Turba

The Concept: Once again, this game also tries to do something new with the genre. In this case, the concept is to make a match-three-or-more puzzle game with levels based around your music. Multipliers and combos are built up by triggering the groups of blocks in time with the game’s tempo.

The Good: Supports most open media formats (.mp3, .ogg, .wav), as well as Audio CDs. It also has leader-boards for songs over going by song-length. The rising-and-falling blocks puzzles work really well, and I kind of like the game’s mouse controls – on easy.

The Bad: Proprietary song formats (read – Apple) aren’t supported, so if you’re been ripping your songs in a higher quality Apple audio format, you’ll have to convert them to mp3. Also, difficulty in this game doesn’t scale very well. A song that I did well on in regular I failed outright, and early in the song. Additionally, you can’t adjust the screen resolution in full screen, so you’re either playing windowed or full screen at a very low resolution.

Verdict: Give this one a pass.

Recommended Music: Slower paced, longer music actually works better for this than techno, metal, or any really faster paced pieces. In particular, classical music should work well.

Rhythm Zone

The Concept: It seems surprising that no-one has tried to emulate Guitar Hero with the earlier games in this genre. Well, someone has finally done that with Rhythm Zone, a game which where you have to hit falling gems in rhythm to your music. The game also features downloadable music tracks for free.

The Good: The backgrounds are much more dynamic than the backgrounds in Audiosurf, while still maintaining some abstract sense to them. The game also works with all the digital audio file formats I’ve tried with it (though I haven’t tried .ogg and .flac). The difficulty levels also scale really well.

The Bad: While the game supports USB controllers, it doesn’t work very well with USB controllers. In particular, while the game works with the Rock Band guitar, because it works with button presses alone without hitting the strum bar, I found a certain disconnect with playing in this fashion – I would pre-press the notes, as I would in Rock Band, which would also register as a “strum”, and would be considered a missed note by the game. Now, this is mostly a psychological thing for me, but it does bear mentioning.

Also, the DLC for more songs is small, which is unfortunate, in part because Audiosurf has added songs every week, but also because there are several achievements related to the DLC songs, and beating certain numbers of featured songs, which are unavailable until we get enough songs to meet the needs of those achievements.

Verdict: I do really like this game, in spite of some notable flaws, and will recommend picking it up.

Recommended Song: “Eminence Front” by The Who works really well for this game, as well as most Pink Floyd.

Space Invaders: Infinity Gene

The Concept: In Music Mode in the game, the game generates stages similar to the other stages in the game based on tracks on your PS3 or Xbox 360.

The Good: Most of the levels I played were, frankly, on par with the other levels in the game. Because they were procedurally generated, I wouldn’t say they were of the same quality as the designed levels of the game, but they turned out very well, and you didn’t necessarily have to dramatically change your play style for these levels.

The Bad: There are no leader-boards for music mode, and you’re stuck with the music formats your console supports.

The Verdict: This is the cherry on top of the delicious sundae that is the rest of the game. It’s yummy and delicious, but you shouldn’t buy the sundae for the cherry.

Recommended Music: Since, basically, any music you’re going to put on your console will most likely be ripped from CDs, you might as well go with concept albums. It will fit in well with the tone of “Normal” mode anyway.

So, what game should you get? If you’re on the PC, you can’t go wrong with Audiosurf, with Rhythm Zone being a close second. On consoles, you’ve got either Beat Hazard on the Xbox 360 or on both consoles the Space Invaders: Infinity Gene. I’d go with Infinity Gene, if only because it has a lot of enjoyable game content outside of Music Mode as well as satisfactory levels based on the music in your collection.