic racing track will be generated. The slow parts of the song will be smooth and uphill (you can see what's coming), whereas the fast parts of the song will be bumpier and downhill.

The objective of the game is to collect blocks based on colour. The more of the same colours, the more points. The cool thing is that the incoming blocks follow the rhythm of the music. Such is the complexity of the audio analyser of the game.

It runs on the Steam engine. Whether you like it or not, it allows for more community-based services. It compares your score with others who played the same mp3 (based on ID3 tag) to see how well you did.

It's a great game, and it's truly meant for everyone who enjoys music. I had a whole lot of fun playing Audiosurf with the tons of game and anime music in my hard drive. And I hardly even played one eighth of it! What a BIG distraction from my work!

Here are some sample tracks I found on YouTube:

Bleach - Asterisk



Blur - Song 2



Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei - Kusou Rumba



Go buy it coz it's worth every sen! And support independent game developers! Go to http://www.audio-surf.com.

Damn, have to get back to work. Wait, one more song...