Audi Auto Group just released an update to their FREE driving/rhythm game, Audi A1 Beat Driver. The app includes tracks from up and coming rock bands, including La Roux, The Rakes , Lo-Fi-Fnk and Torpedo. Artists in this current update include White Lies, Don Diablo, Metric and Spleen United.

New tracks
“Gimme Sympathy” – Performed by Metric
“I’m Not Your Toy – Jack Beats Remix“ – Performed by La Roux
“Love Affair Strapped In Electric Chair” – Performed by Torpedo
“Suburbia” – Performed by Spleen United
“Death” – Performed by White Lies
“Where I Belong (Life Is A Festival)” – Performed by Don Diablo
“Earthquake threat” – Performed by Torpedo
“A Funny Thing (Dan Grech Final Mix)” – Performed by Penguin Prison

Kai Mensing, project manager at AUDI AG, says,
“We were so pleased with the success of the original Audi A1 Beat Driver app in so many markets that we wanted to say thank you to all those users who downloaded the app. We thought the best way to do that was to give them even more great new music to enjoy.”

Steer your Audi A1, collect markers and avoid hazards. Simple, right? Is this more than a glorified commercial? Sounds like it might indeed be. If it sounds like a game, plays like a game and walks like a game, including global leaderboards and facebook/twitter integration, it just might be a game, no? Enjoy the screens, and check out the app. Let us know what you think in the comment section below.

The new 17-track Audi A1 Beat Driver is available for FREE download from the App Store

Developer/Publisher: Feel Every Yummy
Genre: Rhythm Game
Price: $0.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Review Platform: iPod Touch 2G
Verdict: There are better rhythm options available
Pros: Easy to learn
Cons: Limited music library

Rhythm games are one of those genres that you either can’t get enough of, or you could really do without.  Generally speaking I fall into the latter category.  I neither rock the band, nor am I any sort of hero with the guitar set.  So what was my editor thinking when he sent me on a mission to review Bongo Blitz? [I resent the accusation that I was thinking at any point! -Ed.] ‘Lucy, you gotta lotta ‘splainin to do.’

When you fire up Bongo Blitz you’re presented with a chance to dive right in, play a tutorial or download additional tracks.  I thought I’d take the tutorial in order to nurture my inner-babaloo.  The game play screen consists of an American idol flavored rock concert background overlayed with a rhythm track and two bongo drums.  The left drum is yellow and the right drum is blue.  I figured this might be my big chance to get my groove on.  I can handle two drums.

As the song begins to play, you tap tap along.  Yellow half circle, left drum.  Right half circle, right drum.  Full green circle, whack both of those bongos, boy.  Let’s hear it for primary colors !  But wait, what’s with this star ?  I don’t know what the star is for ?!?!  Ah-ha !  The tutorial clearly states that when the star appears in the rhythm zone, you need to go all whammy bar on that iPod and give it a quick shake.  The more accurate hits that you land, the higher your score and corresponding multiplier.

Any time you miss a note, your Life Meter takes a dip.  You’ll also find ‘extended’ drum hits, as you will see in most rhythm games.  Hit one of these and go for a drum roll of epic proportions to score bonus points.  So that’s the ground rules, but the question is did this pocket-size pounder turn me into a Bongo Hero ?

Well the game comes loaded with three songs so I fired one up and started to play that funky music, white boy.  I was tapping the left drum, and whacking at the right.  Then, just like that classic episode of Lucy, they started to speed things up and I turned into the rhythm game spaz I usually prove myself to be.  I did make a recovery and in the end the score screen showed I had over 200 great hits and less than ten complete misses, so I didn’t feel so bad.

That said, if I have to play a rhythm game, I’d sooner play the Muppet-themed Animal Drummer or the iPod grand-daddy of them all, Tap Tap Revenge.  As I said earlier, Bongo Blitz ships with three songs and I did find three additional tracks by independent artists.  The Note Tracks option also allowed for some better known tracks by artists like Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift.

It may well be that I’m just not a rhythm game guy, but I had no desire to bang my bongos beyond the review period.  As always, your whammy-bar-induced, revenge-fueled mileage may vary.

Audi apparently sees the iPhone as a creative way to advertise their cars, by releasing games based off of specific car models on the App Store. Their latest attempt at game-based marketing is Audi A1 Beat Driver. This rhythm game has you trying to hit notes coming down a track set to licensed music, like pretty much any other popular rhythm game. However, in this one, you slide an Audi A1 up and down the track to try to catch the notes. As you catch notes, your multiplier bar increases, which you must tap when it’s full to increase your multiplier. There are also powerup and powerdown icons to raise and lower your multiplier respectively. The track list for the game is as such:

“Accelerate” – Performed by Torpedo
“I’m A Rope” – Performed by Tommy Sparks
“Strength In Numbers” – Performed by The Music
“Farewell To The Fairground” – Performed by White Lies
“Gold Guns Girls” – Performed by Metric
“1989” – Performed by The Rakes
“Bulletproof” – Performed by La Roux
“Digital Age” – Performed by After The Fall
“Want U” – Performed by Lo-Fi-Fnk

La Roux should be familiar to anyone who watched TV in January and saw the Bayonetta ad repeated ad nauseam. That isn’t the same song, so your sanity shall remain intact.  Audi A1 Beat Driver is available for free on the App Store right now.

