Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Girls Aloud. Biology. Ninja Mono. That was my favourite Audiosurf gig. I’m keen to see what that bounciest of pop tracks will play like in Audiosurf Air, the sequel to the rather lovely music riding puzzle racing game. It was 2008 when Audiosurf came out, a pre-Skrillex world. If there was a game that could have benefited from ‘the drop’ it was Audiosurf. I hope there’s specific dubstep code in this version. Trailer is after the dropppppp.
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Once upon a time, Audiosurf was briefly RPS’ favourite game ever (although not in the case of John, who only likes beat-free music featuring men with nasal American accents*. Or Jim, who doesn’t like emotions). We put in our songs, we turned them into blissfully surreal racetracks/match-3 puzzles, we fought endlessly for higher scores to prove we knew our most beloved songs better than anyone else did. And then we stopped. Why? Oh, there’s probably an essay in that, but the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, basically.

I earnestly hope that newly-announced sequel Audiosurf Air will bring about a new fever for digital synesthesia, though: I have almost a half-year of new music that was never Audiosurfed, all manner of new colour-explosions, rollercoaster drops and giddy undulations potentially awaiting me.
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In the light of recent events the RPS team has been taking a look at various games involved in the Potato Sack. Of these we’d suggest playing Audiosurf. It’s quite the thing.

What are you doing right now? Working? Smiling? Breathing? Well, stop with that nonsense and go straight over to the Steam page for The Potato Sack, a new bundle of indie games offering £108′s worth of great indie games, including Amnesia, Super Meat Boy, Toki Tori (which you can read Kieron shouting about here), The Ball (which Jim and John talk about here) and Defense Grid: The Awakening, for a paltry £27. I’d eagerly pay £30 for those five games alone, and there are another eight in the pack.

While if you already own two or three of these games you might have a tricky decision ahead of you, if you don’t own a single one of them then this is an absolute no-brainer. Buy! Buy it now! There’s even a Team Fortress 2 hat in it for you. And just in case only one or two of the participating games catch your eye, each of them is currently enjoying a 50% off sale. Amazing.

Whatever could be beneath that tasteful festive wrapping paper? It might be a shiny red bicycle, or a Scaletrix set, or perhaps a partially asphyxiated puppy. It’s probably some sort of videogame, though. Be a bit silly if not, really.

So, for the fifth game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…
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If you’re American, you may not understand the curious institution we Britishers call bank holidays. Because of a general agreement that UK weather is so hideous that it’s not worth going outside except during the third week of June, instead families and friends choose to holiday inside their favourite bank for a long weekend. Lloyds TSB is famed for its indoor beaches, while Halifax really does excel at pony trekking tours of the vaults. In the evenings, we all drink tea and discuss the decline of the gold standard.

Also we go shopping. There’s an awful lot of discounted barbecue sets to be had this weekend. Fortunately the internet seems to have caught on. Of course, Audiosurf being reduced to just $5 (about £2.50, Britishians!) this weekend has absolutely nothing to do with it being a bank holiday here, but it’s nice to pretend our weird customs have some some tiny relevance in Americaland.
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Dylan Fitterer just dropped us a line to say how pleased he is with the latest act on his Audiosurf radio. It’s Godheads of Nineties Sex-infused electronic rock, Girls Vs Boys. He loves them. Hey – I love them. But I didn’t love them enough to reprogram some extra variation into the free tracks when you play them, which Fitterer did. Go Basstation and you’ve four lanes to deal with. All the Rage makes you face three times as many blanks as usual. The Come Down only lets you play mono, with no Stealth possible. Let it Breath demands a minimum of five blocks for a match. And – finally – you’re able to play all the four tracks in a first person mode.

All of it sounds like as good an opportunity as ever to return to Audiosurf for a run or eight. The page is here, where it’s still available for a highly reasonable ten dollars. Or there’s the demo. Yes.

If I actually had any old flames of such calibre that, upon re-encountering them some years later, I was so blown away by their charm and beauty that I wondered why I’d ever broken up with them in the first place, I would surely have a most excellent analogy for how it felt to play Audiosurf for the first time in months. But I don’t, so I don’t.

What I do have is Audiosurf back in my life (and the rather surprising discovery that I hadn’t yet played any LCD Soundsystem on it. This has now been corrected), and lo, I am happy. The reason for this slight return is the release of a meaty free update to the MP3-racing synaesthesia supremo. Sexy details on this sexy so-called ‘FM Update’ are waiting sexily beneath the sexy cut…
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Audiosurf, in terms of both commercial and critical success, is the indie-hit of the year so far. It managed to pick up an IGF award at the same time it was sitting at the top of the Steam charts for all of February. It’s caused more listening to eighties-pop music than is strictly healthy at RPS towers, and we love it still. We grabbed an opportunity to speak to its creator, Dylan Fitterer. We talk about music, people’s physical response to music and whether he’s incredibly rich. But we start with the core of things; that is, how Audiosurf works anyway…
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Sorry, it’s a bit of a deluge of PC Gamer today, as they’ve just thrown a mega-ton of last-issue content up onto their site. Think of it as like visiting relatives on the other side of the country.

On my part, there’s my Audiosurf review, replete with entirely gratuitous Vonnegut quotation. It’s a significantly more upbeat take on the game than the RPS verdict (more Verdicts soon, promise), which arguably got a little sidetracked onto picking holes in the game – probably because by that point we’d already fired our happier hyperbole at each other at some length. And also because my own interest in Audiosurf tends towards the blissful edification of my ears and eyes, rather than trying to perfect the match-3 element. It’s not often that I stay with a game for a significant time after the review’s filed, but my most intense Audiosurf playing came in the fortnight following my word-fart. I suspect I’ll be voting it slightly higher in the year-end polls than most folks.
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Like some sort of lumbering clockwork giant, the RPS Hivemind has duly constructed the second instalment of its new Monday feature – discussing a recent game of note, then casting a vote upon its worth. No ludicrous letter-based scoring systems here, though – simply, to buy, or not to buy? That is our question.

This time around, it’s award-winning synaesthesia game Audiosurf. We’ve waffled about it a fair bit on RPS previously, so you’d presume we all loved it, right? You may be surprised. You may be less surprised to see our thin veil of camaraderie ripped aside to reveal the snidey barbs, self-interest and hypocrisy beneath. Rock, Paper, Shotgun – like an old, married couple arguing about groceries.
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