Monday 10 January, 2011

I'm not trying to make a ton of new entries and logs, but I'm sitting around at my mom's with not much else to do but read, watch TV, and play games, and so it's happening.

I've downloaded a lot of new music since I've been home this break and decided to open up Audiosurf to "ride" some of it. I've watched videos of Audiosurf, but playing it is better! I love how you can feel the track moving underneath you to the beat and tempo of the music. I tried out various oldies, metal, rock, techno, and acoustic stuff to get a feel for some different things. Audiosurf creates a unique track for each song. The point of the game is to navigate your ship left and right to stack blocks, 3 of a color, that come down the track to the beat. More intense parts of songs have "hot" colored blocks, and they come faster and are worth more points. Slower parts have cool colors like blue and purple and are easier to stack, but worth less. Syncopated beats make bumpy tracks, and things will speed up and slow down during stops and gos. I found that the most fun songs to play aren't just super fast ones, but ones that change tempos and beats because it makes the tracks quite dynamic. Super fast metal songs are fun and totally intense, and slow acoustic tracks are mellow, but the slow-fast-slow stuff, whatever you can find like that, is my favorite.

I am most surprised by all the different variations of gameplay. One mode you just match colored blocks and avoid gray ones. All these different modes are with different ships, so one you can rearrange the board to match colors, another you can grab a block and hold it to use later, another you can jump or spread out to cover all 3 lanes at once. It's pretty cool, but I had the most fun with just the basic "casual" modes. The others are just too insane for me to care about perfecting, but it's awesome that so many hardcore play styles are supported. I tried some technical death metal in Ironmode and I don't know how anyone could keep up! I definitely foresee playing this from time to time in the future. In a way, it makes me pay attention to the music more than I would if I were listening to stuff while doing something else since the music is wrapped up in the movement of the character.

I even showed it to my mom and she things it's neat. We did co-op Beatles songs for a while. The universal stat tracking is awesome too. I didn't play a single song that hadn't been played before, which surprised me. You can even hold top spots and it tells you you're in first place for some song. I imagine this game brings out the competitiveness of anyone who likes it, even if it's just a little competitiveness. I sure feel it! I'm going to tell some folks about it and see if I can't get friends to match scores with. Cool game. I will be riding some new music this week!

My experience regarding the different modes is similar to yours. I prefer the simple casual one. All the others seem to get in the way of experiencing the music...

Yeah, I thought before playing that it would make me not focus on the music as much as the matching colored blocks, but I end up really paying attention to the music, which I like, and which is easier to do with the simpler difficulty. I tried some big band music tonight while I was putting together a CD for my grandma. Swing and big band stuff is crazy on Audiosurf!