What do you get if you try a little videogame alchemy? Combine rhythm-action poster child Guitar Hero, add retro arcade puzzler Klax, and throw in a dash of futuristic racer Wipeout and you get Audiosurf.

Audiosurf takes an audio track and turns it into a race track. Beats, pitch and tempo all control the path of the course, and your craft must fly along it, dodging or collecting blocks of various colours according to the structure of the music. It’s absorbing stuff and great fun.

The best part? Audiosurf uses your own MP3 collection for the gameplay, it even compiles charts of the most played tracks, compares other players’ performance to the same songs, and scrobbles to last.fm too.

The worst part? It’s a dirty PC only game, which is made a little better by being pretty cheap and available on the excellent Steam platform, but only just. You’re alright if you can take a break from your PowerPoint presentation on your PC, or Halo on your xBox, but if you are a PS3 and Mac man like me your options are limited. For the PlayStation, may I suggest Vib Ribbon…

I can happily report however, that if you have an Intel Mac, you can play it perfectly using Boot Camp and there is also a free demo to try it out first. Still, a PlayStation Network release would be great, and it would go down a treat with all the audiovisual Mac users out there…

…pretty please?

I’d love one of these iPod cases. As usual, you can’t buy them, but it can’t be too hard to make one – first stop eBay. Shame to break such a lovely retro Walkman though…

Via ffffound, which came via ipodhacks, which came from apple-touch, which came from gearfuse, which came from dvice, which came from gadgetvenue, which seems to have come from sirljohn’s flickr stream. Thought I’d post all the links, I had to follow the trail to the end, kind of like finding one end of a piece of string…

I wrote a few days ago about Emma Clarke, the woman who does the voice for the London Undergound tube announcements. She had created a set of spoof announcements which were doing the rounds on the web. Some of them were quite funny.

Well, it seems that Transport for London weren’t so amused and Emma has been dropped as the voice of the tube as a result. A shining star of the TfL PR department said:

“London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Ms Clarke are experiencing severe delays.”

She was in all the papers today, so we did get to see what she looked like…

Also found this article about other iconic British voices…

Emma Clarke is the voice of the London Underground tube announcements. She’s the calm and collected voice of every single delay, nightmarish late arrival to work, relentless tourist scrum and late night bleary eyed stumble home for all us Londoners. Despite being oh so very helpful and sincere, (She IS sorry for your delay you know) she also appears to have a sense of humour.

Check out these spoof announcements she has recorded. My personal favourites being:

“I may look nothing like you imagine”

“Passengers filling in their sudokus”

and…

“A reminder for American tourists”

Found through Going Underground