Pong and Beyond

17th game played so far

Genre: Puzzle/Music
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Dylan Fitterer
Publisher: Steam (online), Ascaron (hard-copy)

Many games have been released that have tried to capitalise on visualisations of music. We will be covering a bunch of these later on but Audiosurf already does something that they can not; create a puzzle that is truly customisable based on the song that you put in. With this comes a large online community of leader boards where almost all songs are somehow covered.

Even though I have written this introduction without yet having fully played the 5 hours it is already obvious that this is a must-have game for any musical fanatic.

Our Playthrough

We went through my iTunes folders and tried a wide variety of music using all the characters available. Music that we covered included the likes of ABBA, Sleigh Bells, Lady Gaga, Utada Hikaru, VV Brown, Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire.

Our Thoughts

I believe that we have finally found a game which accurately simulates the feeling of driving when on an acid trip while the strangest music plays (ha ha I have odd music tastes).

It is quite possibly the best visualization of music you can have. I agree wholeheartedly. As mentioned before we are still to cover games such as Frequency and Amplitude but this will surely blow them out of the water in every conceivable way as it allows the use of ANY piece of music. Of course you need to have an mp3 or one of several other audio formats, to be fair. Yes that was a bit of a disservice to the game. Many audio files (such as iTunes’ favourite) are also compatible. Yeah

So in other words, have music, select it in the game, and get going. But there is a lot more to it. The visuals are astonishing for an independent game. It looks good; strange, but good. It’s, as said, psychedelic, and with the shifting colours, turns and blocks sliding past while shapes turn in the background, it’s interesting and colourful experience although while it looks odd, it’s not distracting from the actual gameplay.

Agreed. The gameplay is helped by the number of different cars you can play around with; each with their own powers. Yeah and when you get beyond the psychedelic track, the actual gameplay is worthy of any other puzzle game: You go forward following the beat of the music and have to collect blocks that are placed based on the music. If you line up at least three, you get points and they disappear. Collect too many and you crash and need to wait to re-spawn and depending on your character you can then shuffle these around, push blocks out of your way and even launch your car over them.

You could also spend the entire track sitting in the hard shoulder whilst watching the dazzling racetrack… if you really wanted to. But what’d be the fun in that? Get someone else to play while you look at the marvels something I enjoyed doing whilst we experimented with various genres.

If you want a really fast game that’s challenging I would recommend either ‘Rachel’ by Sleigh Bells or ‘evolution’ by Ayumi Hamasaki. (Trust him, he’d know) but it makes you want to try out other songs as well, just to see what they look like. It’s amazing what slower songs can look like on there too.  ‘Devil’s Spoke’ by Laura Marling was surprisingly complex.

Another nice feature is the leaderboards. Rather than playing on your own, your point total gets compared to other people who played the same song and you can see who did best on it. By developing a nice little online competitive community they have been able to really extend the game’s longevity. Aside from the obvious trying out of new music after it plops onto the doormat.

Making this a game not just worth trying, but keeping up with for some time, whenever you want to combine colourful graphics, good music and a nice puzzle to make it more worthwhile.

Final Thoughts

This may be too early to call it (seeing that we are only 17 games in) but with the exception of the games with the little plastic instruments (I am eagerly anticipating a DJ Hero set at some point in the future) I can not think of a music game that will come close to beating this one.