Audiosurf

Audiosurf was actually released on Steam last month. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, and so, I was curious and bought it. I rarely buy games on impulse but I was feeling like taking a risk at the time.

Man, what a great choice. Audiosurf is an absolutely astounding game. Allow me to educate you about what it’s about.

The premise behind it is that you can pick a song (whether mp3, m4a, ogg, etc, it’s compatible with a lot of formats), and it will create a track out of it. The road is bumpier based on the beat behind the song, and goes higher the calmer the song is. If it’s a downward spiral, the song is intense and fast.

What you do on these tracks is collect coloured blocks and try to make ‘clusters’ (groups of 3 or more coloured blocks) out of them. At the end of a song it calculates your score and places it on a scoreboard with other people who played the same song.

It’s somewhat complicated on paper, but in action, you take to it quickly. There are different “characters” (or ships) that have different abilities that mix up the game types a little. Mono, for example, changes the game to two types of blocks: grey blocks (which you are to avoid) and coloured blocks(they’re all one colour, which changes as the song plays).

Guitar Hero (series)

My cohort doesn’t exactly have the highest opinion of Guitar Hero. So, in order to give you another viewpoint, I will provide my own opinion of the series.

With the exclusion of the expansion pack, Rock the 80s, I have played every Guitar Hero game. I can play Easy, Medium, Hard, and I can attempt Expert. I’ve put in around 12 hours, which is very decent for someone who doesn’t own any of them. I feel that even with my relatively minor amount of time put into playing it, I can provide a good summary of the game.

In Guitar Hero, you play the part of one of around eight characters who attempt to become a rock star. They do this by playing guitar in a supposed band, although you don’t get to play any other instrument (excluding instruments similar to the guitar, such as bass).

As the story continues, you play song after song, each one getting progressively harder. At the end, supposedly you get the whole shebang-booze, chicks, and drugs.

How do you play a song, anyhow? Each game is packaged with a guitar peripheral for the console you buy it for. It’s plastic and small, but it gets the job done. The peripheral has five coloured buttons at the top of the “neck”. There’s also a “strum” button you push up or down. On-screen, circles of colours fly down the “road”, and you press the coloured button it correlates to and press the strum button at the same time it flies over a part of the screen.

Guitar Hero (series)

Guitar Hero is basically worshipped by most people, and has five or so games in the series. I have played 2 and 3, desperately trying to like these games, seeing as everyone bows down before it and sacrifices baby lambs in its name. I figured it had to be good. I was dead wrong. I can probably tell you the entirety of the game in one sentence. Let me try. In Guitar Hero, you have to press colourful buttons, and strum on a toggle thing at the bottom of the guitar, and time your strumming to the notes on-screen. See? I told you. Anyway, onto why Guitar Hero is so bad.

Apart from the fact that it is sickeningly simple, especially for a console game, it has almost no difference between the games. The only thing I saw added between games were new songs, and different characters. The object of the career mode is exactly the same. The controls are exactly the same. The games shouldn’t even be separated by numbers! They should just be expansion packs, with different songs! There are only two things ever done to make the game any different. In Guitar Hero 3, boss battles were added, where you play guitar, and somehow develop magical abilities to break parts of the other guy’s equipment by playing a certain note. The other new thing is the fact that you can use different instruments, such as drums, with the newest game, Rock Band.