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Audiosurf android1/17/2024 ![]() My beef with Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead is a little more nuanced. This logic also would help explain Poison by Alice Cooper. It is on the same CD as Creep and the only reason I can see for choosing Creep as a Monster Halloween Hit is that creep is part of the word ‘creepy’. I suspect that embracing a playful riff on folklore was less important to the selection process for Monster Halloween Hits than the fact it has the word ‘Wolf’ in the title. It’s a lot like Dracula, but instead of trying to put an end to all the sucking and seducing, Shakira’s like, “Mate, I’ve got a radar to track down eligible dudes and the emergency services on speed dial in case it gets so hot it catches fire.” She Wolf is also a total CHOON. It is ostensibly about werewolves, but, look, the werewolf is a metaphor for sexual agency and freedom. There’s also Black Night by Deep Purple, maybe because dark, gothy colour palettes and night are spooky? More in the way of political unrest and a loss of faith in governance. There’s a creeping horror there, sure, but not in the kind of campy over-the-top Halloween way. Ghost Town is a song about unemployment and the decay of once-thriving areas. I assume it’s because it namechecks ghosts. I mean, Ghost Town by The Specials in on there. You never attend another Halloween party as long as you live. You throw the pool cue onto the floor and run to the taxi rank. Your pool game is now the most dramatic event of your life. Then O Fortuna from Carmina Burana starts up. You don’t know how to deal with this change in mood so you slide a quid onto the side of the pool table. ![]() You try to order a snakebite and black because memories of some metal club night at university are stirring and while you shout your order Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead pops up. You go to the loo to try to get over your sudden waves of angst and alienation and by the time you get back it’s barrelled on towards Iron Maiden (The Number of the Beast, since you asked). Picture the scene: you go to the pub (the one which Phil may or may not have made up) expecting cheesy over-the-top cobwebstravaganza realness, and as you walk through the door the CD spits out Radiohead’s Creep. While I listen to Things That Go Bump In The Night via a terribly low-quality YouTube video, I decide the biggest stumbling block with Monster Halloween Hits is that tonally it’s all over the place. And where the hell is the sublime Things That Go Bump In The Night by allSTARS* (a band which no one seems to remember except me, and whose members included a woman who played an Australian housemate in the eighth season of UK version of Big Brother and the guy who plays Darren Osborne in Hollyoaks)? Sure, there are classic tunes like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Monster Mash, but the rest are just songs with vaguely spooky words in the title. The track listing of Monster Halloween Hits reads like an exercise in Halloween keyword searches. I don’t remember anything I bought in 2010 so it seems unlikely that Phil would recall this album so easily if he wasn’t still listening to it regularly. ![]() He is very keen to distance himself from his purchase of Monster Halloween Hits, insisting that it was ‘necessary’ for a party his stepfather’s pub was hosting back in 2010. This is how I come to learn that Phil paid money for an album called Monster Halloween Hits ( full track listings here). ![]() “No one actually owns any music nowadays.” “No can do on the Reinstall, Phil,” I say. This is when I took my problem to the rest of the PC Gamer team. Ambient electronica makes for absolutely tedious racing, while punk started giving me a headache, because I’m a million years old and deeply uncool. The latter has a jaunty folk rock thing going on which means there are plenty of blocks on the screen to maintain your attention, but after that I was struggling for mp3 options. The Freak Fandango Orchestra’s Requiem for a Fish works surprisingly well. 'Happy Birthday' is too short to be an enjoyable course, and 'i love you' is slightly too weird. If you clog up a lane with non-matching colours you can’t pick anything up for a while. Warmer colours are worth more points, so red is the most desirable pickup and blue is chump change. Audiosurf takes these files and turns them into futuristic racecourses, each spackled with coloured blocks. Collecting groups of matching coloured blocks in each lane of the track is how you earn points.
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