GregHowley.com

Things have been pretty busy recently, but I'd like to take a moment right now to talk about my favorite new block-stacking rhythm racer: Audiosurf.

I just discovered this game this weekend, and got a copy from Steam for ten bucks. I played it a good bit this weekend - it's a lot of fun. You choose a mp3 file or a song from a CD, and the game uses it to dynamically construct a racetrack. During the slower, quieter, more mellow portions of the song, you'll be slowly travelling uphill. During the faster, louder, more intense parts of the song, you'll be rocketing downhill. Along the track are colored cubes which you can hit to pick up. When you hit one, it will fall into your grid, connect-four style. You need to match groups of at least three same-colored cubes, at which point they'll disappear from the grid and you earn points. If one of your three columns overfills, you're penalized. In casual difficulty mode, you just lose all cubes from that column. In the harder difficulties, you "respawn", which means that your car goes translucent and you lose the ability to pick up any blocks for a few seconds.

The red and yellow blocks are worth the most points, and purple and blue blocks are worth the least. Black and white blocks instantly score you points if they touch the bottom of a column. There are also other powerups: a lightning bolt instantly fills your grid with a half-dozen or so matching blocks for instant points. A paint power-up paints all blocks in your grid the same color. This is great if it's a red paint power-up, but not so great for a purple one, unless you're trying to avoid overfilling a poorly matched column.

There are a good number of game types, which makes for a good amount of replayability. You can play "point man", in which you're able to pick up and drop a single block at a time, placing it in whichever column you want. This is really useful, but when you're moving at high speed, it can be really difficult. There's a two-car mode, where you get four lanes instead of just three. You can steer both cars yourself, or play the game two-player. One car is steered with the mouse, and the other with the keyboard. There's a vegas mode, in which you can move to the breakdown lane for 5 seconds in order to trigger a random shuffling of all the blocks in your grid, in the hopes of creating a match. There's also a "pusher" mode where you can hold down the left or right mouse button as you hit blocks, and instead of being placed in the lane you're in, they'll be placed in the lane to the left or right of your position. Lastly is mono mode, where you only get 2 types of blocks: colored, and grey. The goal here is to hit all the colored blocks, and avoid all the grey blocks. In this mode, you can right click to jump over blocks, but the jump is so slow and imprecise that I tend not to use it. Left clicking in mono mode extends fins so that you pick up blocks in all three columns. Use cautiously, or else you'll fill your grid with worthless greys.

Each time you play a song, you can see what other people have played that song and what they've scored. You can also assign yourself a region so as to compare your scores with other people from your home state. I'm thinking that I should've picked Connecticut instead of Colorado though.

So far, my favorite songs to play in Audiosurf are Sabotage by The Beastie Boys, Beside Myself by Jethro Tull, Zanzibar by Billy Joel, Figure Eight by Schoolhouse Rock, and Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode. If you've played the game and have any good ones, let me know.