Punk-O-Matic 2: Flash Game Mini-Review

I first discovered the original Punk-O-Matic on Newgrounds many years ago.  It was a simple music maker, allowing the user to make punk music with predefined licks and chords and play it.  You could also extract a code that you could then post so anyone could copy it and listen to the tune you made.  The comments section was full of great music, and it was certainly a fun tool to waste an hour on.

A few years later, I discovered Punk-O-Matic 2 on Armor Games.  This seriously updated it and turned it into a rhythm game.

A pretty neat interface, too, that's much more intuitive than Rock Band.

In POM 2, you start as a garage band, earn money by playing gigs, update your image, learn cover songs, and of course, create your own music with a far more robust system that allowed for not just various kinds of punk, but if you really worked on it, you could make metal and ska (minus horns), too.

A music maker that's fun to work with? Absurd!

POM 2 has a storyline, humorous cutscenes, and the ability to play any of the four instruments.  Best of all, on Newgrounds, Armor Games, and Kongregate, you were no longer restricted to creating codes for your music, but could simply upload them and browse other users' songs as much as you like.

POM 2 was created during the height of the Guitar Hero craze.  Of course, you can't exactly plug a guitar into your computer to play, but instead use six grouped keys on your keyboard.  Two players could also share the keyboard and play together.

I spent ages making music on POM 2, let alone playing the songs in concert.  The problem came in a bit later when, for some reason, parts of POM 2 started breaking.  Scrolling became a problem, and even the controls for playing got buggy.  I couldn't quite understand it.  My only thoughts were that browser Flash updates broke it, and then it never got an update.

But I recently discovered a downloadable version, which works great.  The community disappears because you can't publish your songs to a game site server, but the controls and scrolling are no longer broken.

Now that I've found a working version again, I can recommend giving it a shot.  You can download Punk-O-Matic 2 from punk-o-matic.net.

Don't forget to turn num lock on for second player controls!