Today was the release day for Audiosurf, and at $9 I couldn’t resist checking it out.

It’s kind of like the various Tetris-ish block-drop games in that you collect blocks of the same colour in groups of three or more touching each other. But, the way you collect the blocks is by running a ship over a track with blocks scattered on it, and the shape of the track and placement of the blocks is generated based on the song you select (and any old MP3 will do). The pace of the blocks tries to match up with the beat, and the slope and twistiness of the track represent how intense or slow-paced the song is at that point.

It’s not a particularly deep game, but it can be fairly challenging. Although you can’t really ‘lose’ at it, you have to be quick and accurate in order to score well. You can also choose different ship types that affect how the game is played — with a ‘mono’ ship, you want to avoid gray blocks and only get the other single-coloured blocks, with a ‘pusher’ ship you can cause blocks to slide to the column on your left or right instead of the one you pick it up in, and so on.

If none of this makes any sense, you can probably just check out some Youtube videos of it in action to see how it plays.

Leaderboards are kept separately for each song, and so far I’m on top of several of them. Even if it’s only because I’m the only person to have played that particular song so far… I did about a dozen or so, including some of the included Orange Box soundtrack songs, some Interpol, and some Rush. I even did 2112 — yes, the full 20-minute version.