Fuser, for people who want to make mashups but don't know how to use FL Studio

I first heard about this game through Acai, and loved all his videos he made of all his silly mashups in this game. Then i heard that the game was removed off digital storefronts and he graciously provided the community with a drm free copy of the game.

After i started playing, and messed around with mods, i fell in love with this game. it's so unbelievably fun to mess and toy around with it you can lose hours doing it. Being able to mix my 2 favorite songs together and create an unholy abomination is simply something no other game can provide

There are a few things i dislike about this game, however, mainly it's artstyle and the fact that it got pulled off digital storefronts

still, if you can somehow get yours hands on a copy of this game, please for the love of god do play it, and try it with a couple of mods as well, you will not regret it

harmonix was constantly trying to create musical experiences where the user could have control over music in a gamified way, which they never really got quite right (freestyle solos in rock band 4 were certainly an attempt)

this was the game where they finally got it right, and like, absurdely right. this makes both for an extremely funny game and also a mostly accurate dj simulator save for the fine details of djing. this is also a great party game as in a game you play at a party

i headcanon this game as a response to neil cicierega and the fact that most of his mashups were done using multitracks that were ripped from rock band games. especially given that all star is one of the tracks available in the base game. make your own mouth album!

and then epic games bought the company and fuser died. which makes sense in a corporate way considering how expensive music licensing can be but... man... glad this was archived and people still keep making customs for it bc it's such a great piece of software

You can have some fantastic moments in Fuser when you hit the right mix and groove out, but there are some problems holding it back. And unfortunately, the game is delisted and dead since it bombed pretty hard.

In the game, you got a bunch of well-known songs that you can mix and match in some really cool ways. For example, you can take the drum sample from one song and add the lyrics from another. And on the PC, you can save your mixes (I don't think you can do that on consoles).

The problem is that there is a timing system that is not very fun. You have to time beats to get the best scores and progress, but it makes the game feel like a puzzle game rather than a music creator.

Luckily, you can go into free mode and do what you want, but most are going to start playing the campaign, and that part of the game gets a bit annoying. It also feels a bit empty in a way, where the point of the game feels like it's about getting super good at timing beats and unlocking stages, but it's not quite enough to engage you.

The real fun in this game comes from messing around in Freestyle mode and combining different songs, especially with the thousands of custom songs people have modded into the game. You can make combinations that sound surprisingly great, or you can put the vocals of Bring Me to Life on top of the instrumental of Call Me Maybe. Unfortunately, in order to learn about all the different things you can do and unlock new things, you need to play the campaign mode, every level of which drags on for far too long.

I've been a big fan of Harmonix pretty much since their inception, and now that they are stuck in the fortnite gulag I decided it was time to check out some of the things that they made that went right under my radar, with Fuser being one of those titles.

Harmonix games have always loved breaking music down to its individual stems, from frequency/amplitudes lane shifting to rock bands multiple instrument play. Fuser basically takes harmonix's fascination with stems to make an incredibly simple to use and fun mixing program. This is the REAL way to do "DJ hero". You get four tracks and can put any stem from up to 24 songs you select into them. They basically figured out a way to make a music sandbox game, which is insanely rad.

That being said, because of the open-ended freeform nature of the game, turning it into an actual game is insanely boring. The singleplayer campaign essentially forces you to check menial things off of a checklist within a given time, which kind of sucks the entire creative aspect of the game right out as you are forced to bend the mix to the games will and not necessarily your own. It also drags on far longer than I want, with the most generic cookie-cutter lookin mfers as NPCS. When I first showed my friends this game they thought it was fortnite, and ngl if that happens you know you've homogeonized your artstyle too far.

Despite the slog of a singleplayer, I've had way too much fun in freestyle mode to dislike this game. On PC, there's an entire treasure trove of custom music to install, and with mods this game becomes a 10/5 shitposting factory. I've spent so many nights DJing in VC with my friends as we all watch the mix flip-flop from the most rancid sounding trash to the freshest beats in the modern day and back again. The freestyle mode really is where the fun in the game lies, because there it's on YOU to determine how good you are mixing instead of the game. We've also made a decent song meta of what songs are universally OP in mashups, with jamiroqual's Canned Heat and the Black Eyed Peas' Let's Get It Started working no matter what whereas something like Bob-omb Battlefields' clown horns always bob-omb the entire vibe that the mix was going for. The doofy trumpets in Psy's new face are always fun to drop in when people least expect it, as is the iconic trash synth in Cbat (which surprisingly works more often than not).

It's absolutely something worth giving a try (if you know where to get it, the game has been delisted for a while), because there's really an endless amount of ways to mess around in this game, and everyone will mess around in a completely different way depending on their music tastes. Making stupid mashups has never been so streamlined and easy! Just don't touch the actual campaign with a 300 foot pole, download a complete save file or something if you want all the unlocks.

A pretty fun game, but essentially it's a digital form of Dropmix, Harmonix's killer board/card game that had most of the same principles as this. This actually expands it a bit, and to great effect. I dunno how they could have pulled this off better beyond maybe some campaign type random missions thrown into the freestyle or like an arcade mode that doesn't require MP. But regardless it's a lot of fun just making your own mixes to the point it doesn't really need it. The campaign itself is just an extended tutorial that lets you hone your ear for finding the right kind of cues for a good set. It feels like they've iterated on the DJ hero idea over the years due to DJing being a central unified cross-section of music lovers. I just hope this can become a bit of a virtual DJ software where you can insert your own stems(via mods, probably) and it gets a ton of DLC over the years.

Edit in 2024: RIP. I wish you had flown farther but I'm glad you live on in some way in fortnite.