firehose

By Craig Pearson on October 7th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

What a strange game Audiosurf 2 is. It landed on Steam Early Access last week, just when I was in the mood to take a long road trip along Total Eclipse of the Heart. I tuned in, hoping to turn around at high speeds and make it to the end of the line. Here’s how it went.

Chances are your MP3 collection is the densest folder on your hard-drive. My collection is just a dump of folders and files that I make sense of with tags, a music player’s inbuilt search function, and a bit of witchcraft. Audiosurf 2 has none of those. The server browser is laughable, currently just a list with no filters and a laggy menu crammed into a tiny box. I ended up pre-selecting a pile of songs that I thought might provide interesting tracks and putting them in their own folder. I can’t imagine that this won’t be fixed, because the previous game already allowed you to search with a Windows-based browser pop-up, and you could see a lot more songs in the default browser, but I’m surprised that it went up on Early Access with a such an intrinsic flaw. Ride my music? You need to help me find it, first.

The other major and upfront mistake is to force Wakeboarding onto the players the first time they play. Wakeboarding is a new way to play Audiosurf: you’re dragged along the song between two engines on either side of the track. You have to use the wake of those engines to jump into the air at big bumps on the track. Once up in the air, you pull tricks, flipping and spinning to gain points. It’s a confusing addition, and tough to master, with the move from sliding to actively riding the wake being a jittery motion that’s fairly disorienting. That’s not what you want when you’re haring down Bonnie’s raspy tones. You want precision and control. In the air, you’re supposed to select one of four moves to perform, and if you have the time you can combo them together. It didn’t matter if I used the keyboard, mouse, or joypad controls, they felt pre-canned and unsatisfying, and I was only doing them for points. On top of that, the first mode won’t allow you to attempt a trick if it knows there’s no time. Later on, when I unlocked all the modes, the game does allow you to pull off moves without being blocked, but for the first hour I was actively fighting against these strange, joy-sapping tricks when all I wanted to do was ride my music.

But that frustrating mode is all that’s open at the beginning, with the other levels, including the classic Audiosurf challenges, greyed-out until you pull off moves and earn a certain amount of points. That’s a particular problem when you select a track from your music that doesn’t support a long enough jump to pull off the large score. It took me a few goes, clumsily hunting for a song that would allow me to pass the prerequisites of jump length. Thank you Mister Thomas Squarepusher, your ridiculous and wonderful Dark Steering gave me the bounce I needed to succeed, but if you don’t click with it there’s nothing you can do until it’s over. (It should be noted that Audiosurf 2 comes with some tracks that will allow you to perform the tricks, but I only discovered this after about an hour because I don’t have much of a reason to play on tracks that I don’t already understand.)

Even when I did manage to do what the game asked me to, I just didn’t see the point. Wakeboarding’s visually spectacular, but it removes you from the intimacy of the original’s challenge. That excitement of seeing a music track you know every single beat of being turned into squares and hills, the joy of knowing a track’s bumps because you know the song’s beats – it’s gone when you’re spat into the air. Everything you loved about the song is below you, out of reach, as you lamely twist in the air for points. It’s a huge disconnect.

Things got better when I finally unlocked Mono and fell into it like a needle slipping into a groove. I was sliding along 212, scooping up coloured blocks and dodging greys, attempting to pile up the coloured blocks as Azelia Banks blasts filth. There’s a subtle change in this mode: in the original game, grey blocks had to be removed manually, a heart-breaking moment because when you hit it the multiplier would reset. Here it fades manually, and the blocks don’t seem to pile up for a multiplier, which kind of takes away from the tension.

A few more tracks—Britney’s Radar and Gaga’s Just Dance—reminded me of why I spent so much time on Audiosurf when it was released: it was a place to take those filthy little pop secrets and connect with them on an entirely different level. That’s why the Wakeboard parts don’t do it for me. There’s no connection. It’s Audiosurf gamified. I did play the original for points, but they were secondary to the music.

It’s a theory I tested out with my all-time favourite Audiosurf track on the newly unlocked (sigh) Wakeboard Grid mode. You collect coloured blocks to build up a multiplier that boosts the score for your jump, so the challenge is to hit the jump with the maximum multiplier. I deployed Girls Aloud’s Biology. It is the most glorious track you can possibly ride. I lost hours to it on Ninja Mono on the previous game. The additional challenge of collecting the blocks gives Wakeboard Grid a bit of a boost, but the two modes together are clumsy, like an exciting mashup that chooses the wrong bits of each song. I struggled with my timing, I pretty much failed at figuring what moves would slip into the grooves of each jump, and when I landed I felt lost. I should feel part of this song and not be fighting against it.

