I was recently … uhm … alerted to a … game. I mean, I think it’s a game.

The only thing I can say is that this is the Faces of Death of videogames. It’s disturbing, mostly fake, and inhumane yet I keep looking at it and using it.

The game is simply titled The Torture Game 2 and that sums it up wholly.

After the near fatal incident with my iPod last week I’ve realized that I now have full access to all my music since my HDD mirrors it (previously it was all managed from my iPod like an external HDD). In effect I am taking full advantage of music programs and have rekindled my relationship with Audiosurf.

Music is one of our societies greatest arts, and it’s so easily and widely shared that most of the time I take it for granted. While playing Interstate 8 by Modest Mouse on Audiosurf I thought about just how accurately the song was being visually represented. Audiosurf is far more than either a game or a visualizer. Most of the time neither is rooted to music in so many primal ways. In most games music will set the mood in the background, much like with film. With visualizers there’s no interaction and no scope.

Audiosurf combines those things and adds more. The key to it all is the course that is generated from the music. The track created from the digital wavelengths inside your music are the focus of the player throughout most of the play time, and even outside of it. The first time you play a track the program creates a map at which point the player is shown where to expect the most traffic, and also it shows the flow of the song.

Before the player can begin playing the song an overview of the course is given by rotating around the zoomed out arena. Upwards slopes are slower and the colors are in the cold range. Downward slopes warm up in color and contain more architecture. The color and shape now has a form which is displayed like a captured snake before the buyer.

While riding the serpentine path small nuances of the music are shown through color, accolade, and speed. Moving through the notes inside the track the color shifts from shades of color by melding perfectly from one to the next in a natural and beautiful display. When notes are passed a small light glistens off the corners enhancing the beat. Particularly intense moments involve traveling through a tunnel of arches or exploding particles in the air the same color of the track.

The whole time the eye must travel to the upper left in order to track progress represented not on a straight line, but a crooked bent one. A digital map of the music.

Speed is the second key to connection between the art, the player and the game. Upon reaching the peak of a slope the player will speed down the other side like a sledder on a hill of snow. Smaller formations and dips will garnish less speed, while mountainous heights result in velocity drops that nearly take your breath away. As the beat slows down the camera slowly pulls away from the avatar of the player while speeding up pulls the camera in. This keeps the flow of the music controlled by perspective. The theory is that when you see notes your brain will attempt to process them all. Pulling into the player’s ship limits far ahead you can see and makes processing the notes simpler. You’re not overwhelmed. When things slow down the camera pulls out so that the brain doesn’t become bored as there’s now a longer amount of track’s worth of information to process.

The course creation and speed management combine to turn music from an audio experience to a visual and tactile treat. Simple controls result in low learning curves. The wall of dissonance between the input device and player is broken down so that the emergent result can be reached by users of any experience level. The connection I had with the song Interstate 8 made me remember a scene from Mr. Holland’s Opus, which now has me contemplating other applications for Audiosurf.

Mr Holland’s Opus is a 1995 film about Glen Holland, a high school band conductor played by Richard Dreyfus. The film chronicles Mr. Holland’s life from when he begrudgingly starts teaching through his retirement. The most important thing to Glen is music and his dream is to write music and conduct a real orchestra: he pursues them above all else. When him and his wife have a baby boy who’s deaf Glen has no idea how this could have happen, and feels that his son can’t understand music nor his love of it. So, rather than learning sign language and being an understanding father, he distances himself from the child. During a dramatic Hollywood-esque he finally comes to know that his son can understand music and its significance by the way that the recent news of John Lennon’s death effects them both.

In an attempt to redeem himself in his son’s eyes Glen Holland builds a sound visualizer. In it’s design there is a special platform which amplifies the vibration of sound via a speaker directly attached, and flashing colored light to representation the music. Not only does Glen invite his son, but many other hearing impaired students from the special school he attends to seat on the vibration amplifying platform. After the initial concert Mr. Holland stands up in front of the crowd and sings a Lennon song to his son, during which he signs all of the lyrics showing that he has finally learned his son’s language.

