The world, and fate, have joined forced to make me lose USD$1.00 on the game Audiosurf…
But I don’t particularly care.
I played the Beta version a while back, and it was one of the most addictive casual games I’d played in a long long time.
Audiosurf is mostly a puzzle game mixed with a Media Player visualisation. You can load in your own mp3s and it builds a custom ‘track’ for you to fly your little spaceship/car/thing (the actual racing is mostly like the game ‘wipeout’ although for all intents and purposes in terms of gameplay every track might as well not turn corners or go up and down, these are simply visual themes.) In the exciting parts of the music you go faster, in the more mellow parts you go slower.
The puzzle part is the fact that there are other ‘cars’ (they call them cars – I have no idea why, they’re little blocks so far as I can see) and you attempt to hit the cars, collecting them and playing a small ‘bejeweled-esque’ game where you must match three or more of the same colour in a cluster and then they’ll disappear. You have three lanes to fill up, and if one fills up without disappearing, you’ll go invisible, and won’t get points for a bit.
All in all, the game is visually amazing, and in the end I found myself getting caught up in the graphics and not particularly caring about the points. There is even a seperate ‘practice’ mode where your car is always invisible and you can’t hit cars but you can just drive along the great-looking highway generated by your music.
So yeah, try the demo. It’s well worth the USD$9.95 they’re asking on Steam.
Which brings me to my side of the story. It was released for pre-purchase a few days ago, when I was- er- between paychecks, so to say. Steam was offering a deal in which if you purchased it before it came out (You obviously couldn’t play it before it came out, but you’d have the pleasure of owning it), you would save one dollar on the deal. (USD$8.95)
My frustration was immense, as I couldn’t afford it until I got paid, which was yesterday. I didn’t mind though, because I would have plenty of time to purchase it during the day.
Yesterday, I woke up to the phone ringing. I was needed at work. I had no time to start the computer up and pay for Audiosurf. This wasn’t a worry. I could still get it done before I got home.
After a pretty good afternoon at work, I got home and sat down, opened Steam, and went through the purchasing rites. My card was declined, I didn’t have that USD$8.95 in my account. I had put it all into my sub-account, which I could easily transfer using Internet banking.
Upon checking my email, I found the culprit to be GoDaddy, who had taken out a pre-determined amount of my main account. This was no problem, I could still easily transfer my money from the sub-account into the main one, and voila, I would have pre-ordered.
But alas, my bank’s online banking website was down for some reason or another. It simply didn’t work. The rest of the site worked fine, but as soon as I got to the little ‘online banking’ section, it produced an Error of type 404.
I stayed up until 5am (The time it would be here when it was 10am the previous day in Steam HQ) refreshing the online banking website every now and again to test it. It was a fruitless wake.
Sad, mourning for my loss of USD$1.00, I slept. Of course, the banking site was up and running again this morning, and I happily purchased Audio-surf. It is currently downloading its awesomeness from Steam, so that I may waste more of my time in musical wonder.
But I may never forgive Lady Fate for taking away my dollar.
Damn you, Lady Fate. Damn you. (sobs)
So, moral of the story, leave more than enough money in your main account, so that if you wish to purchase wicked racing-puzzle-music-visualisation games from Steam you will have well more than enough to do so.
That’s all for this time, tata.
The Maddened One