AudioSurf has been available on Valve’s Steam service for some time now. There has been a recent rumor that it will be appearing on Xbox Live soon. Unfortunately, these rumors don’t look to promising. I have been playing AudioSurf for the PC and using the Xbox 360 Controller. I can see this being a good match also considering the PC version awards achievements similar to those on Xbox Live. Personally, I’d like to see AudioSurf on the Zune or IPod in the future. Keep reading and you’ll figure out why an mp3 player would be a perfect match for this kind of game.

AudioSurf is sort of a racing game and a puzzle game. The idea is to race down a track and hit the colored blocks that fill up a grid. Whenever you fill the grid with at least 3 adjacent colors, they disappear. If you fill up the grid to the top with junk colors that do not match, you receive a point penalty and your vehicle stalls momentarily. What makes AudioSurf so interesting is the blocks come at you in beat to the music. The flashing lights and graphics in the background move to the beat of the music as well. The biggest ‘drive’ to AudioSurf is that you can play your own music library. Tracks are auto generated based on the music file you play. Songs with strong beats like electronica or techno tend to create an intense experience with mostly downhill slops. Slow songs tend to give you a slower speed and more relaxed race track. AudioSurf is compatible with most of the standard music formats (mp3, wma, ogg, iTunes, etc.).

A touch is the unique way the game handles scoreboards. Each song you play has its own online scoreboard. So if you play the song “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, the online scoreboard will show the highest scores for that particular song. If you have bizarre musical tastes like me, you’ll be smart to play those songs first. The less popular the song, the more likely you can gain number one spot. However, playing AudioSurf has made me realize my musical taste really isn’t that bizarre after all. I was surprised to see there are other people out there own the same music I do and play it in AudioSurf.

Tags: PC, Racing, Steam, Word & Puzzle, Xbox Live

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.