With the rise in popularity of games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Singstar, the amalgamation of music and interactivity has reached the mainstream masses in recent years. As more and more people are exposed to music games, the complaint of “I don’t like the song list they have.” invariably surfaces sooner or later. Since it’s virtually impossible to cater to each and every person’s musical tastes, developers have done their best to have a little something for everyone. But what if you could use any song you have as the basis for such a game? Not just as a soundtrack, but as a crucial foundation to how the game is played. That’s exactly the basis for independent developer, Invisible Handlebar’s upcoming release, Audiosurf.
The essence of Audiosurf’s gameplay comes from piloting a futuristic craft along a racetrack, much like Wipeout or F-Zero if you’ve played those games before. However, unlike those games, the goal is not to achieve the fastest time or to eliminate the most opponents with weaponry. The goal in Audiosurf is to accumulate points by picking up colored blocks littered along the track and matching them in your grid. Once you get three or more blocks of the same color touching each other, they’ll disappear from your grid, putting points into your total. It’s kind of like Connect Four meets Puzzle Fighter. But that’s not even the most interesting part. Each time you play Audiosurf, you pick a music track from either the preloaded songs or any song from your own music library. The game supports many file formats, including WAV, MP3, AAC, OGG, and more. The racetrack and colored block placements are then generated based on the song you pick. So the valleys and twists and turns of the track coincide with the tempo and rhythm of the chosen song. As you pick up the colored blocks placed along the track you’ll notice that they also keep in time with the beat of the song.
Audiosurf also features online leaderboards for each song and different difficulty levels depending on how much you want to actively participate in playing the game. The controls are exceedingly simple. You’re either pressing left or right keys or moving your mouse to move your craft. The graphics are fully rendered in 3D and have some cool color effects. It’s not going to compare with something like Crysis, but it’s also not a shitty looking PopCap game either.
I had a blast trying out Massive Attack’s Teardrop and Justice’s Genesis with Audiosurf. The game suggests you try out songs with a strong beat at first, to get acclimated with the game controls. This makes sense as it also makes the experience a lot more salient. As the song builds in intensity you see your craft going up a hill. Then, as the song hits audio climaxes you feel a burst of speed as your craft glides down quickly and goes through twists and turns. It’s quite an experience and I think it’s one that will create a whole new way to listen to music. The game is active enough that you can’t be doing other stuff like working or browsing the web, but it’s also not so attention sucking as to push the music into the background. Audiosurf is also something that can appeal to any listener, whether or not they have experience playing video games. The controls basically amount to moving left or right so it’s very intuitive and easy to jump in with.
Invisible Handlebar has a very promising title on their hands here. As someone whose two biggest passions are music and games, Audiosurf is a game that successfully combines those activities into one cohesive audio-visual experience. The game has made as a finalist of the 2008 Independent Games Festival competition and rightly so. It feels so natural, you wonder why no one has done it before.
Audiosurf releases this month on PC (no word yet on other platforms), but you can download a beta now and try it out. I recommend you do so.
Download the beta from Fileshack [fileshack.com]
