Audiosurf: Riding a Magical Music Highway

Audiosurf is a game that has been given a lot of press lately (or at least I hope so) and in case anyone on here hasn't heard of it, let me enlighten you. This game is the best use of ten dollars and the wasting away of all your free time that I have seen since Popcap first became popular. Audiosurf by its very nature is classified as a casual game, but the stand out feature is its diversity created entirely by the userbase.

Audiosurf takes any song you have on your hard drive and generates a track for a little car to zoom along at fantastic speeds. The basic point is to collect colored squares on different parts of the track which are set up in tune with the song. The game plays like a weird variant of Tetris or other color matching games, but the shining difference is in what I mentioned above. Any MP3, Ogg, and other formats will work, giving a near infinite versatility to your playing field. I've done songs ranging from The Who, Aphex Twin, Boston, Nina Simone, and even the Benny Hill theme song. Some songs work better than others in the sense of game play, in that the composition of the song will decide whether you have a nice and leisurely stroll through the park or a vertigo-inducing blast of sound and color. I tend to pick songs on the faster side for the challenge of the twists and turns, along with the excitement of fast paced music.

The best part of Audiosurf is a chance to put your music collection to work for you! Why just listen to your songs when you can ride a space-age roadway while blasting good music? I've got piles of albums just sitting on my hard drive collecting dust, and many of them contain at least one gem for me to try out in Audiosurf. The other fun part about having your music collection out is to show it off, because Audiosurf allows you to compete with people across the world for the best score in any song. Audiosurf is a highly addictive way to listen to music, and it's worth every penny of the low price to buy it.

You can see more about Audiosurf here. One note: Digital Rights Management software, DRM, is a barrier to using songs in Audiosurf. itunes is one these according to the game, requiring files to be converted to plain MP3s before playing them in the game. I don't have itunes, so I don't know how universal this is.