A trip to Akihabara is always worth it when you can buy one of these:

Soundtrack for Rhythm Tengoku (Heaven), all the way from the GBA version to the DS! 3 CDs chock full of 140 insanely addictive songs! I’m listening to them right now… they don’t call it heaven for nothing! Hehehehhehehe, I’m just so happy right now!

What? You don’t know what is Rhythm Tengoku? Shame on you! It’s a music game with no bars, no arrows, no interface, just plain fun mini-games. Made by the superb Wario team. You MUST get this game! If you don’t have a DS, buy one! For this game! NOW!

Daim and I have two more games left to get perfect, the ping pong and moai statues hard versions. We might pass it one day…. kaaaaaaa mo ne, hoi!

I lied. I can’t resist blogging about this. I have to tell the world how great this game is.

It’s a game that I’ve always dreamed of creating. A game where you can take in an MP3, CD music or WMA, and generate some sort of gameplay based on it. Of course, I’m completely inspired by games like Vib Ribbon and Rez.

Now someone beat me to it, with Audiosurf, released by Invisible Handlebar. It became the IGF 2008 Seumas McNally Grand Prize finalist. Just bought it online yesterday for 10 bucks. Clearly, the best investment I’ve made this year.

It’s a beautiful game where you choose a music track in your hard drive, then a superb psychedelic racing track will be generated. The slow parts of the song will be smooth and uphill (you can see what’s coming), whereas the fast parts of the song will be bumpier and downhill.

The objective of the game is to collect blocks based on colour. The more of the same colours, the more points. The cool thing is that the incoming blocks follow the rhythm of the music. Such is the complexity of the audio analyser of the game.

It runs on the Steam engine. Whether you like it or not, it allows for more community-based services. It compares your score with others who played the same mp3 (based on ID3 tag) to see how well you did.

It’s a great game, and it’s truly meant for everyone who enjoys music. I had a whole lot of fun playing Audiosurf with the tons of game and anime music in my hard drive. And I hardly even played one eighth of it! What a BIG distraction from my work!

Here are some sample tracks I found on YouTube:

Bleach – Asterisk

Blur – Song 2

Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei – Kusou Rumba

Go buy it coz it’s worth every sen! And support independent game developers! Go to http://www.audio-surf.com.

Damn, have to get back to work. Wait, one more song…

Once upon a time, there was a man named Jinja~ who lived in faraway place called Japan.

He was waiting for a package to arrive. He waited and waited. Finally, the postman arrived and gave him the package he truly longed for. Oh look, it’s The Music Animation Machine!

The great Stephen of California wrote such a wonderful toy. He always thought that musical scores were hard to read. So he created a toy that enables you to compose music by setting an animated score. The position of the notes indicate the pitch and length, and each note lights up at the exact moment it sounds! Now even you and me can read the score!

Oh i’m sorry, let’s go back to Jinja~. You see, he loves games so much, he wanted to express this interest by creating a retro game musical score using graphics. So he worked day and night to come up with a masterpiece.

“Finally fantasy, I finished!”, he screamed with excitement. “Even if my listeners couldn’t get the game the music comes from, they can always look at the graphical score!”.

Hurriedly, he rushed through the jungle called the Internet and uploaded his toil and sweat on NicoNico Douga. Another guy picked up on his passion and posted his video on YouTube. Here’s the result:

And that, my friend, was when a genius was born.

I still haven’t compiled all the Raya pics, so the birthday raya post has to wait. It’s still raya anyway, right? :D

Just 2 days ago, the Ballistic Wars team (minus nyin *sob*) went for some interview. One of the questions: “What’s your favourite game?”. Such a difficult question. Of course, we grouped our answers into different genres.

Though I enjoy playing them, I generally suck in strategy and fighting games. But I do rock (literally) in one genre: music games :)

I’m what they call the ol’ skool Konami music gamer. Pop’n Music (my fave), DDR, Beatmania, Drummania and Guitar Freaks. I rarely play those online music games possibly because I enjoy playing in the arcade and consoles more. And I’ve been rather busy in my later years. (yea, i’m freaking old)

Ah, I remember the good ol’ days when I played Dance Dance Revolution in Sungei Wang on Maniac mode and stepped my way through hell a million times. Now, I can’t imagine going through it even once. Yea, age and fat took over. Fortunately, my fingers didn’t get fat, so I still have the skills for pop’n and ez2dj ;)

Coincidentally, I was browsing through my old Level UP! blog (remember that junk?) and suddenly remembered about this video my friend took last year:

Yup, that’s me playing Pop’n Music in Timesquare. The song was Eurobeat Love2 Sugar EX level 38. My friend wanted to take a video of me getting the usual full combo, but I failed (hence my thumbs down at the end of the video).

Times have changed. Now, people are dancing on the Pump it Up machine for style rather than accuracy. And even though I won the 2nd prize for an o2jam competition once, I suck compared to the recent o2jam players. I barely can play music past level 25, yet I see people playing level 30 songs with ease :|

Ah, suddenly I’m inspired to create a music game like Rez and Space Channel 5. More on creative music games like these in http://www.easyonlygames.com/glog tomorrow!