The main problem for me isn’t that online leaderboards per se are unable to substitute for a proper generated goal, but that these in particular just don’t carry any meaning for me. I can’t see the skill in this game. Sure, you can memorise where it throws a lot of reds and yellows and maybe even what stacks it drops them in. But is that even optimal? Should I take what I can get in blues? There’s no feedback in the game to tell me when I’m doing well; only exhaustive and repetitive testing and calculation will tell, and in the meantime I’m recording numbers in some notebook while playing a pop-three. The greed ratio probably varies from song to song, too. Actually, is that what this game is about? Is the high-score competition fundamentally a memorisation competition? That’s how it looks to me, am I just missing something big?

Anyway, in summary I can derive fun from online competition but in order to enable that the game has to first be some minimal level of fun on an immediate level. The core experience here, in my mind, was supposed to be me grooving to my music. The game part has no groove, no sense of momentum at all. I’ve also read on RPSh about a problem that hasn’t affected me personally and won’t – that it combines scores based on artist and title instead of a checksum. There’s a strong argument to be made that that’s the preferable route, but on the flipside it means that different versions of the song have different intrinsic scores and you can’t tell if people are actually playing the same track as you. If I were trying to get stuck into online high scores that uncertainty would drive me frothing batty.

And another half of the fun, I feel, is finding the tracks that make the best surfs.

The problem is that the game I played while listening to and watching the music immediately and persistently bored me to tears. I can collect these things! In groups! Of columns! Or something! And if I collect a bad one they turn grey! Or something! I’m not interacting with the music, and I can’t tell whether I’m doing well or poorly because there is neither a generated target high score to pull me nor an opponent or even a rubber-band progress line to push. There’s just too much boring mental paperwork in keeping track of the colour points hierarchy while avoiding making X group while waiting for a Y to appear in the Z column at random in service of a meaningless highscore. A line-following or obstacle avoidance game could have worked – as is, I found I was essentially trying to watch a fun toy while playing an overcomplicated pop-three so I regretfully gave up both.

Watch this: I gave it another shot before posting to make sure I wasn’t saying anything grossly inaccurate. The final line of the first draft was a request that he make an edition with the game part turned off. Oh look, there’s been an update. Now you have to sign in, which doesn’t make me happy but for a free beta I’d be a jerk to complain. However, there is also now a ‘freeride’ option. Here, have some of my money, sir! I love Audiosurf now that I never have to play it again.

I suspect it’ll be huge. As is, but more so if they port it to iPods, mobiles, PSPs. Perfect for commuters.

The only solution is to have a leap-podcast.

Possibly.