AudioSurf

If we're judging quality purely by time spent playing a game, Audiosurf 2 would clearly take the #1 spot as I've spent over 2000 hours either playing it competitively or using it as a music visualizer. AS2 certainly looks better of the two from a graphical standpoint, though as a video game, Audiosurf 1 is by far the more realized one. That's not to say the systems in Audiosurf 1 are perfect. The camera is wild and tends to veer away from the playing field on sharp turns. The match timer is also completely useless on easier difficulties. For the sake of keeping this review comprehensible, I won't be going into specific details of the various systems that factor into this game's scoring. Just keep in mind that there's a lot of them!

Being able to choose a favorite between the two games is immediately apparent to me when I open up Audiosurf 1. A loud crack of electricity plays and the game boots up with a simple electronic tune that plays over its colorful and cleanly organized main menu. It's like booting up Windows XP, but better. All of the characters are immediately listed in front of you, leaving you to decide which ones to try out first.

Audiosurf is a game focused on music, but it's not focused on rhythm. That's why this works so much better than say, Codemasters' Dance Factory. When playing outside of the Mono modes, this becomes a puzzle game that requires coordination skills similar to Tetris or Puyo Puyo. It's not just about collecting colored blocks, but about knowing which colors to collect, where exactly to put them, and timing the matches to optimize scoring. When you start learning about the various combo systems in the game, you will soon realize that high level Audiosurf puzzle play requires a ton of brain power. And hand speed! Most players opt for the most simple mode, Mono (or one of its more difficult variants), which is no more complicated than picking up colored blocks and avoiding grey blocks. While mono scores can't compete with high level puzzle-mode scores, it proves to be a unique challenge of speed and precision, especially on tracks with high block density.

Although AS2 is far better for visualizer purposes, AS1 was the first to hammer in each song as its own 'track' that could be ridden like a rollercoaster. You could throw in any music from any genre and end up getting something completely unique. This leads to the community scouting out which songs are the most difficult ones, which could range anywhere from trance, to hardcore, to experimental electronic music. It's because of this and the high skill ceiling that the game has essentially infinite replayability. Even if you have played every audio file on your computer, there will always be room for improvement.

I've never gotten particularly skilled at this game, though I've gotten a handful of top scores on popular songs using the Eraser mode or the Vegas mode (which let me just say, once you figure out how to optimize Vegas mode, it feels like you're cheating. I wouldn't recommend this to anybody unless you're REALLY desperate for a high score). I don't regret the time I spent with it because ultimately, I'm just listening to music and playing games like I normally would. This isn't a bad way to combine the two.

Content breakdown
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3 difficulties of gameplay
6 unique gameplay styles (characters)
13 total characters
3 auto-generated score goals to beat for any given song (these are very easy to beat)
online leaderboards for every song, separated by character difficulty
additional gameplay modifiers that can be added onto any song