Ride your music (fnar, fnar)

I haven't written about games on the blog for a while, principally because I haven't played anything that's set my world on fire. But, for the last week or two, I've been toying around with a little thing called Audiosurf and, while there are no flames in my garden, my keyboard is slightly singes.

Basically, it's a cross between a shoot-em-up (think Space Invaders) a puzzle game (Tetris) and a media player (iTunes). Seasoned gamers would draw parallels with Rez or Space Giraffe but, let's face it, they're just nerds with too much time on their fat sweaty hands.

You take control of a ship flying along an outer-space race course, which is littered with bricks (bloody asbo teens, etc). Points are scored by collecting similar-coloured bricks and chaining them together. The more bricks you have in a sequence, the more points you score.

It's not exactly a ground-breaking concept, I grant you, but Audiosurf has an ace up its sleeve: The racetrack is based on the song playing in the background, and you can use any track from your iTunes library to create a new course.

Really intense bits of music - guitar solos, for example - make the game speed up. Hundreds of bricks come flying at you, simulating the experience of being a Chinese policeman in Tibet. Slower songs - anything by Westlife - are more like a stroll in the countryside with the occasional speed bump.

When you finish a level, you get shown the scores of all the people in the world who have played the same piece of music. I am proud to say that I am currently the globe's best at Little Red Corvette.

I'm not so good on Ace of Spades.

Best of all, the game only costs $9.95 - or £5 in real money - and you can download it now from audio-surf.com.

Here's a video of some nutter playing The Rolling Stones' Paint It Black:

Audiosurf - Paint It Black

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