NOCLIP Pocket E66 - Old Man Territory - Audiosurf

Ride your podcast. Welcome back to the podcast! This week, we’re
talking about Audiosurf, a procedurally generated rhythm game that
uses your music as the seed for all its levels. No need to worry
about spoilers on this one, as Audiosurf doesn’t have anything in
terms of a plot and all game modes are unlocked right from the
start. In fact, that is part of what makes this game feel sort of
weird in the overall landscape of games. It feels more like a piece
of utility software than a traditional game at times, with it’s
function essentially being applying a point system to listening to
music. The game was extremely popular among the PC crowd around the
time of its release because of its novelty, and there’s a lot of
impressive tech going on to make it work, but it’s rhythm game
elements are pretty soft. Difficulty can largely be determined in
any given song by looking at tempo and the sort of noisiness of the
track, and it ends up feeling a bit linear once you understand
that. Not that there isn’t merit to what Audiosurf is doing. It’s a
way to engage with music in a way that passive listening can’t
accomplish, making you think more about the songs before you play
them and letting you appreciate the nuances of each one that led to
what its track looks like. It’s an extremely cool thing, and the
different playable ships bring a ton of varying mechanics giving it
a lot of depth in terms of practicing and getting better and it’s
well worth checking out if you can get it running on modern
hardware. We’re going to be talking about how your musical taste
can influence the difficulty, sometimes without you even realizing,
why most of the character choices can feel overwhelming, and how
the bygone staple of leaderboards can make you feel like a World
Famous Gamer(TM). Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re
trying to inject some variety into Pocket in the time leading up to
Halloween here, and Audiosurf was a game we’ve had on the list for
years and years and just never got around to actually talking
about. For us, this is a definite nostalgia pick, something that we
played years ago and remembered loving and getting to sit back down
with it again did bring back a lot of those positive memories. Do
you have any positive memories of Audiosurf, or other rhythm games
you played when you were younger? Let us know in the Discord, or
down there in the comments! Next time, we’re going to be talking
about New Pokémon Snap in our quest to play every rail shooter
photography game, so join us then and let us know if there are any
others in that genre we’ve missed because this pointless objective
is for some reason really important to me.