Ride your podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast! This week, we’re talking about Audiosurf, a procedurally generated rhythm game that uses your music as the seed for all its levels. No need to worry about spoilers on this one, as Audiosurf doesn’t have anything in terms of a plot and all game modes are unlocked right from the start. In fact, that is part of what makes this game feel sort of weird in the overall landscape of games. It feels more like a piece of utility software than a traditional game at times, with it’s function essentially being applying a point system to listening to music. The game was extremely popular among the PC crowd around the time of its release because of its novelty, and there’s a lot of impressive tech going on to make it work, but it’s rhythm game elements are pretty soft. Difficulty can largely be determined in any given song by looking at tempo and the sort of noisiness of the track, and it ends up feeling a bit linear once you understand that. Not that there isn’t merit to what Audiosurf is doing. It’s a way to engage with music in a way that passive listening can’t accomplish, making you think more about the songs before you play them and letting you appreciate the nuances of each one that led to what its track looks like. It’s an extremely cool thing, and the different playable ships bring a ton of varying mechanics giving it a lot of depth in terms of practicing and getting better and it’s well worth checking out if you can get it running on modern hardware. We’re going to be talking about how your musical taste can influence the difficulty, sometimes without you even realizing, why most of the character choices can feel overwhelming, and how the bygone staple of leaderboards can make you feel like a World Famous Gamer(TM).
Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re trying to inject some variety into Pocket in the time leading up to Halloween here, and Audiosurf was a game we’ve had on the list for years and years and just never got around to actually talking about. For us, this is a definite nostalgia pick, something that we played years ago and remembered loving and getting to sit back down with it again did bring back a lot of those positive memories. Do you have any positive memories of Audiosurf, or other rhythm games you played when you were younger? Let us know in the Discord, or down there in the comments! Next time, we’re going to be talking about New Pokémon Snap in our quest to play every rail shooter photography game, so join us then and let us know if there are any others in that genre we’ve missed because this pointless objective is for some reason really important to me.