The Polynomial is a 3D musical 'space shooter' game, with non-shooter mode and built in fractal editor. Visuals are generated mathematically and animate to your music or microphone input; there are 4 music-driven animators and 38 arenas to choose from (12 arenas in free demo). You can create your own arenas using built in editor, and you can save your fractal images at any resolution. There are many parameters you can change for entirely new, original look; the number of combinations is astronomical. The Polynomial comes with 50 minutes of excellent soundtrack created by Alexey Lavrov and T.K. System requirements: GeForce 8 series or later, Radeon HD 2000 series or later, with at least 256MB of video memory. NOTE: Intel's integrated graphics (GMA and the like) mostly do not work due to their slow speed at anything other than textured triangles. If you encounter any problems, see the forum. Linux issues: you need proprietary 3D drivers. You will need libmpg123 for mp3 file support.
I can't believe the amount of time i spent(or rather, wasted) playing this little toy. The visuals alone make it worth paying for, as it creates a rather cool ambient for your music. Im sure some people have already used this to play music at parties; it looks really nice. The gameplay isn't specially complicated, but it's good enough: Flight simulator controls, enemies which keep spawning faster and faster and try to eat the power-ups you can collect(which in turn spawn at a faster rate too), and you gain speed while close to the particle field, which vibrates to the beat of the music. Nothing excessively complicated, yet astonishingly addictive.