Game Stooge

REVIEW: AudioSurf: Ride Your Music (PC)

• Scribbled on March 4th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Action, Music/Rhythm, PC, Reviews

If you thought your ripped CD music was just for iTunes, well, AudioSurf: Ride Your Music is going to change all that. Pretty soon, you’re going to be buying CDs just to avoid the DRM most iTunes songs come with just to be able to play them in the game. Maybe this will even destroy the use of DRM coding in songs - who knows?

All you need to know is AudioSurf is f’ing awesome.

The gameplay of AudioSurf is simple, almost basic, arcade action - you ride a spaceship down a tube, collecting colored boxes. Depending on the type of game you play, you either are trying to avoid boxes while picking up others, or trying to capture different valued boxes to create patterns of 3 or more - the boxes’ placement is dependent on whatever lane you picked them up in. Again, depending on the game type you’re playing, your ship can either pick up boxes and put them down in specific places, jump, grab everything in a row, and so forth.

The real magic comes from the music and the track layout. The game allows you to select a non-DRM music track from your hard drive, and it will analyze the song (fortunately, the long process is only done once; after the analysis, the track is already ready.) The track created by the software is amazingly faithful to the song - the slower the music, the slower the track, and the reverse is true. Using, for example, “Stealing the Enterprise” from the Star Trek III: The Search for Spock soundtrack, results in alternatingly slow and breakneck moments. In addition, the track winds, rises, and falls perfectly in tune with the song, so much so, that there’s an option to just do nothing but ride the track and enjoy the music.

The game also takes an Xbox Live Arcade tack with its own Achievements and leaderboards - one of the most fun things about the leaderboards is that it goes by song, and since one must pick one of their own ripped tracks, you can see how many people share your musical taste as well as their competing songs.

If there is one caveat, it is that there’s few multiplayer modes, and all are offline. It’s somewhat logical since songs must be ripped to play, but since they are DRM-free, why not just allow the game to send the song and track to the other player’s machine just like many first person shooters do when the other player does not have the map?

The $9.95 price point is the right amount for this game. You can try the demo and buy the game from the official site or off Steam. The demo allows you to play 5 styles of gameplay with the permission to try 5 of your own songs. This game just screams to be ported to Macs, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. (The XBLA-styled features make one assume that they at least are considering it.)

Check the demo out - you’ll be hooked.

[System requirements: Intel® Pentium® 4 1.6 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0 or higher, Windows XP/Vista, DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card, 32 MB DirectX 9.0 compatible Graphics card. (support for Pixel Shader 3.0 recommended)]