By Kieron Gillen on November 28th, 2008 at 2:20 pm.
When I wrote about QWOP’s inspired silliness, between the giggling at inexpert thigh-control a lovely reader got a tad uppity that I’d linked to it rather than Auditorium. Because being beautiful, atmospheric and pristine means something is more worthy of attention or something. There’s a name we have for people like you: “Edge reader”. By which we mean “Not entirely wrong”. Because Auditorium is beautiful, atmospheric and pristine and well worth hailing.
So we will.
In fact, Auditorium has been plugged by a steady stream of readers for a while now – hello, the lot of you, lovely people – and understandably. The bastard child of Electroplankton, Newton fucking around with some prisms and (er) something beautiful and pristine, Auditorium is about using a series of reflective objects to guide stream of light into Volume-metres. If you do so, the meters fill and the appropriate bit of music plays. Get all the metres playing at once and the full music plays, but the real atmospheric kick is how as you puzzle around the problem of getting all the beams hitting all the meters, you get the sections of music fading in and out.
The puzzles – which are very much problems rather than puzzles, if you see the difference – soon elaborate, requiring you to pass the stream through a areas to change it to the correct colour to activate certain metres, and your other abilities – being able to change the size of an area of effect around one of your re-direction devices – becomes paramount. And if all goes wrong, it’s still beautiful, pristine and atmos… oh, you get the idea.
Bonus marks that the game’s able to go full screen too. Definitely worth spending your lunch-hour on. I’m terrible at it. Auditorium, that is. Not lunch. I’m KING LUNCH.
28/11/2008 at 14:38 Pags says:
A good puzzle game doesn’t punish the player for failure, and that’s probably the greatest strength of this. Even if you can’t work it out straight away, it still rewards you with pretty lights, colours and sounds.
28/11/2008 at 14:45 qrter says:
My dad is better at lunch than yours.
28/11/2008 at 14:46 Ian says:
The music makes this game epic without it actually being an epic game.
However, I’m annoyed and stuck on 2:5.
28/11/2008 at 14:55 Down Rodeo says:
This is really nice, but given that I am stuck on one of the levels a little more variation in the music would have been nice.
28/11/2008 at 14:55 Lu-Tze says:
Very pretty, very nice. Definitely a lunchtime that would be well spent.
28/11/2008 at 14:57 Dominic White says:
Tangential, perhaps, but anyone else notice that the latest version of Flash (10) is way, [i]way[/i] better optimized than previous editions? Animations that’d bring even my high-end rig to a crawl at points now run silky smooth.
And it makes games like this all the better, as they stay pretty much locked at their intended framerate.
28/11/2008 at 15:06 bc9b89 says:
Flash 10 went from being absolutely impossibly slow on the Macintosh to still stupidly slow but not that bad.
28/11/2008 at 15:06 MacBeth says:
Pedantry corner: meters, not metres…
Otherwise, nice game, very mellow. Works particularly well after a lunchtime pint, I find.
28/11/2008 at 15:22 Down Rodeo says:
Disregard my earlier comment, I was being stupid (and crap at the game).
@MacBeth: I’ve just wikied it. It seems to be “poetic metre” generally but like so much in language (it looks like you read Private Eye so you’ll know the mess that is) they are probably both acceptable forms.
28/11/2008 at 16:17 subedii says:
Hey I like EDGE! :(
28/11/2008 at 16:37 garren says:
Can’t get past 1:4 /ashamed
Please tell me I’m not the only one
28/11/2008 at 16:45 Gap Gen says:
When you get all the boxes to fill it’s like an epiphany. Amazing.
28/11/2008 at 16:48 Tux says:
Lovely, and at the sweet spot of difficulty and playability. On a tangent, has anyone seen this? It’s a disco-hard drive song. So bizarre… http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html
28/11/2008 at 17:08 St4ud3 says:
I’m stuck in the lvl that’s on the screenshot :/
28/11/2008 at 17:34 Sören Höglund says:
Man, that’s a pretty awful title Kieron, even for you.
I need to watch that movie again though. It’s been a good while since a movie made me curl up in a fetal position with terror.
28/11/2008 at 17:37 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
Awesome… but now I keep seeing particles flying all over my screen.
28/11/2008 at 17:46 Calabi says:
I, LIKE IT!
28/11/2008 at 17:59 Scandalon says:
Curse you Kierion! I spent an hour playing that… Very nice.
