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?

This is lovely, a quirky game concept being developed by Ian Dallas which sets you the task of finding your way around in a completely white environment. Don’t worry though, you have some black ink at your disposal to pick out doors and objects. Could be loads of fun or completely baffling, one or the other. Whichever though, it gives rise to something very graphically distinct. Graham Linehan thinks it’s the next Portal…

Looks wonderful, it’s being coded in XNA though, so I’m unlikely to ever actually play it. Shame, could have been great as a PlayStation download, an iPhone app or even for the Pandora…

Now this is something special. Some ingenious chap has actually created a recreation of the classic arcade shooter Defender, wait for it… as a website favicon.

You know favicons, they’re those teeny tiny little icons you get next to a website address bar which show the company’s logo or something and get saved when you bookmark it. They’re only 16 pixels square, so to get even the most crude version of Defender running in there is mind boggling.

I found this via Andy Bennett, but don’t take our word for it, head over to the page and try it out for yourself. Amazing.

I thought these were great, but then again I love stuff like this. Fantastic attention to detail…

Ffffound via Fubiz, where there are lots more…

Just saw this over at FormFiftyFive very nice. Could form the basis of some great gaming ideas maybe, I’m thinking something along the lines of the excellent Echocrome:

At the least it’s a very cool demo. Come to think of it, there isn’t really a kosher demo scene for the iPhone, would be great to see an experimental visuals section to the App Store full of free goodness, instead of 50 versions of Solitaire…

Thanks to Sean for the link…

This is Pixeloo’s idea of what Mario would look like in ‘real life’. Scary!

Check out his site where he talks about how he makes the images in Photoshop.

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