Symphony (vert where your music generates enemies)

[DJ Incompetent]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J3lLrPEkSk

[Plasmo]

Cool idea, not so cool gameplay

[Udderdude]

Ugh, enough with the art projects pretending to be games.

[ZOM]

Ugh, enough with the art projects pretending to be games.

You call that art? Right now I'm wishing geometry wars never happened.

[Enhasa]

Art project, not art.

Also in this case, let's blame Audiosurf!

[Udderdude]

Also in this case, let's blame Audiosurf!

Good idea.

[MathU]

Reminds me of Bullet Philharmonic Orchestra.

[EPS21]

So the music generates the enemies, but seems to have absolutely no bearing on how the game is played it seems. You should have to do something to the rhythm of the music in order for it to be relevant.

[ZOM]

So the music generates the enemies, but seems to have absolutely no bearing on how the game is played it seems. You should have to do something to the rhythm of the music in order for it to be relevant.

That's exactly the problem - basically you just wait for the next little small enemy wave to pop up, which depending on the soundtrack, can take quite a while to show up.
And when it's finally here you just shoot them for 50 points a piece, totally breaking the game for scoreplay unless everyone plays the same track...

[lgb]

so in other words techdemo. engine test. art project. /not a fucking game/.

[gatsu25]

Apparently this is coming out now. It's up for preorder on GOG.

[Cagar]

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[CptRansom]

This is out on GOG and Steam. Anyone pick it up? How is it?

[DJ Incompetent]

Anyone with a digital music collection and a widescreen setup/decent rig should pick this up. It is a good novelty thing.

'Game isn't great though. I suppose it's an original euroshmup.

It's kinda like Star Soldier caravan but perpetually fighting the R-Type circle turret midboss composed of Gradius' enemy formations

Game is pretty. But all the bullets are red. The high tempo mode during songs changes background and enemies to red. So you get bullet contrast issues. There are no bullet patterns. The boss fights are 80s "two forms, one attack" crap. Boss fights appear randomly during long tracks.

Mouse controls ONLY. 'Stupid.

The startup is slooooow. The game has no fail state (just score penalties), yet they won't let you raise the difficulty to something interesting until you log 1-2 hours. The game scanning your music library also crashes when you have a large collection. I don't know its threshold, but I can tell you it can't handle 800GB. On your first boot up, just navigate to the music scanning thing and walk away for awhile. That scan is also slow. The music playback is pretty quiet, bass seems to be eliminated from bass-heavy tracks for some reason, the "music corruption" effect the game uses doesn't work, and altering the SFX/BGM ratios doesn't feel like it's working correctly. The enemy spawns and movements don't seem to sync with the music. Some of the enemy attacks do, which is neat to watch, but you won't see any of these effects until you unlock difficulty settings.

The ship upgrade system is neat. You get to bring four simultaneous weapons to each song stage and can configure each weapon's shot angle, shot button, and autofire ability. The lower your weapons, the higher the score multiplier. Every song you play unlocks a new weapon to buy. "Rare" weapons seem to be found when you play pop culture classics that won't go away like Bohemian, Teen Spirit, etc.

Probably the best part of Symphony's game is the scoring system. Killing enemies does not score points. You have to chain picking up icons dropped by downed enemies in a sorta DDP way, but the pickups are stationary, so you have to take risks weaving through otherwise safe enemy formations or quick-jerk the mouse to pickup things. This leads to many deaths where you're unsure what hit you. You also have to watch to kill enemies when they're actually on the playfield or else they won't yield points to collect.

Grazing bullets blows weapons off your ship. item pickups repair them. It's pretty neat.

There is a leaderboard database building kinda like a Cleverbot style for every song you play. I didn't know there was a Steam version of the game, so I am the loneliest.

I'll probably buy Steam Symphony again at $10 because I think the game is worth $20, it seems the dev is only patching the Steam version, and I'd be happy to see if I ever ran into another player who ran the same song leaderboard I did.