Developer/Publisher: EA Mobile
Genre: Music/Rhythm Game
Price: $9.99
Acquired: Promo Code from Developer
Verdict: So uber-chic, you know what you are: S-U-P-E-R!
Pros: Nails the Rock Band experience, playing the instrument tracks feels better than Tap Tap Revenge’s playing along with whatever they decide to chart, cheap DLC available (including an awesome free Freezepop 2-pack), great unobtrusive Facebook Connect integration, No Megadeth songs
Cons: It’s still not the same as playing your plastic instruments, online multiplayer is asynchronous only, No Megadeth songs

When Rock Band Mobile was announced for cell phones that were notably not the iPhone (and iPod touch as well, can’t forget the brotherhood of those without AT&T and/or 3G), the community was incensed. How could EA ignore the biggest mobile gaming platform in existence? Turns out that they weren’t, they were just keeping their ace hidden up their sleeve – and now Rock Band is here for the App Store, and it’s just as good as we could have hoped.

Rock Band for iPhone and iPod touch impresses in that it’s a great simulation of the console experience. You choose between guitar, bass, drums, and vocals to play, just like the console Rock Band games. While in this game you only have 4 notes to play per instrument as opposed to 5 – this means no orange note for guitar, and no foot pedal for drummers. That sound you hear? Your foot weeping in ecstasy. Drums are simple enough to play – you tap the on-screen button to play the note, simple as that. Guitar and bass are a little more complicated, in that while you just tap the button (no separate strumming) you have the sustained notes, and hammer-ons/pull-offs to use. Hammer-ons/pull-offs can either be done by just tapping them like normal notes, or you can slide across the buttons to hit the hammer-ons and pull-offs. There aren’t a lot of crazy speed metal guitar solos in the default set list (there is Jethro Tull though – hah), but with downloadable content, it may be an especially helpful technique in the future.

Vocals are fairly interesting, in that you don’t sing along with the song, you tap buttons to them just like you would with a normal instrument, however, the alignment for these buttons is vertical, as opposed to horizontal, so you feel like you’re tapping along with high and low notes. The button-based singing feels a lot more authentic than Rock Band Unplugged ever did, even if you’re still just tapping buttons. It would be interesting to see if singing like in the console versions would ever be technically feasible, but for a portable game, this probably works best. Singing into your iPhone in public is not a good way to look like a normal, functioning human being.

The other impressive thing with Rock Band on the iPhone is the dedication to the console game’s interface – all the sound effects, menus, and note tracks look and sound identical to the ‘real’ game. Where the game kind of disappoints is in the ‘band’ aspects – you can’t customize or create your own rocker, and the in-game band is comprised of timed pre-rendered video, but the tempo doesn’t really match up with the songs, so it can be a little off-putting. However, you probably won’t notice it most of the time since you’ll be focused on the note charts coming at you, as you should be.

Rock Band features 2 main modes – Quickplay for picking a song and playing it, a World Tour mode (although the single-player version of this plays more like the classic Career mode from Rock Band 1, or the first 3 Guitar Hero games), and Multiplayer, to let up to 4 rockers within Bluetooth range of each other to rock out together. There also appears to be an asynchronous online multiplayer in World Tour, where you play one instrument track, and then your friends can join in and add their tracks later for your band score. But how will your friends know how to join you? Well, the game supports Facebook Connect, although this is mostly used solely as the game’s central player database, not as a tool to annoyingly post every high score you get to your wall. Because if you did that, then you’d have no friends left. Then again, you would be number one on all your leaderboards. As it is, it’s a great use of Facebook Connect, and there’s something just kind of cool about seeing your real name be number one over all those other chumps on your friends list. Makes it feel all the more real.

So what we have here is a faithful adaptation of Rock Band – not just in the look, but in the feel as well – this game trumps Tap Tap Revenge, because instead of playing amorphous note tracks that come along set to some kind of beat, by playing the actual instruments, it feels that much more authentic as you know what you’re playing, and it makes sense logically. It’s the same reason why Guitar Hero became so popular in the first place – not just the instrument simulation, but that you were playing along with the music and a specific instrument, so you had an actual feel for what you were playing. While playing this game is nothing like playing an actual Rock Band game (or real drums or guitar for that matter), it at least feels that way, and in some ways, invalidates Rock Band Unplugged, as playing just a single instrument track with buttons is pretty fun after all, as opposed to playing an amalgamation of all 4.

Also, the Rock Band platform’s downloadable content feature has made it as well – and what’s awesome is that tracks are mere pennies compared to the console version – 2-packs of songs only cost $0.99 here. There’s 5 paid packs to start off with, along with the must-have free Freezepop 2-pack, with the insanely catchy “Super-Sprode” and “Science Genius Girl” available. I’d buy these for $0.99, but as free DLC, it’s S-U-P-E-R.

