This week, I discovered a really really fun game called Beat Hazard. It's a game that came out on Xbox 360 indie games, but has now also come out on PC.
I read the description and it sounded fun, but there is no PC demo so I decided to trial the Xbox 360 version. It was fun! So I bought myself a copy for PC via Steam. On Xbox 360 it costs 400 MS Points, but I took the more expensive option - a special offer price of £5.24 - so that works out about £2 more. Various reasons: because I can't get my Xbox 360 and PC to talk to each other properly and my MP3s are on my PC. Oh and my internet connection is being flaky and Xbox Live won't let me play indie games offline. It turns out that the PC version is a more enhanced version of the game anyway. :)
Beat Hazard is a twin-stick top-down-view shoot-em-up that generates enemy wave patterns and bullets from files in your MP3 collection. So you choose a song, it starts playing, and you shoot wave after wave of enemies until the song is over. The gameplay is not rhythm based as such, it's just a shoot-em-up which is listening to the music. It's not just the enemy firing patterns which are dictated by the music, it's your ship's firing patterns too. I have noticed that if there's a quiet bit in a song, my ship's mighty flood of bullets will become trickle from a peashooter, so I end up having to evade the bullets until the music ramps up again.
There are two modes: "play" mode where you can play one track, and get rated on that, and "survival" mode where you just play whatever's in the folder you're looking at until you run out of lives.
It is definitely not a good game to play if you are sensitive to flashing lights. It might literally kill you off, it flashes so much. At first I found it difficult to tell where the bullets were being shot at my ship because of all the visual effects, but I think I got used to it.
I can see myself coming back to this over and over just to try new songs, even though in reality there is still a limited amount of variation (otherwise the leaderboards just wouldn't be fair, would they?). I suppose a player's enjoyment in this game is going to really differ if they only like music that does not create interesting stages. It looks like the developer is still busy maintaining the game and adding new updates to this game too, so that is likely to keep interest up!
One thing I personally have discovered while playing this game is that it's really great to play while listening to old mecha anime songs. Some of these songs will make you really super powered (I have found that FIRE WARS by JAM Project is one example that is good for this). Even better than that, in some songs, the shouting of special attacks sometimes actually causes a huge attack with which you can defeat your enemies! *_* That's just so much fun!
So you can put on Macross 7 music and get Fire Bomber / Nekki Basara to rock everything to death! (er, yeah, perhaps that's abusing his music against his intentions...) You can put some Animetal on and have Eizo Sakamoto scream things to death! This game is just so amusing!
(Actually, the Animetal Marathons are really great for Survival Mode. Not because they make it easy, but because it makes it very varied and there are no pronounced gaps between tracks. I think the 4th marathon is most effective).
The album "EROTIC & HERETIC" by ALI Project is also really good for playing through. It makes exciting stages, some are just full of bosses!
