Casual music gaming is heating up on mobile platforms. We recently saw the music quiz game SongPop hit the number three spot in iTunes’ list of top free apps, and then were impressed by Synesthetic, also for iOS, which lets you “see music” in a game reminiscent of Synesthesia. Last week, in the rival Google Play Store,…
Way back in August 2008, when apps were still in their infancy, Tapulous Tap Tap Revenge – a rhythm game that many likened to “Guitar Hero for the iPhone” – ruled the school. Over 1.2 million iPhone users installed it in the first month it was available, back when that was still a ridiculously big number. (Remember, the iOS…
If you’ve ever listened to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz on mute, you know the magic of the synchronized audio-visual experience. And if you haven’t, well, the weekend is only a couple of days away, and we’ve embedded the whole mash-up at the bottom of this…
Videogames have included musical soundtrack since the early days, but now, it’s becoming part of the gameplay itself. Take Thrust Interacrtive’s Boomblastica (free for iOS and Android), for instance, which mixes the gameplay of a retro shooter with techno beats. It’s basically a classic shoot em’ up, but, as the publisher says, “every enemy is…
If flying around as a kitten with a jetpack, a “butterfly” kitten, or even a kitten wrapped with bacon as techno music plays is your idea of a good time, then Techno Kitten Adventure is the app you’ve been waiting for. This music game mashes the popular lolcats internet meme with techno music, creating one of…
It’s nearing February, with a balmy 55 degrees in normally-frigid Boston, and the number one iOS music game in seven countries is a comic-fantasy-Guitar Hero-style game starring the reanimated corpse of 18th century Polish composer Frederic Chopin, as he does battle against the fictional villains of modern music: techno, reggae, and country remixes of his waltzes…
Music is based on structured rhythms, so when it’s delivered by an app, all sorts of possibilities exist for turning those into interactive elements within a game. Guitar Hero was one iteration of that idea, but it was really just the beginning, as app developers continue to explore the breaking down of musical rhythms into…
There is nothing quite like a line-art rabbit running frantically in two-dimensional space while avoiding musically-synchronized obstacles to really light up the crowd at Music Hack Day, as the above video demonstrates. Robert Böhnke’s homage to the Japanese cult classic PlayStation game Vib Ribbon, which he cunningly named “Vib Riboff,” uses HTML5 to make a browser-based…
Moderati is not the only company obsessed with turning music into something that can be played like a game instead of like a record, but its Romplr remix app for Apple iOS or Nokia Symbian lets you play with some of the biggest names in pop: Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Diddy, and some guy named…
