Alpha Beta Gamer

The Sinking Feelingis a beautiful audio visual experience that sees you sinking to the depths after your ship breaks up in a storm.

A wonderful oddity, well worth playing through to completion for a satisfying conclusion you won’t see coming.

Play The Sinking Feeling, Free

quadrant (all lower-case) is a fast paced rhythm-action game where all you have to do is press the corresponding direction that the large box is located in before it moves. Sound easy? Rest assured, it most certainly is not!

Things start of reasonably easy with some basic boxes on a monochrome background, but as soon as you start to get the hang of it, quadrant will switch things up a bit, adding color, then some snazzy effects, and even rotating the screen - until you’re left with the super-hard and rather hypnotic visions that are depicted in the GIFs above. There are 2 boxes that move on screen, but it’s best to ignore what the little box is doing, as although it signals where the next move can be, it can be very distracting - your eyes have more than enough to cope with anyway!

All this addictive and challenging gameplay is accompanied by an excellent soundtrack, with each level animated differently according to the song. It really does help to have the volume turned up, as the beat of the song helps you stick to the pattern and stops you from making too many rash button presses.

The simple graphical style of quadrant belies a deceptively tricky and addictive game - a mesmerising slice of melodic rhythm action.

Download quadrant, Free

DUR is a musical adventure platforming game where you play as an iron sheet of magical musical wonder that has a violin, and uses it to create beautiful notes that can lift massive objects (including the ground) in the games world to save yourself from the fog that’s filling it.

It’s a short, surreal and beautiful experience, with innovative gameplay and a wonderfully bizarre premise. As your strange little sheet of iron travels through the world you’ll see some marvellous sights and perform some fantastic feats of levitation, all with the aim to bring life to a city that has lost it’s heartbeat. We can’t wait to see more of DUR, as even in these early stages, it a spectacular audio/visual gaming experience.

Play the Alpha Demo, Free

Planet Quest a fast paced rhythm action game with vibrant visuals and an endless supply of levels coming to iOS.

You play an alien who must tap in time to the music to abduct cute dancing animals as the planet spins around in front of you like a turntable. Planet Quest runs on its own custom game engine, that incorporates a sample based music tracker. This tracker allows the game to build songs and levels on the fly with zero lag - allowing for unlimited music/levels. The vector based graphics compliment the music wonderfully, making for a game that’s full of color and energy.

The current Beta test is for iOS, but Planet Quest will also be coming to Android in the future. It’s a fun and cheerful rhythm action game, with funky tunes, vibrant visuals and tons of replayability. Addictive rhythm action animal abduction.

Sign Up for the Beta (iOS 8 Only)

What would you do if a celebrity started pretending to do your job, badly and got paid a fortune for it? Well DJ and music producer Dr. Kucho has had this very problem, in the form of crap celebrity DJs who just turn up and press a button, and has decided to make a Ghosts ‘n Goblins-style retro arcade game out of it – Ghosts ‘n DJs.

In Ghosts ‘n DJs you play Dr. Kucho, as he battles his way through a rather tough side scrolling retro action game, fighting off hordes of naff DJs such as ‘Paris Sheratan’ and ‘Pitbullshit’. It’s no masterpiece but it fun to play, feels a lot like it’s GnG inspiration and does make you smile – especially when you see some of the DJs combat moves.

Still very early in development, we’d love to see this expanded on, with more crap DJs to beat up and more bonafide DJs to play as. As it stands though, it’s a fun and challenging slice of retro action with it’s tongue firmly in it’s cheek.

Check out the Kickstarter & Play the Free Alpha Demo (Win, Mac & Linux)

Friction is a seriously funky space shooter where you plunge down a black hole full of nasty alien ships and the only way to charge your blasters is by flying as close to incoming bullets as possible.

Not only is everything on screen made up of Tron-like neon colors, the soundtrack is amazing – made up of awesome dance anthems by Tikal Shine that have a 90s feel and a strong Daft Punk vibe (and a touch of Boney M!). Crucially, gameplay is fun and addictive too, the way you charge up your blaster by playing chicken with enemy bullets adds a great risk and reward element.

You’ll have to use your hard earned shots sparingly, shooting whole lines of enemies at a time is the best option if you want to survive this tricky neon blaster. Like any shooter worth it’s salt, t’s a little tough, but as long as those funky tunes keep playing, so will you.

Play Friction, Free

Flicker is a fast paced audio-enhanced action puzzle game where you have to avoid previous versions of yourself as you make your way to the goal.

The fantastic audio is an essential part of Flicker, so it’s highly recommended playing with headphones. Your goal in each stage is simply to travel across the screen and reach the goal. What makes things tougher is that each time you complete a stage, it creates a ‘copy’ of yourself which you have to avoid, that moves along the same path as you did last time. Things start of easily, but the difficulty soon ramps up, with multiple copies of yourself and other enemies to avoid.

Flicker is still early in development, but it’s shaping up to be a great game – a stylish action puzzler where you to play against yourself in a pixellated light-show full of cool synth beats.

Play The Flicker Alpha, Free

Beat Patrol is a challenging rhythm action side scrolling bullet hell shooter where you dodge the enemies attacks then shoot in time with the music.

The music is wonderful, and if you have a half decent sense of rhythm it’s (reasonably) easy to match up the beats. Things start off easy, but it soon ramps up to bullet hell shoot-em-up levels of difficulty. It’s a fun and challenging game that will test your sense of rhythm as well as your reflexes.

Download the Prototype, Free

S.W.A.G (Super Wreckless Awesome Gangsta) is a rhythmic first person shooter set in the 90’s where you roam dangerous streets and knock-out your enemy rappers with a finely timed sound blast from your golden boombox.

Gameplay is pretty basic at the moment, but it is still very early in development. It’s a fun (and tough) game for what it is though, with different enemy types that approach you in different ways and a cool retro visual style. As the game is developed, we’d love to see other music to blast enemies from and some more gameplay element features.

Like Harmonix’s Chroma, S.W.A.G. looks set to offer up some fun rhythm-based FPS action, only one of the games features a golden boombox gun though!

Play the Prototype, Free

Inside My Radio is a very cool music based platformer where you can only perform jumps, wall-jumps and dashes in time with the beats of the song.

You control a little green guy living inside a broken boombox, who sets out on a quest to fix it. You’ll travel through various different musical worlds on this adventure, all the while all of your actions must be synchronized with the beat of the music.

The Prototype was created for Ludum Dare#23 where it won both the Overall and Audio prizes in the Jam category and came in second in both Coolness and Innovation, and is now being made into a full game. The audio and visual design are excellent, with the whole world pulsing to the beat of the excellent soundtrack.

As you can only perform moves to the beat of the music, even simple jumps can be tricky, especially if (like me) you’ve got no rhythm. But if you press F1, it’ll bring up a handy visual timing meter, that will assist the rhythmically challenged.

It’s a great blend of rhythm action and platforming mechanics, with vibrant visuals and a kick ass soundtrack. Jump to the Beat!

Download the Prototype, Free

Posts tagged Music