Beat Hazard

[twmac]

Sorry to be gushing over two games in such short period of time but I spent about 5 hours over the weekend playing this game from the Indie games section on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

At its core it is a twin stick shooter which I'll admit is probably getting dull for everyone but this one takes songs from your hard drive or streamed from your PC and creates procedurally generated challenges that changes the type of enemies you have to face, the number and your bullet power depending on the music.

It has more going on than that by allowing you to 'level up' by building up highscores to give yourself perks, as well as setting you mini challenges that would be achievements if it were an Xbox LIVE Arcade title.

The fun has been experimenting with different music types and it has a barcode battlers feel to it (one of the challenges is kill 8 boss characters in one song and I haven't found a song that spawns that many in its duration).

The easiest without being unfulfulling songs are up beat dance songs (the game loves anything chiptune) the dullest so far has been hip-hop and metal in the Pantera vein. Some of the more extreme Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares and Mogwai have been by far the most challenging.

Aphex and Venetian Snares because of the crazy number of beats, Mogwai generally because of its short, caustic blasts that generate a lot of enemies followed by relative quiet which means that your guns are underpowered and it is impossible to kill anything.

It is 400 points and very much worth it, admittedly I don't have any experience with procedural games so it just might be that this is my first and hence why I like it.

Warning: the game does not recognise external storage devices like Hard drives attached via USB so you will need to have music ripped to your X360 or have it streamed from your PC.

Edited November 10, 2009 by twmac
edited the title, well it does sound more interesting now surely?

[Garple]

Sorry to be gushing over two games in such short period of time

No problem. If a game is gush-worthy let us know about it so we can check it out, by all means. Especially if it's something like this that would be easy to overlook.

[twmac]

Anyway I sent an email off to the developer dude of Cold beam games and he actually replied!

Seems like a really nice guy (I would paste in his response but I was getting geeky about how the game accesses media/devices attached to the X360 and its limitations in XNA titles) and it made me download his visualiser (80 points so it was worth it). Hopefully it will fund his work on Beat hazard 2 which he mentioned in his email.

Anyways, I'm sort of bumping this thread with this 'patch' post as I'm hoping other people have tried this game and like it. Having re-listened to Podcast 15 in which Mr Remo said that if you make a game to be also about music then he would love it I reckon he should read this and then go download the game.

[Patters]

FUCK (YES) THIS GAME. Been playing for a while, it's fantastic fun.

[twmac]

Hurrah! Someone else played it!

Just a heads up it was also released on Steam on the 15th of April. PC gamers can now delight.

[Brannigan]

I played it for like a minute and realized immediately why it has a seizure warning right off the bat. That game puked so many colors and effects into my eyes that I'm probably now an epileptic. Also it apparently reads my mind which creeped me out. Was looking for my mp3 of Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child and before I even found it the menu music had changed to that song.

[twmac]

Just started palying through this game and to my surprise all of the updated features from the PC version have been added to the X360 version, this adds an extra difficulty, new boss vehicles and new small ships. This update came out of nowhere and instantly made me start playing it again.

If brannigan thought it was bad before the new 'Insane' mode makes any song absolute chaos onscreen.

[Joflar]

This is a great game to hotseat with a friend. After watching someone else play its a lot easier to recognize what the different movements are on the screen. Its surprising how much sense you can make out of the background.

[Scrobbs]

Holy shit! This game is insane. I'm enjoying the dubstep at the moment.

[Patters]

I have learnt the hard way, don't play this game prior to sleep, because sleep won't happen.

[Scrobbs]

I love that the little ships look like X-Wings, and the medium size ones look like Snowspeeders

[Scrobbs]

I have learnt the hard way, don't play this game prior to sleep, because sleep won't happen.

/stops playing. /watches YHBW (Ch4)

[Noyb]

The XP progression system in this game is one of the most cynical and gratuitous implementations of it I've ever seen*. :(

Earning points unlocks levels which make it easier to earn points and last longer on all of your next tries by giving you more lives, higher multiplier rewards, and more bombs.

The game's difficulty can vary wildly depending on what songs the player chooses. Hence, you can't trust that the player will experience a steady progress curve over the first few hours, where each try results in the player getting better or lasting longer. So it fakes it by gradually lowering the difficulty over the first few hours of play. It artificially triggers the pleasure we get by getting better at a game, except fully independent of the player actually learning anything.**

It doesn't lock out content by time investment (which is a whole other issue), but it completely undermines its score attack component by ensuring that someone who has played it for four hours can earn points significantly easier than someone who has only played it for two hours even if they have the same skill sets in shooters! Two people with similar skills on the same song can only adequately compare their scores if they have progressed to the same level.

And if the player's intent isn't to play competitively, but to just zone out to his or her music, that too is hindered artificially by these unlocks, since they affect how long even a casual player can last.

Bah humbug. :(

* Outside of upgrade-heavy Flash games.

**Or more likely just artificially enhancing the natural skill progression. Instead of scoring 10,000 more than your last run, you might score 50,000 more.