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?

…have you tried thinking back to what you were doing when you last had it?

This is genius, a site which looks exactly like Microsoft Windows XP, so you can read other stuff while you’re at work. Choose from short stories, poetry, classics etc, all called up in a faux PowerPoint window. I think this is the only time I have been able to forgive a website for forcing fullscreen mode on me. Found through the very nice Very Short List

No good for Mac workplaces though. If slightly less cultured vintage games are your thing, check out The Macintosh Garden or the Little Green Desktop for similar GUI lookalikes.

Has anyone seen any other sites which look like operating systems?