Music/Dance

After picking up a favorable critical reception at the International Games Festival, Audiosurf has been the indie flavor of the month on Steam, and rightly so. Ostensibly it is about veering a hovercraft left and right along a race track that undulates to the beat of your chosen song and collecting colored blocks for points, but the grid that those color blocks fall into turns the game into a kind of two-tiered puzzler. Keen racing reactions are needed to collect and correctly position high-scoring blocks of the same color into groups of 3 or more (after which, as you may have guessed, they will disappear).

Created by Masaya Matsuura, the man who pioneered music-generated gaming in Vib Ribbon, Musika is certainly the most baffling game of the four. Not because of any exciting Japanese weirdness or ultra-tough difficulty (both staples of old school rhythm action), but simply because there appears to be no game here.

As polished and colourful as Phase is, playing Beats on PSP afterwards feels like being sat next to a giant subwoofer in the trendiest, spaciest club in town. This is very much rhythm action seen through a Tetsuya Mizuguchi kaleidoscope.

Made by Rock Band and Guitar Hero pioneers Harmonix, Phase harks back most closely to the developer's outstanding debut titles Frequency and Amplitude. A now very familiar vertical track scrolls toward the screen, while the player attempts to hit the notes dotted along each of the track's 3 lines with the use of the 3 central iPod buttons (left, centre, right).

There is a new selection of low budget games that constitute a slight resurgence in the founding rhythm action principles, utilizing basic control schemes to make playing with music fun. All are downloadable and priced under $10, all integrate the player's own music collection with their gameplay, and all have silly, cred-craving one-word titles.

For proof that Cinderella stories can happen even in the world of videogames, one need look no further than the Guitar Hero franchise. When the series started a few years back, it was an almost off the radar game that only the most hardcore rhythm game fanatics were following. Now, it's a pop culture phenomenon.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Lyrics, Mild Suggestive Themes

After years of playing second fiddle, music-based gaming finally reached the forefront with the release of 2005’s Guitar Hero. Now comes Boogie, a game that combines well-known licensed dance hits and hip-hop music—from The Jackson Five to Britney Spears—with onscreen dancing and karaoke gameplay. The result is a strange and misguided attempt to do for singing and dancing what Guitar Hero did for guitar playing.

Game Description: Meet the Boogs. Get ready to join in and sing-in with some of the latest and greatest hits in this unique game with built-in karaoke functions. Fun mini-games, co-op gameplay, head-to-head dance battles and karaoke party make Boogie the perfect party game and a complete entertainment package for gamers of all ages. Players dance, sing and create music videos with this ultimate videogame party package that takes advantage of the innovative Wii controls getting gamers off their couch and playing to a new beat. Not only will gamers be belting out their favorite tunes or dancing to the latest hit songs, players will catch their best dance moves, record their own voice and make music videos with the easy-to-use music video creator.