The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The Steam Sale was, as always, unavoidable, so I picked up a bunch of things. I’m sure you’ll see reviews of them over the next week or whatever. I was happy with most of my purchases, except one. That purchase was Beat Hazard.

Beat Hazard is attempting to use your music to generate, procedurally, a level of a twin-stick shooter. This seems like a great idea, and it is a great idea. It’s just a shame that Beat Hazard does such a bad job at it.

First off, for a game that involves playing your own music, you’d think they could have spent five minutes giving you a menu that lets you look through a music collection in a sensible way. I don’t listen to music, and I still have a ton of music to sift through, and the horrible menu for doing this in game is painfully tedious. I can only imagine how much it would suck for someone who actually collected music to find the track they wanted to play. Opening the standard windows file manager would have been better than what they have. In fact, I think that’s what Audiosurf does, if I recall, and that works great.

The other big issue with the game is the visuals. They could not be trying harder to give you a seizure. They are so in your face and constantly painful that, not only could I rarely tell what was going on as I played, but it also seriously put strain on my eyes. My eyes hurt when I stopped playing the game. And that was on Standard. They advertise MORE horrible light effects on harder difficulty levels. That is completely insane. I haven’t played many video games that it physically hurt to play, but this is one of them. On top of all that, the little space ship designs underneath the blaringly painful colors are really bland, uninteresting, and look out of place against the crazy-ass flashes of light.

If you really, really love twin-stick shooters, you might enjoy Beat Hazard. But hell, I bet I would enjoy playing Geometry Wars while listening to music more than this game. It’s just not all that great. Good for those indie guys for trying something and getting it out there, but sorry, it’s just not working. Maybe with some tweaks and refinements, it could be a great game.