Come August 11th, along with a lot of changes Xbox 360 users will be happy to see, there’ll be one that most will barely notice: changing the name of Xbox Live Community Games to Xbox Live Indie Games. Xbox Live Indie Games has long been the red-headed stepchild of the online service, and there’s some good reason for that---there are serious bugs in the system, including requiring you to be online to play games you’ve already bought. But, worst of all, even with the new ratings system being rolled out, it’s still too hard to separate games you’d like from games that aren’t even worth the free demo.
But Xbox Live Indie Games titles don’t deserve to be ignored completely. It’s a great place for independent developers to try out unusual ideas without a big publisher stomping out anything that smacks of creativity. And even if the game is only a couple hours worth of play, two hours of entertainment for 200 points is a pretty great fun-to-cash ratio! So, every Friday, I’ll be featuring some choice titles from the service. Here's the first:
"Audiball" is the kind of title that justifies the whole Xbox Live Indie Games initiative: Impossible anywhere but a console, but too quirky to make it through a studio. It's the first commercially available game to make creative use of the "Guitar Hero" controller, and that alone would be enough to merit a mention even if it didn't take the idea of music-as-gameplay well beyond this generation's rhythm games. And it has!
The basic gameplay is just a matter of moving balls to their destination via a series of colored gates by hitting frets on your guitar controller. The challenge comes from unforgiving time limits and a series of complicated level layouts, with very different distances between gates. So the only way to get all your balls out in time is to have multiple sequences in motion at once. Essentially, "Audiball" is moving you beyond the simple single-melody structure of "Rock Band," and teaching you how to track a fugue, a much tougher and more satisfying activity.
Musical sensitivity is even more important on the moving-obstacles levels, where you have to sync your play to the background beats, which are themselves synced to the moving barriers. How you sync, though, is entirely up to you. There’s no single best way to play it, and the ultimate strategy will be a matter of what sounds best to you. Again, "Audiball" is taking the listening skills of "Rock Band" and letting you apply them in a creative way. Instead of just following preexisting music, you participate in musical creation.
"Audiball" isn't perfect, though. The difficulty spikes are really inconsistent, and the graphics are pretty much just functional. But it's my personal favorite game ever on Xbox Live Indie Games, and if you're a fan of rhythm games and have a "Guitar Hero" controller you'd like to find a new use for, it's a must-play.
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