By Brad Cook

Your iPod contains thousands of songs, so put them to good use with musika. Designed by Masaya Matsuura of PaRappa the Rapper fame, musika plays a song from your iPod library and challenges you to press Select as soon as you recognize a letter or number in its title. The faster you do so, the more points you’ll earn, thanks to the scoring multiplier that increases by one with each correct response.

Press the forward or backward skip button to pass on a character not contained in the song’s title — doing so also increases your scoring multiplier. The scoring stops when the track does, or when you’ve correctly identified each character in the title five times, so react as fast as you can.

Ups and Downs

Each character comes into view via a different graphical effect, depending on the gameplay level. It might manifest itself from a swirl of blown leaves, or reveal itself in a sea of blinking lights. Correctly-identified characters add to the level meter, sending you to the next level when it’s full. There are more than ten levels total.

When you accidentally press Select for the wrong character, or if you mistakenly pass on a correct character, you’ll see a line appear in one of the title’s characters at the bottom of the screen. That’s known as a block, and you’ll need to correctly identify that character again to remove the block. Receive too many blocks and your game will end. Blocks also reset the scoring multiplier, forcing you to start at 1x again.

Luckily, musika features four bonuses that can get you out of a tight situation: Almighty, which gives you protection against misses, incorrect passes, and blocks for the next three characters; De-block, which removes all blocks from the title; Double Score, which doubles the score you earn from each correctly-identified character for the next three characters; and Double Clear Points, which gives you two correct identifications for each time you press Select during next three characters (you need to correctly identify a character five times to clear it).

The Perfect Environment

If you’d rather just enjoy musika’s ethereal graphics, you can select the Visualizer option in the main menu and listen to your music while letters and numbers flit by. Either way, you have the perfect way to pass a few minutes of downtime during your hectic day.

We’ll leave you with some thoughts offered by Matsuura when musika launched: “The iPod is a device that revolutionized music and it is now poised to be a progressive gaming platform. Many years ago, Apple’s tools first opened my eyes to the power of music and multimedia, so it’s exciting to release my first game for this device.”

Tips and Tricks

iTunes

iPod Games FAQ

Do you have questions regarding any of the iPod games available from the iTunes Store?
musika gameplay area.

Putting U in Focus. Don’t wait until the letter fully appears, or you’ll be too late.

More iPod Games

System Requirements

  • Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or Windows 2000
  • iPod (5th generation). Not compatible with iPod nano, iPod classic, the iPhone, or other iPod models. Please check which iPod model you have.
  • iPod Software 1.2 or higher
  • iTunes required to download (games cannot be played in iTunes)
 
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