[Dark Hunter]

Wierdest name you've ever heard, right?

Well, it is a dodge sim (basically the game hurls lots and lots of bullets at you and you dodge them... you can't shoot back) that uses music to determine the bullet patterns it puts out. Kinda cool...

Here's a demonstration.

You choose what music you put in... though the difficulty is not related at all to how slow or fast the music is... however different songs produce different patterns. Just drag and drop your music file into the "music" folder.

My only gripe is this: it is very inconsistent on what it deems an "incompatible file type". The readme says it will accept .mp3, .ogg, .wav, .mod, .mid, and even .lnk (windows only). Wavs and Oggs work fine, as do some MP3's... most mp3's it seems to not recognize somehow. It also does not work with .mids, no matter what that readme says. I'm curious as to the criteria it uses to determine whether or not to play an mp3...See edit below.


Oh, yeah: download link. The site's all in japanese, so I tried to skip past the part where it asks you if you wish to sign up (which was very confusing to get through since I can't read japanese)... but if the link doesn't work, I'll fix it.

Game seems to be designed with older Windows OS's in mind, but seems to be working fine on Vista. The fact that the designer specifies that .lnk reading is windows-specific suggests there may be builds for other OS's, but the only download link I know of goes to a windows download.

EDIT: Ah HA! It refuses to play any music that has album and/or artist information recorded on it. I'm not entirely sure why it does that... any unsigned music is perfectly playable. There is a way to remove that information from the file is there not? Well, anyway: so long as it has no album or artist info, it seems it can play a wide range of music file types.

[BloodEagle]

Winamp can edit ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. For WMA/V/X/Z/Y/D/E files, you can edit the information by accessing a file's properties.

[colecampbell666]

So this is like Audiosurf?

[Dark Hunter]

Similar premise, except BPO is classified under "Shmups"... despite the fact that your "ship" can't fire back. Oh, yeah, and it's free. ( at "Still Alive" being the most popular song on Audiosurf, btw.)

BPO is absolutely brutal sometimes. Throws so many bullets at you there doesn't ever seem to be a way through. I've been playing using a Smash Bros. Brawl soundtrack (all the music in which has no artist information, hence why the game plays it), and... oddly enough, a slower, more mellow song (Go K.K. Rider remix) is the hardest one I've found, harder than any of the fast-paced rock tracks included, which you'd think in a music-based program would be more hectic... but no.

And I've tried accessing the music files' Properties and deleting the information, but apparently this just sets those bytes to NULL instead of getting rid of them completely... and BPO still refuses to play them. I think it's because the program does not recognize the information stored there (whether it be set to NULL or anything else), and assumes that it can't read the file. Irritating. 

Maybe if I put the file through Goldwave it would get rid of those bytes and just record pure audio?

[Ghostavo]

Use winamp and take off the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. That seems to be enough.

[Mongoose]

Oh, this thing is immensely addictive, even though I utterly suck at it.  As that video suggested, Through the Fire and Flames is rather insane at parts.

[BloodEagle]

I don't seem to die.... Is that normal?

[Dark Hunter]

You don't die in the game... but when you're hit your score goes way down.

When there's a reddish splatter, that means you got hit. A yellow splatter means you got close to getting hit.


EDIT: VICTORY IS MINE! Gave up on Winamp, found a neat little program that gets rid of ID3 tags completely, and seems to be working.

Now... one more thing to take care of...  *kills Winamp* 


EDIT2: I take it back: the toughest song in this game is Advent: One Winged Angel. I'm serious, I don't think it's possible to not get hit at least a dozen times on this song.

[BloodEagle]

Curse my inability to embed videos.

Monk

I moved the audio two seconds ahead of the video, because I think it fits better that way.

More to come.