Ended at 3.3, I think? The one right after the 2 orbiters and 1 left-pusher. Not so much stuck as just…”wait, I have 1 orbiter and 1 pusher and…THAT many targets, spread out like THAT? Uh, I’m done. (Wish they had a save capability…)
28/11/2008 at 18:09 lobsterjohnson says:
Nice post title you’ve got there!
28/11/2008 at 19:13 Alctel says:
3:6 has me beat :(
28/11/2008 at 19:18 Jonas says:
Wow, that’s… wow. That’s one beautiful, atmospheric and pristine game.
It’s just a demo though. This makes me sad. Sad smiley: :(
28/11/2008 at 19:29 The Poisoned Sponge says:
Yeah, the little message at the end was a little annoying. I want the full game now. Damn you successful marketting!
28/11/2008 at 19:53 Goplay says:
Loved it! Can’t wait for more levels. I flew through it:)
28/11/2008 at 20:04 I Am Thermite says:
A friend of mine showed me this yesterday, it’s a really great game. I moseyed on through until 3-6, the level with two swirls and a left. I finished it eventually but jeez that level took me the longest.
28/11/2008 at 21:46 footle says:
It’s lovely.
Go on RPS – start quizzing the developers…
28/11/2008 at 22:30 Wedge says:
Beat the whole game, pretty nifty. As for the last level (3-6), I managed to get just the right split using two orbiters, and didn’t even touch the third piece.
Though the game is nice, the problem of using such fancy physics with a puzzle game is readily apparent here, as a pixel difference in the placement or radius of one of the pieces can make all the difference in success or failure. And this wouldn’t be hugely a problem if it weren’t for the HUGE effect it can potentially have on the flow as a result of these differences, so you could be very close to a solution, and it would still look totally off.
Still a cool spinoff concept though, I remember there used to be a game a lot like this where you place different solar masses to try and alter the trajectory of an object to hit a target point. Can’t remember anything else about it though (I THINK it was done in Java, not really sure).
28/11/2008 at 23:13 Jonas says:
Thankfully I find that the hardest levels can generally be solved by just messing about for a while. I find it a soothing, almost meditative activity, and eventually I will chance upon some positioning that solves the level.
29/11/2008 at 00:34 caesarbear says:
Tad uppity? I hope to stop at nothing but the full haughty.
Here’s another one for you simpletons. It’s a more refined take on Immitation Pickle’s Galcon: Phage Wars
The ‘intended’ solution always seems to have a reasonable amount of wiggle room, but, yes some of the alternate solutions can make you feel like a jewel cutter.
29/11/2008 at 02:02 Phantom says:
Wedge, you are talking about Orbitrunner: http://www.gamezhero.com/online-games/sports-games/orbitrunner-games.html
29/11/2008 at 05:30 spd from Russia says:
argh the controlls are annoying and very unprescise. damn flash
29/11/2008 at 07:00 James T says:
Audition reference noted, reader unmoved.
29/11/2008 at 12:32 Tei says:
hence.. theres a new word: soundcandy :-)
29/11/2008 at 16:25 jph wacheski says:
Wow! simply the best new game I have seen in a very long time,. just love it,. is a puzzle-game with a dj-mixing soundscape built onto an ambiant light-painting. Bravo!
29/11/2008 at 21:58 Hmm-hmm. says:
I like this.. a lot.
..I just wish I could get beyond that dang winter level (2-4, I think).
29/11/2008 at 23:32 Gap Gen says:
Scandalon: It does remember what level you’re on, at least on my computer.
30/11/2008 at 13:52 Ginger Yellow says:
“However, I’m annoyed and stuck on 2:5.”
Likewise, although without the annoyed bit.
02/12/2008 at 19:41 chesh says:
That was a well-spent lunch. Thank you.
03/12/2008 at 03:40 Jesse says:
Like Pags said, every time I want to frustrated with this game, my mind starts to go “Ooh…pretty colors and sounds.”
That’s a good feeling.
04/12/2008 at 05:01 Wil says:
What a fantastic find. Some of those are really, really tricky, and I want more! Rabbit?! 2.4, 2.5 and 3.4 were *really* tricky.
Thank you very much (and whoever found it here and then Penny Arcade) for improving my day.
28/02/2009 at 12:09 Thomas Lawrence says:
Full version is now on sale.
12/08/2009 at 03:48 Jason says:
I’m stuck with 2.5 winter, i’ve tried every way for a week and i cant solve it.
05/07/2011 at 15:45 stevee says:
thank you, i really like this game. happy this is on sale now!
05/07/2011 at 15:45 stevee says:
by the way, similar game to this one, you can just find here: http://www.dr-games.com