Follow the yellow brick road

Audiosurf is not what I would call a typical game. There’s no violence, no story, and not any action per se. More or less, it’s a visual representation of your music that happens to be interactive. And I don’t mean that in a condescending or negative way. The game does what it does extremely well.

The process is simple: you load an mp3 (or CD, wma, ogg, m4a, flac, wav, or even an m3u), the game creates a linear “racetrack” with peaks and valleys depending on the speed of the tune (uphill: slow, downhill: fast), and you ride it on a little spaceship, collecting blocks and scoring points. Or if you’d rather not have the pressure of amassing points, simply ride the track and enjoy the scenery.

Pick your fun

Audiosurf’s longevity is only limited by the amount of music that you own. Its life is further extended by the multiple gaming modes and the online high-score list. There are two main modes of play, gathering colored blocks while avoiding gray ones, and collecting blocks while attempting to match three or more of any one color. Of these two modes, a combination of six unique challenges await (1 for avoiding grays, 5 for matching colors), each with their own difficulty level (a mix of the standard easy, medium, and hard) resulting in fourteen distinct ways to experience any one single piece of music. If my math seems screwy it’s because some challenges can only be completed on one or two difficulty levels, not all three.

The online high-score list is where to show off to your friends and the world how great you are at catching colored blocks to a disco beat – or country, metal, rock, etc. If you own a song that a lot of other people have, it’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of wanting to be number one on the list.

Words and screenshots can’t do the game justice. I, too, was a skeptic until I finally tried it out. It looks complicated, but it’s really easy to play, just tough to master. Definitely worth checking out at least once, even if you’re not a gamer.