It’s not the best written movie, nor the greatest directing, but it does have it’s moments. Seeing what is taken away from the deaf by removing music in its base form of sound makes me a little sad. Even with the device that Glen created it’s still barely half of what makes up music: the rhythm. It misses much of the melody. There are so many nuances that basic colored lights can’t show, no matter how lavishly they’re displayed. By adding a third dimension and weaving it with color and movement Audiosurf creates something completely different. While deaf persons still wouldn’t be able to hear the music, I do imagine that this game could have logopedic benefits and further the understanding of music with the hearing impaired.

I won.

Yes I finally crawled out from underneath the gigantic task of restoring a 40gb iPod that was pretty much wiped clean.

See, some people reading this may not know that I’ve had this 40gb iPod Photo for about 3 and a half years now. The only real panic I’ve ever had with it was when I leaned over into a ice cooler to grab a soda and it slid out of my pocket and into the ice water. It didn’t work for about 48 hours, but then it worked no problem. I’ve had some slowdown with the device before and always knew it needed to be formated, but by that time I realized it was such a gigantic task I always put it off.

Starting back at the beginning: last night. I don’t know what happen, but I connected my iPod to my PC to get some music off it and every program I used said the iPod was empty. Nothing. I even restarted my PC to try to get it to work. I ended up extracting all the audio I could off of it, but out of the 35GBs that use to be on it I only managed to get off about 70% of it at 22GB.

I don’t know what happen to the rest of the music, but it was eaten. It was really weird to start relabeling and organizing all this music only to slowly learn what was missing by only finding one track of a whole album that use to be on there.

I didn’t really do the math or look at the numbers until I noticed quite a few of my most listened to artists suddenly missing more than half their songs. That’s when I realized that somewhere I lost 13GB of music.

Most of it was stuff that was just taking up space. Others are things that are going to be impossible to remember the name of, let alone find them.

I did make a backup a while ago of some of my music on an external hdd, but that ended up only being about 3GB worth of it. I thought I had a lot on my laptop too, but it turns out that none of the stuff on there disappeared.

So, at about 6 am this morning–after staring at my pillow for about an hour–I decided to start this whole mess. As of right now I basically have my new program (seriously, screw anaPod, That program messed up my iPod more than it helped it), MediaMonkey, set up with my whole track list. I have exported it to html in case this ever happens again. I’m going to run the library program one more time to get the couple of albums that I stuck in there last minute registered, then I’m going to connect my freshly formated iPod to it like a virgin. If you’re interested I put the list up here.

So, 15 hours of this and I’m nearly done. I’ve trimmed a lot of fat off my track list, and I have a few things downloading right now that I need to add and don’t have the originals any more (or don’t feel like ripping). The things that have come out of this whole mess for the good:

-Finally found a better mp3 program that interacts with my iPod.
-Got a spare 160gb HDD installed on my PC.
-Connected up my external HDD
-…

Yeah.

Trackmania United Forever has one of the more unique attraction I find in games. In Doom I use to use the walk through walls code just to see what kind of messed up graphics I could make. After hearing about the negative world in Metroid I attempted to get there as well. Things like the highest point in Bubsy 3D interest me. I love to break games and go where I shouldn’t.

The most memorable moment I had in Oblivion was when I found a seam in the wall of a city and broke into the area before it properly loaded. In order to cut down on the resources for a PC/Console to display an entire world Oblivion’s towns were loaded only when you entered them through designated areas. In order to give the player a sense of scale the size of the city is represented in the overworld, just less detailed in case you peek over the walls. When I was inside the town it was deserted of everything. When I threw or dropped any items they would slide on the ground as if it was ice until arriving at a seam in the polygons, in which case it would disappear.