At least the integration of Steam Workshop changed my outlook. There are already new skins, models, and most importantly new modes. I downloaded a ‘dodge’ game mode that was a nice and relaxing inversion of the typical game scheme, avoiding every block that Britney’s Radar threw at me. That was particularly fun using the arrow keys. There’s a mono nitro mode on there that rubbed You Could Be Mine with neon polish and blasted it at me. I bumped across every drum beat, slid around the guitar solo, and was spat out the end of level, buoyed on a wave of Axl’s primal scream.

It was heartening: the potential is there, hidden beneath some poor menus and an insistence that you give a new game mode a shot. But it’s not the immediate slam dunk that Audiosurf was.

As congress and President Obama continue to mull over their tactical options in the midst of a government shutdown and a looming debt ceiling deadline, the Financial Times reported last week that one US bank, which has chosen to remain anonymous, is overstocking its automated teller machines with cash in case of a national credit default. In a similar story, the New York Times reported that many major US banks are considering stopgap measures, such as cash advances for people on Social Security, just in case Congress decides not to pay its debt.

"To guard against possible mayhem from a debt ceiling crisis, some of the nation’s largest banks are deploying plans that were developed in 2011 — when the government first looked as if it were on the verge of surpassing its debt ceiling limits. One senior bank executive said his bank’s plan includes stocking retail branches with at least 20 percent more cash," the Times reported, suggesting that "confidence in Washington has waned." Today Bloomberg took that assertion to its next logical step: If the debt ceiling is not raised, "global markets will see the U.S. government as grossly and dangerously incompetent." An explanation follows:

"Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is fundamentally different from cutting the government’s funding. It’s as if Congress were sending the Treasury two contradictory and legally binding orders -- one that requires it to make hundreds of billions of dollars a month in payments, another that prevents it from borrowing the money it needs to do so. Which order is the Treasury supposed to obey? This is the stuff of absurdist theater. Confidence matters, and this event would destroy confidence."

Founder of now-defunct developer 38 Studios and former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling is holding an estate sale at his Massachusetts home later this week, according to a listing on Consign Works.

The sale will take place this Saturday, Oct. 12 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET at Schilling's "gorgeous 7 bedroom 8000 square foot home." While the famous bloody sock will not be included in the sale, the item listing includes a baby grand piano, a drafting table from 38 Studios and a bathrobe bearing Schilling's Red Sox number 38.

Schilling's home itself is also up for sale. The house, which boasts 7 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms, was originally listed in 2008 for $8 million. The current listing shows an asking price of $2.9 million.

The liquidation auction for 38 Studios' assets will be held Nov. 14 and 15. Assets on the block include the IP for Project Copernicus, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was in development when the studio closed, sequel and merchandising rights to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and the IP rights to properties from studio Big Huge Games, which include strategy games Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends.

38 Studios declared bankruptcy in June 2012 and since then the fate of the studios' assets and Schilling's struggle with the state of Rhode Island have been an ongoing discussion. Check out Polygon's StoryStream for the full history of 38 Studios.

Just when some of us were growing more sympathetic to Time Warner Cable's fight with TV broadcasters over retransmission fees, one of the company's lobbyists makes a move that is sure to alienate many customers as well as Democratic lawmakers. According to a report by the blog Hillicon Valley, a TWC lobbyist sent an email last month to Republican staffers on Capitol Hill that pointed to an announcement from NBC News about a segment designed to help viewers get the most out of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. The TWC lobbyist said in the email to the Republicans: "Next time you think about helping the broadcasters — particularly the networks — read this…"

Making their clients' enemies look bad is part of what lobbyists do Republicans generally oppose Obamacare and the government has been shut down for six days as a result of the conflict. Meanwhile, TWC is trying to hold the line on the fees that television broadcasters charge cable and satellite distributors to retransmit their programming. These increases in retransmission fees are often passed down to subscribers, and a dispute over them with CBS prompted TWC to recently stop distributing that network's programming for a month. The issue could eventually be settled by Congress, and just in case that happens, it's obvious TWC wants some support.

Wasting no time in defending NBC or punishing Time Warner Cable, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), a longtime supporter of the entertainment sector, wrote a letter last week to TWC CEO Glenn Britt and said: "A broadcaster has a public service obligation and should be informing viewers about the new options for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, a cable company should not be pandering to the worst instincts of the reckless Republican extremists that seem to be running the House of Representatives." A Time Warner Cable spokesman said the company plans to respond directly to Waxman.

The most surprising thing about this email is that someone, presumably from the GOP camp, leaked it and that a lobbyist would trust something this potentially embarrassing to an email. Whatever benefit TWC got out of knocking NBC to the Republicans was likely discounted by the fact that it likely alienated the Democrats — both on the Hill and among the company's customers.