Ride the Math!

Mark posted a link to this really sweet game called Torus Trooper:





You can download the game here.

It's a very typical japanese scroller-shooter, but in 3D. By "typical" I mean "has so much stuff flying at me that I can't possibly tell what's going on". I've never been a huge fan of the genre, but this is a really pretty one.

Two comments:

1) the track is clearly procedurally generated. A number of years ago, a collegue and I did a paper and sample app on generating procedural content. The result looked something like this. It's horribly dated but at teh time I was quite proud of it. Anyhow, the point I'm getting to is that the result we were going for was procedural generation of natural-looking content. Torus Trooper reminded me that procedurally generated procedural-looking content can look beautiful too. Play it, and somewhere inside you a giddy mathematician will come out from his hiding place.

2) It reminded me less of a game and more of some nightclubs I've been to. Combination of the music and the color schemes. It was only missing those kids with the glow-sticks and that one guy with the whistle (why does every dance club have one of those?).

Go play it! It's a quick try and worth a look.