Is Rock Band worth the purchase? With over 20 songs available in the game as is, cheap DLC options, the multiple instrument tracks available, and just the Rock Band touch that helped make the console games so beloved, Rock Band is the king of the App Store music game market.

Today Harmonix revealed the full setlist for their portable rock & roller, and I’m going to reveal my stance without much beating around the virtual bush: I’m not impressed.

Anticipating the ability to strut my rhythmical and musical chops, Amplitude style, to Tenacious D’s “Rock Your Socks” and Alice in Chains’ “Would” leaves me slightly breathless. Knowing that a full 2/3 of the 41 on-disc tracks are retreads from Rock Band & Rock Band 2 leaves me slightly nauseous. I’ve played these tracks to DEATH already.

The nine songs temporarily exclusive to this PSP version are indicated by asterisks below, and on the whole it’s a solid lineup. Maybe it’s the MTV-raised Gen X-er inside my DNA, but I was actually expecting more, you know, unplugged!?

Here’s the finalized set list:

2000s

AFI – “Miss Murder” *
All-American Rejects – “Move Along”
Audioslave – “Gasoline” *
Black Tide – “Show Me the Way” *
Freezepop – “Less Talk More Rokk” *
Jimmy Eat World – “The Middle”
The Killers – “Mr. Brightside”

Lacuna Coil – “Our Truth”
Lamb of God – “Laid to Rest”
Modest Mouse – “Float On”
Queens of the Stone Age – “3’s and 7’s”
System of a Down – “Chop Suey!”
Tenacious D – “Rock Your Socks” *

1990s

3 Doors Down – “Kryptonite” *
Alice in Chains – “Would?” *
Blink 182 – “What’s My Age Again” *
Foo Fighters – “Everlong”
Judas Priest – “Painkiller”
Lit – “My Own Worst Enemy”
Lush – “De-Luxe”
Mighty Mighty Bosstones – “Where’d You Go?”
Nine Inch Nails – “The Perfect Drug”

Nirvana – “Drain You”
The Offspring – “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘em Separated)”
Pearl Jam – “Alive”
Smashing Pumpkins – “Today”
Social Distortion – “I Was Wrong”
Soundgarden – “Spoonman”
Weezer – “Buddy Holly”

1980s

Billy Idol – “White Wedding Part 1″
Bon Jovi – “Livin’ on a Prayer”
Dead Kennedys – “Holiday in Cambodia”

Motörhead – “Ace of Spades”
The Police – “Message in a Bottle”
Siouxsie & the Banshees – “The Killing Jar”

1970s

Boston – “More Than a Feeling”
Jackson 5 – “ABC” *
Jethro Tull – “Aqualung”

Kansas – “Carry on Wayward Son
Rush – “The Trees”

1960s

The Who – “Pinball Wizard”

~~~

On the bright side, Harmonix ‘gets’ DLC and have promised to treat this PSP counterpart as a music platform, as they have with their big brother versions. Beginning June 9th, 10 additional tracks will be available for download from within the game, with more to follow on a regular basis.

• 30 Seconds to Mars “The Kill”
• Belly “Feed the Tree”
• Disturbed “Inside the Fire”
• Lynyrd Skynyrd “Gimme Three Steps”
• Muse “Hysteria”
• Mute Math “Typical”
• No Doubt “Just a Girl”
• Oasis “Wonderwall”
• Paramore “Crushcrushcrush”
• Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge”

I *do* have to throw in that if you’re still on the fence about buying a PSP, the upcoming Bundle is tantalizing:

To commemorate the debut of the Rock Band franchise on the PSP system, Sony Computer Entertainment America plans to release a limited edition Rock Band-branded PSP Entertainment Pack at the launch of Rock Band Unplugged. The bundle will include the game, a “Piano Black” PSP system, a 4GB Memory Stick PRO Duo™, and, in the United States only, a voucher to download Paramount Pictures’ School of Rock from PlayStation®Store.

Now, the only question remaining, is will you guys and gals be picking this up? What are your gripes? What are ya excited about? Let us know down below!

Due to popular demand, PM Games has announced that a “Crew Edition” of DJ Max Fever, exclusive to the United States, will go on sale starting April 25th. The Crew Edition, which you can only pre-order at this site, contains all the goodies included with the Limited Edition package. Those goodies are:

-3 Disc DJ MAX Audio Trinity Soundtrack(!!!)
-DJ MAX Art book
-Puzzle
-Limited Post Card set
-NB Rangers Mask
-Collectable DJ MAX Technika IC Player Card
-DJ MAX FEVER PSP Software signed by the developers

There are a few key differences between the Crew and Limited editions. For one, you can actually PURCHASE the Crew Edition (as opposed to THIS one), so you don’t need to enter any contests or be particularly skilled in the game and have a high ranking. Also, because this one is exclusive to the U.S. of A, it’s coming in it’s very own lovely red packaging (shown below). What more could a hardcore Music gamer want?

The 125  Crew editions will go on sale for $130 each, so pre-ordering it here would be a good idea for anyone interested.