Sometimes there are small things that let you into these backstage worlds in games. Other times you just have to think a little outside of the box. In Shadowrun (2007) the player is given an option of having glider wings bolted to their back which allows a small degree of flight. The player also has the ability to learn the magic spell gust which can push enemies back with a gust of wind, or can allow the player to break their fall with a cushion of air. A smart player thinking outside the box can combine these tools to get places the developers didn’t intend you to go. Besides just breaking the game and gliding around outside the limits of the planned arena there were also some partially built levels revealed by skilled players who explored in the right areas.

Aiming for self set goals is one of my favorite things to do in games, and when the opportunity presents itself even in the least expected places I take it.

While playing a particularly challenging desert track on Trackmania United Forever I happen to launch right off the track and into the landscape. At first I thought it fun just to see how far out things went.

Notice the awesome custom sheriff’s car with the welded-on spikes at the front. So I continued to drive off through the sunset where the atmosphere ends.

From there I was curious to see where things went. I cautiously crept up to the edge of what looked like all land.

Looking back on it I probably should have tried to drive off the edge and seen what awaited me. Instead I chickened out and turned around back towards the track.

While not the most interesting adventure off the beaten path I’d ever had, it did at least let me know that it was possible to break the limits of the game and explore secret worlds.

On my fifteenth million attempt at bay course C3 for the damn silver metal to move on, I happen upon a far more interesting situation than being in the desert. Shortly after a very sharp turn there is a speed boost right in front of a ramp which will launch the SUV (or in my case a Monster Truck) quite the distance in the air towards a small tunnel entrance. In my case the wheel wasn’t straightened out well enough before the speed boost which launched me diagonally into the ocean.

I noticed that my truck had somehow landed upright and was capable of driving underwater. Since the camera was forcing me to look at a small dot at the bottom of the ocean I aimed for land as best I could and hoped that I’d eventually come up for air.

I was greeted on the beach by a small group of apartments–or perhaps condos–in a state of seeming disrepair. At the bottom of the buildings it looked as though overgrowth had taken the first two floors. Upon examination the growth wasn’t vines that climb three stories of the building and cover all the windows, it was actually the trees that would look like they’re in front of the building from a long distance away in case you happen to look.

I found a misshapen and discolored road out front of the condos leading to the city which made up much of the backdrop throughout the race.

It looks like not just the outskirts have been taken over by the shrubbery.

On the way out of the city buildings are far more grim–the takeover becoming more hostile.

With the city far off in the distance fleeing the infested place, I feel a bit better and head for the hills.

The mountain bluffs surrounding the bay range in size. Some are much smaller than they appear because they are closer. When you finally drive for five minutes only to see that the taller peak is in a different direction. Why are you looking for the tallest peak? no particular reason honestly.

On the way up a mountain all the way at the back of the bay I found a wrinkle in space.

Following it I found the rift opening into a similar black space that was beneath the desert. I decided to give it a try and see what happens. When I drove over the edge I took many pictures which I will refrain from posting to save the weak at heart.

Strangely enough I happen to graze something with my back tire on the fall into blackness. It righted me in mid air and I safely landed on an absent ground.

The way that the geometry of the landscape worked under everything was wondrous. It was like ribbons of earth suspended in time over me.

Approaching the city buildings hover eerily in the air over me with their infected green bases all the more macabre in appearance.

Condos hover over me like cavity infected dentures.

Off in the distance is the racetrack where I started.

Unfortunately my subterranean expedition was ended early. I didn’t realize that I would be able to slide out from under these buildings into the water.

I’m honestly a bit sad that I got to explore so little of it all. I wanted to go check out the area that had even more growth infested buildings than the part I did get a shot of from underneath.

My instinctive curiosity prods me compelled me to keep going on, to look over the edge while still being a cautious enough to hold on to ground firmly. It’s a great feeling. Most games now have either unbreakable walls, or artificial ones which keep the player restricted from seeing the man behind the curtain. It keeps the games focused and the fourth wall erect, and for all intents and purposes it’s how you want the game to be. That’s why when I can I look behind the curtain I do.