Beat Hazard: A Shooter Powered By YOUR Music

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WARNING:If you suffer from photosensitive seizures, unfortunately, you will not be able to play this:WARNING

Beat Hazard is a dual stick arcade shooter, in the style of Geometry Wars, for the Xbox Indie Games platform (and now PC!) that takes music from your library and creates unique levels. Each song directly affects the gameplay, for instance, the power of your weapons and the amount of enemies coming at you.

Its hard to put the experience of playing Beat Hazard into words, so here's a gameplay clip:

I downloaded the game, yesterday; my roommate and I spent 4 hours testing out different music tracks with it.

My favorites, so far:

Clutch - Electric Worry
Michael Jackson - Don't Stop Till You Get Enough
Wolfmother - The Joker and The Thief
Modest Mouse - Doin' The Cockroach

The game was developed by Cold Beam Games, which consists of one guy named Steve.

http://www.coldbeamgames.com/
I was really surprised by the quality of the title, so I decided to share it with the rest of Goodjerdom. If you like music and video games I recommend it.

This looks officially awesome. I'll be snagging the PC version as soon as it comes out.

Awesome recommendation! Reminds me in a graphical-style of N2O on the PSX. I have to dig through my Crystal Method tracks, pull out Franz Lizst's Hungarian Rhapsody, and the super-long Type O Negative dirges to see what happens then!

On a side, there's another shooter on XBLIG called Shoot1UP for $1, and it's many flavors of awesome as well (and Angry Barry, well, that goes without saying).

So this came out today on Steam. It's got some bugs, to put it lightly, but it's the kind of game that's just that good that you grit your teeth and keep going despite it crashing at odd times and occasionally playing the wrong song. I think I'm in love, I'm actually seriously considering getting good enough at this sucker to compete on the leaderboards. It's a ton of fun, and the developer seems very committed to updating it with bug fixes and improvements. I think we have a winner here.

I've been trying out different albums with this game, over the past couple of weeks. Every time a track comes on that works well with the game it makes me smile for the whole run-time of the song. There's something about shooting ships to a soundtrack that takes the Awesome-o-meter to 10.

Also,
I'm throwing down a challenge. I beat the entire album of Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion (November Rain was a right bastard).

Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion

Score:19,270,397

Right Next Door To Hell - 570,292
Dust N Bones - 973,979
Live And Let Die - 556,672 (awesome in the game. awesome)
Don't Cry - 673,673
Perfect Crime - 291,934
You Ain't The First - 171,227
Bad Obsession - 1,097,345
Back Off B*tch - 1,372,530
Double Talkin Jive - 587,155
November Rain - 3,695,304 (completed after about 20 tries)
The Garden - 1,165,960
Garden Of Eden - 305,442
Don't Damn Me - 1,037,756
Bad Apples - 740,041
Dead Horse - 562,178
Coma - 5,468,909 (10 minutes of awesome)

Do you have this album? Can you do better?

hmm I don't think I have that one. Although on Tuesday I did complete Unsuccessfully Coping by Type O Negative from Origin of the Feces, clocking in at 15 minutes.

MaxShrek wrote:

hmm I don't think I have that one. Although on Tuesday I did complete Unsuccessfully Coping by Type O Negative from Origin of the Feces, clocking in at 15 minutes.

I don't own any Type O Negative, but tackling a 15 minute long track sounds fun. Do you remember your score on it?

skeletonframes wrote:

Also,
I'm throwing down a challenge. I beat the entire album of Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion (November Rain was a right bastard).

Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion

Score:19,270,397

Psha! This is Use Your Illusion I. Try Use Your Illusion II sucker!!

In all seriousness, there needs to be more games that incorporate your own music. I absolutely love this stuff.

I saw this was released on Steam, I was interested. Looks like it might be more fun than Audiosurf, at least for me. I loved the idea of Audiosurf, I just never put a lot of time into it. This looks like a more fun diversion for me. But then again, I've made a lot of $10 purchases that seemed like I would put a lot of time into and don't get past the 5 hour mark.

Unsuccessfully Coping: 3,372,109 on Normal, on Hardcore, it's impossible after the first couple of minutes- there are parts of the song where your guns more or less turn off with that little pea-shooter dot default gun. Tool's 10,000 Days and Lateralus make for some awesome displays. Cannibal Corpse is just ridiculous to play. Easy, but ridiculous.

Someone try some Rammstein. Or Led Zeppelin.

The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight
Score: 2,656,372

This ranks up there with one of my favorite songs to play in the game. It builds and builds and builds, until you're basically manuevering on intuition, as you can barely see your ship or your enemies. Completely insane.

Oh yeah, You've got to play this game on Hardcore. It notches the intensity of each song up to the "Japanese Seizure Robot" level.

duckilama wrote:

Someone try some Rammstein.

I've been playing their latest album, since you requested it. I haven't finished a song yet, but I suck at these types of games, but man, this game is sensory overload to the extreme. It becomes impossible to see things sometimes ... and I'm not a fan of that, but otherwise this is really interesting.

Oh, and it doesn't help that the beginnings of the Rammstein songs keep being rather quiet as the louder the song, the more powerful you are. I mean, at the beginning of Rammlied I can't kill anything.

I'm going to play some Tool now.

