The Silver Age Begins...

Now that I've got a scanner I can subject you all to the various pictures that I can't reproduce in MS Paint. Here's a brief comic showing my standard reaction to the presence of a cat:

Audiosurf Vs Beat Hazard

While working towards the last achievement in Beat Hazard it occurred to me that I'd never got around to doing a comparison between Audiosurf and Beat Hazard despite there being no good reason not to. After all I frequently lament the fact that I find it difficult to rate media in a vacuum or in relation to it's context at large, but not in a direct comparison. So why the hell haven't I done this yet?

Anyway, AS and BH share the same premise, using your music to generate the level, but take it in two different directions genre-wise. AS gives you a track the length relative to your song choice and you 'race' do it, collecting coloured blocks to make groups of 3+ whereas BH gives you a top down space shooter where the firepower is determined by your music. These are both games were basically the entire goal is to get a high score. For convenience I'm going to harness the ultimate power.....of subheadings.

Visuals

The great thing about superficial things is that they're generally easier to discuss. AS' visuals could be summed up as simplistic. There isn't much in the way of textures, so everything is rather blocky and reminiscent of virtual reality in older films. Not that there is anything wrong with this; you're a car collecting blocks for points, not some war-wearied soldier or something. While the objects may be plain, the colouring is actually important. The blocks are colour-coded for value, with hotter colours being worth more. Further more, the track and background take on a hue relative to the speed of song/track, with the slow sections being blue or purple, and the fastest, most intense parts red.

BH is probably the better of the two games in terms of actual visual quality. The spaceships have some detail, and there's plenty of bloom. The catch is there's too much bloom. You see, visual distortion is a deliberate game design choice.

Artist's representation of a climatic boss fight, probably.

Unfortunately BH doesn't take a note from AS and so colour is meaningless in the gameplay. With the exception of the grey ships and the yellow missiles, the colours of the various explosions, lasers and so forth all alternate through a neon spectrum with no apparent rhyme or reason.

Gameplay

AS can be rationalised into two different styles: combo and evasion. In combo you collect the various coloured blocks and the challenge is not getting yourself in a position where you can't make groups of 3+. You can select from several racers each with their own unique abilities which further varies the gameplay. In evasion there is only one colour to get, but there are also negative grey blocks, which hurt your score noticeably, so the challenge has a lot more focus on fast manoeuvring and less quick decisions. There is only one racer choice for this (because evasion style is really just a racer's ability).

BH has several actual gameplay modes, but the core challenge remains the same: you continuously shoot while dodging oncoming objects. Beyond that there's the choices of when to use a screen-clearing bomb and when to stop shooting to raise your point multiplier. This is what kills a lot of BH's longevity for me as all rounds play out basically the same, whereas AS as some variety.

Music Relevance

Despite being a fundamental part of both games, there isn't too much depth to the effect music has on the games. In the end it is really just the speed of the song that does anything. AS changes the gradient of the track based on the song, with slow parts being uphill and fast naturally being down.

In BH your musics speed effects both the size and power of your shots, and the frequency of the enemies. Your weapons will vary between a pea shooter and a death-beam that covers a quarter of the screen, and the idea is in the lulls where you guns are useless, the idea is to play evasively and raise your daredevil multiplier. Sounds pretty cool right? Just like communism, in theory it works. As far as I can tell which enemies spawn and in what amount seems to be all determined by the difficulty and not be the music at all. I've had plenty of times where I've had massive lasers but only a couple asteroids to destroy, and other times have been stuck with the pea shooter and had to survive against two bosses.

Longevity

These are both score-based games. There are no definite goals and accomplishments, as any success just means that now the bar is higher. Personally I'm really not interested in games like this; I want to have more concrete goals, and I can't stand that feeling that there is no ceiling, I could always do better.

AS has a noticeable lead over BH in this area, as each song has its own global leaderboard complete with comment, whereas BH has just a leaderboard for highest scores in general or something (I really don't know exactly, BH doesn't present it after a song unlike AS).

Conclusion

Whether these games are worth playing depends on how into the whole 'your music makes the game' idea. If you really like that then you'll probably be disappointed, but if you already like the genre of either game anyway, then you might get more enjoyment out of it than me.

What I would like is a game that is a cross between AS and Mario Kart. I like the idea of a song making the track but I hate the implementation. I want people to race against, I want weapons, I want the track to be a circuit rather than a straight line. But that's not going to happen. Or is it?



No.