iRiS 2.0 is a music player with visualisations where you can also create and edit your own with a built in editor. Is it easy on the eye or a bad trip? Read on to find out.
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This software comes in two sections; the music player with visualisations and the visualisations editor. I will start with the music player as this is the first thing you will see. You can play your music from either files stored on your Xbox 360 or if you have a connected PC you can stream the music from it. If you choose the latter and have a larger library of music it may take some time for the first media scan, but subsequent loads are much faster thanks to the cache.
The user interface is easy to navigate, moving the joypad will bring up a control panel which allows you to perform the usual music functions such as pause and skip to next song. Tapping LB will bring up the music menu which allows you to choose from playlists, albums, individual songs etc. While your music is playing the visualisations will be active in the background responding to the beats of the music.
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You can choose time interval for the visualisations to change or you can choose a new one by tapping the X button or pressing RB to access the Visualisations tab. From here you can browse installed visualisations, create a new one or download custom visualisations from other owners of iRiS. At the time of reviewing the game, there were no hosts available so I was unable to try sharing or downloading any custom visualisations.
There are over thirty predefined visualisations included, you have your typical 80s/90s rave video styles with kaleidoscopes and starfields through to gaming themes with asteroids, space invaders and tank wars which are very cool. My favourites were the gaming themes, asteroids for example runs like an automated game with a space ship destroying the asteroids in time to the music The visualisations as you would expect look great and responded well to the music I played.
The second part of iRiS is the visualisation creation tool which gives you full access to a built in editor that is feature packed. A series of tutorial videos explains in good detail on how to add, set up and tweak the visualisations, highly recommended to view as the menus can be a little daunting without first viewing them.
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The user interface is again presented well and is easy to use. Simply choose a widget from a categorised selection and add it to the screen, you can then edit the properties such as the location, size and colours. Categories include Mini Visualisations which have graphic equalisers, Fireworks with a range of firework style visualisations and Themed which include rain, lightning and comets. There are plenty to choose from and with a wealth of tweakable options that I could fill a few paragraphs of text explaining and you can easily spend a long time playing around with them.
After spending a bit of time playing around with the editor I started work on my own visualisation which I titled Gamergeddon Rave. Thanks to the easy user interface it was a painless task and within minutes I had a half decent creation up and running. You can view a short video of it below that I quickly took with my mobile phone with some accompanying music, a homage to the 80s rave scene. There is also a trailer from the developers after this review which you should also check out.
iRiS 2.0 costs 400 :MSPoints: which is in the high end of the price range. There are plenty of music visualisers available on Indie Games but none as far as I know have the possibility to create your own. As an end user only using the supplied visualisations there is fairly good value for money with the possibility to download more if people create their own. As a visualisation creator you get your moneys worth and this is where the strength of the software lays. Either way, you should check this out as it is a great piece of software.
You can find out more information about iRiS 2.0 – Visualizer Studio as well as download the trial or full versions on the Marketplace.
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