Holster® » pc

Audiosurf

Richard — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:53:35 +0000

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?

Obama IS a Mac

Richard — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:55:57 +0000

While the world mentally says goodbye to war, famine and injustice while they wait for President Obama to start work, I’ve noticed that all that speculation during the Democratic campaign has proved sound. Obama IS a Mac, and so is Joe Biden too.

I wonder if Barack will be ringing up Al Gore for some Keynote tips?

Word Clock

Richard — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:02:33 +0000

I wrote a little while ago about nine nicer ways to tell the time as I had noticed a few clever ways of your screensaver being used to display the time. Well I wish I had known then about Simon Heys’s Word Clock, which shows the time typographically and gives quite a bit of control over the display of the typography.

There’s also a Rotary Word Clock which is just as lovely, if not more so. Have a closer look by clicking the images above, then get over to the site and download the screensavers for PC and Mac. You can even get an iPhone version if you’ve been brave enough to jailbreak your device.

His portfolio is rather nice too…

Back to the Future GTA

Richard — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:18:55 +0000

This mod for GTA: Vice City looks amazing! It’s a real shame that as a non-PC user I won’t be driving my DeLorean round Vice City anytime soon, but for all you Windows users, it should come as some small consolation…

It makes me realise I’d love to see a great Back to the Future videogame, where you could drive the DeLorean around and manipulate events, a bit like the old Time Machine game from the 90s which I loved. The nearest we’ve got so far apart from the retro offerings, is the awful Universal Studios game originally for Gamecube. For now, stick with the Japanese SNES effort, Super Back to the Future 2…