Posts tagged with “Auditorium”

Last week Brenton, an indie dev from Upstate NY, drove all the way here to Boston to talk to our monthly meet up for local indie devs. He was showing off Planck, an interesting new take on a music game being worked on by new start up Shadegrown Games.

The game is kind of like a mash up between a shoot ‘em up and Frequency. You play as an invincible speedboat zipping along a tar black sea, shooting objects in your path with 1 to 4 weapons. Each of your weapons plays the notes of a different violin, and each of the enemies explodes in a little firework which plays notes as well. As you can imagine there is a lot of shooting going on, and you wind up making a fairly coherent, looping, and simple yet gratifying song in the process. Different weapons/instruments behave in different ways, but none of it really matters much as you are invincible so you don’t have much pressure to shoot/explode targets beyond what music you’re trying to make. You also have the ability to “crossfade”, which shifts the tint of the playing field and the style of the music you’re making while keeping the same beat and theme. The whole thing has a nice neon and water aesthetic, and kind of reminds me of Auditorium.

The game is interesting, and fun to play even if it is a bit rough around the edges. The song gets a bit repetitive after a while (only one track is available in the demo), and the gameplay seems aimless at times. That said the game is a neat psychedelic experience, and certainly worth a play. It also looks fairly polished for such an early stage of development. We’re excited to see where these guys go with the game – we’re looking forward to new mechanics, new levels and abilities, and more compelling gameplay choices. And I bet the Shadegrown guys can deliver!

Go download the game and give it a shot, especially if you like music games!

2009 was an awesome year for games! And we played a lot of them! Here’s a recap of the great games we played this year. If you haven’t tried them yet, now’s your chance! They are all FREE and just waiting for you to enjoy them.

Our year started off with a great little platformer called Eversion that has a scary twist (a retail version is in the works). We then laughed a ton while living out the Olympic dreams of QWOP. There were a few fun games in the Boston Global Game Jam, and The Redistricting Game taught us about how messed up our current electoral system is.

The Legend of Princess gave us a glimpse of what could have been a sequel to Zelda 2 (on the NES), and Dino Run ate up a bunch of our time as we ran away from Armageddon with our dinosaur brethren. Speaking of dinosaurs, have you checked out Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When They Roar yet? It’s a pivotal work in gaming. Gemcraft is an addicting little tower defense game with a fun chromatic twist, and Facade is an older game (2004 or 5, I think) but still a lot of fun to play today.

Effing Hail is a neat little flash game where you destroy buildings, airplanes, and satellites with hail, or if you are in a more constructive mood you can try building with Grow Cube. Don’t Eat the Mushroom (and Knytt Stories) is a hilarious game about what happens when you do (or don’t) eat the mushroom, and is a must play for any serious gamer. Finally this year we enjoyed racing through the apocalypse in Canabalt, and subsequently relaxed with the music of Auditorium.

These were all terrific games, if you haven’t tried them yet be sure to go play them all now!

I like music games. Rock Band, Guitar Hero, the new DJ games, AudiOdyssey, if it is a music game I’m gonna play it. Auditorium is made by Cipher Prime and Will Stallwood, and is a fun new flash twist on a music game. Rather than being a traditional rhythm game in which you have to “play” (type) notes in order to hear a famous song, Auditorium is a fun puzzle game in which you have to push colored light into music boxes which then play a sort of repeating classical tune. It starts off fairly easy but gets pretty damn hard after a few levels, and most (if not all) of the levels are solvable in many, many ways.

Personally I think the game is great. The pseudo-classical music is nice, and the neon lights on black background aesthetic is quite compelling and enjoyable. I think that normally I would find such a complicated game frustrating but the music is so nice that I don’t mind spending huge amounts of time figuring out each puzzle. I also like how each music box plays a different instrument so you can hear each individually before combining them for the full song. My only gripe about the game is that once you do solve a level you don’t get to hear your composition for long, as the game almost immediately flows into the next stage. Having an option to keep listening for a while would be nice.

Normally we only feature games that are free in “What We’re Playing“, but Auditorium only has a free demo of a couple of levels (you have to pay for the full game). In this case we thought the game was good enough to mention it anyway.