I like to listen to music while lying on my bed, alone, my forearm covering my eyes. I also like to listen to music while walking around or in a car. I also like music in my movies and my video games. Jonathan Mak, creator of Everyday Shooter, clearly agrees with music in games. He's an artist with a knack for programming. He did the programming, art, music, and, most importantly, the ideas for this phenomenal, deceptively difficult game.

On its face, Everyday Shooter is just another overhead 2-D shooter (hence the name). You are a little speck in the midst of a bunch of abstract, ferocious shapes. Sometimes launch other shapes at your shape and sometimes they just amble by. But any shapes, other than yours and the shapes that you shoot at the other shapes and small white shapes that give you points, are bad shapes. So you move from level to level shooting and avoiding shapes and collecting points. The action is often fast and furious and there are patterns in each level that make destroying the other shapes easier and more valuable.

But Mak has done more than create and pretty, difficult, fun shooter. He's created a shooter that doubles as a musical instrument. Each level, rather than built around a timer or a set number of enemies (if you can call shapes enemies), is built around a piece of music. Just like everything else in the game, Mak wrote and played all the music. The pieces all quite different and all quite good. I'd listen to them outside of the context of the game (but for the impossibility of doing so, as we'll see shortly). The truly nice part of the game comes from how the music changes based on your play. Every time you pull the trigger and make contact with a shape you make a musical sound. Sometimes it's a synth sound, sometimes it's a single guitar note, blow up something cool and you'll get a whole chord. Mak obviously spent lots of time getting the enemy count just right so that the soundscape never gets overwhelmed, and it all works quite well. You'll have to find a balance between making it alive through the often difficult levels while also trying to blow up the baddie at just the right time to play the chord that you want when you want it.

This isn't really a new idea. Rez famously did this back on the Playstation, but while the music was great in that game, levels often played out the same each time and I never thought it lived up to its potential. And of course chance music has been around for half a century in the world of academic music. One of my heroes, Iannis Xenakis created a piece in which directors battled each other with competing orchestras; using chords and motifs as their arsenal (it even had a scoreboard). And rhythm games are only gaining in popularity. But Everyday Shooter does things just a bit different. You really feel like you're contributing to the soundscape. Mak is in control, but you get to help. Every round is different, and that's great because the game is hard enough to make you sure you'll hear those guitar chords dozens of times.