Beat Hazard

Indie games aren't bad but I tend not to buy or play them because there's no achievements and it seems they are shorter than I would like when I do really get into them. Yesterday I bought this game twice because I NEED IT EVERYWHERE!
 
This game is essentially a twin stick shooter, you point one stick where you wanna fly and the other where you wanna shoot. Boring, done to death, and not my cup o' tea. I wouldn't have cared if I hadn't seen a video where a guy was trying to experiement or break the game by recording himself talking, yelling, and growling onto a custom MP3 and the concept hit me and hooked me.
 
This is a twin stick shooter where your bullets depends on what music you listen to while playing. You pick a song from the game or from your custom library of songs and the louder and more energetic the music then the more you can shoot at a time. This doesn't last long however as once you start shooting space debris and enemy ships powerups will being to show up which allow you to turn the volume up on the song (which makes it louder), power up your laser (which makes your laser more powerful and flashy), or combo up which boosts your score. 
 
So you get a game where you listen to your custom soundtrack while playing, no big deal. Yet the visuals on this thing are ridiculous! Your laser explodes everything once you get a few power ups and those things blowing up make more bright and flashy explosions. It's really the kind of game where you lose your ship on screen in all the pandamonium and special effects.
 
You should play it to see what I mean, it can be described but not understood until you see this thing in motion. It's 400 MS points which is the high end of indie games but it's worth it. You can link your computer to the Xbox via Media Extender and that will let you play songs from your computer too, although if you don't have your music organized very well (read: lots of folders to break down each genre, artist, album, remix, ect) it will take a while to fully bring them over and label them. 
I used a folder which housed my podcasts, downloaded remixes, ripped music, downloaded music, and some random audio files (basically I put all audio into it's own folder, movies in their folder, pictures...I see now how dumb this is). Point is that I had 578 folders to import in and it took about 20minutes. You can pick and choose which ones to import in but when you first go to this menu it lists the folders as Folder 1, Folder 2, ect. so you don't know what you will be getting without importing them. There is an option to stop the Import All and you can finish later if you get sick of waiting and just want to play already.
 
Overall it's a great game, not badly priced, and so far offering hours of entertainment. It's the perfect game to pick up and play a few songs if you're waiting for someone to logon for some mainstream gaming action or if you were watching a movie and your kids keep needing to use the bathroom so you keep pausing and getting bored waiting for them to finish (it's sad that this is my typical situation in my household!).