What I’m Playing – Beat Hazard

Since I spend good chunks of my time gaming, I figure I’ll spend a little time now and again pimping one of the games that currently has it’s addictive teeth sunk in to my leg.

Beat Hazard. No, it isn’t a game about a rogue cop smashing them Duke boys upside the head with an axe handle, though a great game that would make (especially in the best forgotten Coy and Vance days).

Take the basic game concept of something like Geometry Wars or Robotron (Kelly? Liam? Remember those damnable toasters in the N64 remake of this one?)…you’re a lone dude, ship, whatever running around a game screen, constantly being pursued and fired upon by an onslaught of enemies. In this case, you’re in a ship…WASD steers your path, while the mouse aims, the left button fires, and the right button blasts a Super bomb that annihilates all but boss enemies on screen.

So far, so redundant, right? Okay, now add your music. Any songs that you have on your system (actually, the M4A format is thus far unsupported, but that’s on the way!) are played to. They aren’t just background noise, though. They also build the level.

The more intense the music gets, the more powerful your weapons become. Of course, the more intense the music, the more enemies will appear, and the more likely boss ships are to come up. So yeah, you might be kicking some ass, when suddenly…oh shit! A lull after the solo! Now there are 10 bad guys on screen and your guns are ineffective peashooters for the next 13 seconds…fun!

This game is also intensely bright and full of insane strobing and screen shake effects. This is what you’re greeted with when you start it up.

Now, I’ve seen screens like that before…I have NEVER seen one pop up every single time you play where you have to press a button to acknowledge that, yes, I waive the right for my eyes to function properly from this point forth.

I made a few videos while playing this last time that hopefully get the basic idea across of how insane this game can get. I’m only using the freeware version of FRAPS so I’m limited to 30 seconds a pop, but whatever.

This first video is playing the game to Over the Seas by Alestorm. Never heard of Alestorm? You best fix that shit! Come on, they’re described as ‘Scottish pirate metal’ on their MySpace page, where they also rip off the intro lyrics to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air as a bio…do you really need to know more?

Now, those little items that popped up when some ships (especially the boss ones) exploded are power ups. Each of the +1 spheres adds to the score multiplier for the round. The POW spheres increase your weapons power. Every time you pick one up, those lines on the bottom of the screen move closer together…when they meet, it not only starts strobing and flashing like everything else in the damn game, it also means your weapons are at Beat Hazard level. In other words, go forth and fuck some shit up! Finally the VOL spheres increase the volume of the music in the background AND power up the weapons. So yeah, all those guys driving around in cars worth less than the speakers they’ve installed in them were right…volume = win.

At the end of every round, your score is tallied. There are leader boards that will eventually track individual song plays and who scored what per round on them. You also have a constantly growing score total that increases your rank. Every rank increase adds more for you the next time you play. Maybe now your multiplier increases by 5 rather than 1. Or perhaps you start each round with one of each Power up type already on screen.

It’s addictive as Hell, and you’re limited only be your own music collection, and how resilient you are to staving off seizures. I picked it up on Steam, but you can also grab it from Gamersgate (and eventually Impulse and Direct2Drive) for a whopping $9.99.

And just to get the point across, and to subject your vision to enough of this that your eyes melt, let’s take a look at a battle against 2 boss ships set to Megadeth’s Hangar 18 with high powered weapons.