Harmonix has been churning out music-based video games for nearly two decades. From early titles like Frequency and Amplitude; to the incredibly popular and then not popular at all Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises; to their most recent title, Fuser. That game puts you in the role of a DJ who can take popular songs and create unique, interesting mash-ups. You then get to play these songs at massive, digital music festivals, which is a nice bit of escapism since those events currently don't exist.
Now you could use Fuser to create some mash-up songs that are fun to listen to, but that's a boring use of this technology. As some players have quickly discovered, these tools can be used for the purposes of evil to concoct unholy abominations of music.
Gaming journalist Andy Kelly has been making a series of nightmare mixes that take beloved songs and smash them into much less-beloved songs. This tweet above shows what happens when you forcibly combine The Pixies' iconic "Here Comes Your Man" with Smashmouth's even more iconic - although not necessarily good - "All Star" with a dose of Kendrick Lamar's "All The Stars". It's hard to say if this mix works as a song, but it's certainly memorable.
He then followed that up with a song that mashes "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" with the infamous rick-rolling "Never Gonna Give You Up" with a few splashes of Billie Eilish's "bad guy" and 50 Cent's "In Da Club." And of course, there's a little hint of Smashmouth yet again at the end for flavour. It's, surprisingly not awful? Maybe even bordering on good? Although that might just be the insanity of listening to these mixes kicking in and clouding my judgement. These tweets also make me wonder what kind of music festival would feature a middle-aged hippie dude playing remixes of Rick Astley hits.
Because I would go to that festival.
And then there's this one, which...yeah. This one hurts. The frantic, disturbing pace and odd combo of sounds mixed with the background of giant donuts and various sweets is such a sensory overload that it could potentially trigger an anxiety attack. This mash-up truly fits the bill of being called a nightmare mix since it's the kind of hallucination you'd experience after eating too much Halloween candy and passing out.
These tweets should give you a pretty good sense of whether or not Fuser is your thing. Our own Sam Watanuki had some issues with it in his review, but mostly seemed to enjoy it. So if the idea of being a mash-up making DJ sounds like your type of fun then it might be worth checking out.
Just try to use your new found musical powers for good instead of the evil we've shown here today.
Source: Twitter