Rhythm Game Takes Gamers on a Wild Puzzle Ride

By Connect Mason Reporter Daniel Sims
Photos courtesy of Steam

Since last fall Steam has mainly existed as a sort of Facebook for online gaming – a meeting place with friends for weekly sessions of Team Fortress 2. Over the last couple of weeks, however, my time was spent rediscovering my mp3 collection through Audiosurf.

Dylan Flitter’s Audiosurf is a program that takes any audio file you put into it and plugs it into a rhythm-based puzzle game. Players select a ship corresponding to a mode of play and your selected track is translated into a course down which you ride. Notes are translated into blocks which you collect for points.

Any song you put into Audiosurf is turned into an interactive rollercoaster, and it does this beautifully. If a song slowly builds up to a climax it’s like a climb before the big drop. The colors, humps and blocks all create a road that seems to run on the beat, creating not only an interactive interpretation of your music, but also a competent rhythm game.

Collecting blocks relies on falling into the rhythm depending on what mode you’re playing. Audiosurf’s base mode called “mono,” turns each song into a basic obstacle course where you collect the colored blocks and avoid grey ones. The other modes turn the notes into different-colored blocks which must be collected and matched by the player sort of like in Bejeweled.

In the colored modes you’re not only riding down a course but also managing a falling block puzzler at the same time, which can get a bit overwhelming, especially on faster songs. In its simplicity, Mono mode lets you focus directly on the music and catching specific notes. Despite this, the very nature of Audiosurf gives the music some value in randomizing the colored modes.

When a song is completed in Audiosurf, the game checks to see who else has played that song and ranks your score among theirs in either local, global, or friends list leaderboards. The game lets you check up on which songs are popular, and even e-mails you if your high score is beaten.

My only real gripe with Audiosurf is how it organizes music. Instead of containing a full music organizer like iTunes or Winamp, Audiosurf simply has you look through your music collection in Windows Explorer which can be extremely difficult depending on how messy your music collection is.

Bottom Line
For $10, Audiosurf is perhaps the best deal on a downloadable game I’ve seen in a while depending on how big a music collection you already have. It lets you ride waves that run on your own music while playing a competent rhythm puzzle game.