XBLIG News, Reviews & Previews

Altered Reality is back with iRiS 2.0 - Visualizer Studio, which is a much more complex version of the original iRiS. Priced at 400MSP, which has had some gamers doubting that it is truly worth this price. However, I would highly suggest that you download and give the trial a go before reaching that decision.

iRiS 2.0 has pretty much what its predecessor had, plus more. The main beauty of the iRiS 2.0 is that you are able to create your own visualizers and even download those custom ones created by other - I was unable to check this out as it didn't appear that anyone was online at the time. The visualizer editor is fairly complex and allows you to apply various widgets and effects to you custom visualizers, all of which are customisable. Luckily the visualizer editor comes with a number of tutorial videos to get you started.

iRiS 2.0 comes with 31 different prebuilt visualizers, 10 of which are classic ones and the remaining 21 are all new visualizers.

As with the original iRiS, iRiS 2.0 allows you to play music from either a media center connected to your Xbox or your Xbox itself. It does not current support playing music from USB devices such as Zunes & iPods.

Whilst, I don't really use my Xbox to play a lot of music, for those of you that do, definitely download the trial and give iRiS 2.0 before writing it off as too expensive. Clearly a great deal of work has gone into iRiS 2.0.

I rate iRiS 2.0 - Visualizer Studio , mostly because it just isn't really my thing, not because it isn't good.