This game is super fun. Except when it throws a boss at you right when your song hits a quiet part and you wind up trying to take down those stupid homing missiles with your tiny little quiet-music popgun that does next to nothing.

I wonder how Audio by the Blue Man Group is. Looks like another $10 game like Audiosurf that I'll end up buying just to support this type of development but not play as much as I should. Still, I love this sort of innovative design.

Edit: I have a Xbox360 wireless controller with the USB wireless adapter for my PC - can I hook that up for this game? Sounds like the twin sticks would be almost mandatory.

duckilama wrote:

I wonder how Audio by the Blue Man Group is. Looks like another $10 game like Audiosurf that I'll end up buying just to support this type of development but not play as much as I should. Still, I love this sort of innovative design.

Edit: I have a Xbox360 wireless controller with the USB wireless adapter for my PC - can I hook that up for this game? Sounds like the twin sticks would be almost mandatory.

Yeah, the Xbox controller works well with the PC version (which is on sale on Steam this weekend, by the way.)

The XBox pad seems to be the intended controller for this actually, even on PC. I tried it with mouse and keyboard and really didn't like it, despite preferring M+K for some other top view shooters. The dual sticks just feel right, despite my never having really gotten comfortable with them in most games.

Dear lord this is addicting. The only reason I'm not playing it right now is because of it crashing on me.

My favorite music-powered game is still Every Extend Extra Extreme. This looks cool though.

man, Judas Priest- Painkiller (title track): 5,264,762 with multiplier at x174. The first solo is tough, the second solo keeps it going when you're ready to cry uncle.

Found Use Your Illusion I, I'll take a stab at it.

Max, are you on Hardcore or Normal? I'm imagining you aren't on Insane because that's, well, insane.

I like it. Definitely needs a little work for some things, though. *Any* song should be playable, which means that there should never be songs, for example, where at no point during the entire song is your gun firing often enough to even kill off the seeker bullets a boss sends after you, much less give you time to kill the bosses.

Also, it needs to support more audio formats. 98% of my music is in .m4a form, so being restricted to mp3s is kind of annoying. :X

Hypatian wrote:

Also, it needs to support more audio formats. 98% of my music is in .m4a form, so being restricted to mp3s is kind of annoying. :X

If you mean songs in iTunes, right click them and choose "Create MP3 version". I think that you can do that as long as it's iT+.

I wish it would plug into my Windows Media Player library and pick a song at random. I've got all my stuff organized in folders by Artist/Album name and having to navigate the whole thing every time is kind of annoying.

skeletonframes wrote:

Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion
Score:19,270,397
Right Next Door To Hell - 570,292
Dust N Bones - 973,979
Live And Let Die - 556,672 (awesome in the game. awesome)
Don't Cry - 673,673
Perfect Crime - 291,934
You Ain't The First - 171,227
Bad Obsession - 1,097,345
Back Off B*tch - 1,372,530
Double Talkin Jive - 587,155
November Rain - 3,695,304 (completed after about 20 tries)
The Garden - 1,165,960
Garden Of Eden - 305,442
Don't Damn Me - 1,037,756
Bad Apples - 740,041
Dead Horse - 562,178
Coma - 5,468,909 (10 minutes of awesome)

So far, I've got:

Right Next Door To Hell - 1, 269,972
Dust N Bones - 1,995, 894
Live And Let Die - 840,424
Don't Cry - (really hate this song, I'll save it for last)
Perfect Crime - 642,302
You Ain't The First - 1,285,212
Bad Obsession - 3,016,612
Back Off B*tch -
Double Talkin Jive -
November Rain - 5,862,184
The Garden -
Garden Of Eden -
Don't Damn Me -
Bad Apples -
Dead Horse - 2,024,252
Coma - 8,333,206 (90%) .. making it right up to the last bit, and *BOOM*

Album: 25,270,158 (at 59%) ..
What difficulty is your setting? *edit* .. oops I forgot, my rank is Vice Admiral & multiplier starts at x20

garion333 wrote:

Max, are you on Hardcore or Normal? I'm imagining you aren't on Insane because that's, well, insane.

I'm set at Hardcore, but the disparity of scores is playing with my ranking at Elite level 4. That gives me more power-ups at start (especially the x20 bonus), and allows me to keep a certain amount of power-ups when I die. That would mean a 5 minute song I played earlier would give me a score of 1 million, while a 3 minute song would bow fetch me 4 million points. I'll have to go back and get a better score with the higher rank.

Nine Inch Nails works really well on this game, I have Broken loaded up, and I'm going to throw in the Fixed remixes, should get really crazy with that one.

I played that album on Normal (not elite). I've got work to do.

Build up your Rank on Normal or with quick songs on Hardcore, then you'll start off in good shape.

Anyone who picked it up on Steam, send me a friend request as I currently have zero friends playing this game (except for the two of you I just added). Steam name is same as here.

Edit: I'm thinking of firing up Lady Gaga. Her europop sound (or whatever it is) would probably be great in this game.

I couldn't finish the Bad Romance song, I think I wasn't paying attention.

MaxShrek wrote:

Build up your Rank on Normal or with quick songs on Hardcore, then you'll start off in good shape.

Yeah, I'm a level 19 Elite, now(and been playing on Hardcore). I'm playing that album, again, and you are going down.

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