On Wednesday morning, I saw a tweet from games magazine PC Gamer that made me leak from the eyes with laughter. It contained a video, in which a wide-eyed, pained-looking cartoon trombonist struggled to hit the notes of Beethoven's Fifth while the composer himself stared sombrely out of the screen in evident disapproval. It is a golden comedic combination of terrible music, fart noises, earnestness and absurdity. This is the video game Trombone Champ, and it has since gone wildly viral. I've been playing rhythm games for more than 20 years, from Beatmania to Guitar Hero to Amplitude via fun musical contraptions in Japanese arcades, and I take them embarrassingly seriously.

Video games and heavy metal music have long shared a passing curiosity with one another. Look no further than the iconography of Doom, or Tim Schafer's Brütal Legend, for evidence of that. But it was in the mid 00s – during the reign of music and rhythm games such as Guitar Hero – that the link was most obvious. Count me among the ranks of those who learned about Pantera and Megadeth by way of the plastic instrument. Which is why this year's Metal: Hellsinger is on my radar.

Music has always been central to video games. Motifs from popular franchises like The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. are so canonized that people who don't play games could likely point them out. Even games with licensed soundtracks like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater have gone on to reflect and inform the tastes of an entire generation of players. But for a brief and fleeting moment in the mid-2000s, music became central to the way we played and interacted with games--and the genre this spawned, the rhythm game, became one of the most profitable in the world. By the latter half of the 2000s, off the back of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, the rhythm game cemented its commercial dominance.

Late last month, Chris Donahue and Abhay Agarwal launched an impressive new tool called'Beat Sage', which uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to automatically generate custom Beat Saber maps from any song in seconds. We tried it out, and were left suitably impressed -- the resulting tracks are fun, challenging and better than many other auto-map generators for rhythm games. With the tool still in active development, we reached out to Donahue and Agarwal to get a better understanding of what makes Beat Sage tick and how it might be improved in the future. "I first tried Beat Saber in December 2019 and loved it immediately," Donahue, an AI researcher at Stanford University, explained in an email. A month later, in January 2020, he began intermittent work on what would become Beat Sage and spoke to Agarwal, who runs an AI design firm called Polytopal and agreed to help out.

The stretch of summer between E3 and the holiday season is a hard time to be a video game fan. The industry tantalized us with all the wonderful games it's making, but the problem is that most of those new and amazing-sounding games won't come out until at least November. But that just means you've got plenty of time to catch up on all the amazing video games 2019 has already gifted us. Here are the best video games of 2019 so far, including a few that may have slipped under your radar. Come for the incredible visuals, stay for the profound and moving story.

The Mogees Play is the latest product from London-based startup Mogees. Based on the same contact microphone and machine-learning technology first seem in the company's original product, the Mogees Pro, it promises to turn any surface into a music and gaming input device, bridging the physical and digital worlds in new and delightfully creative ways. Once again, Mogees is launching a Kickstarter campaign to brings it wares to market, but unlike many crowdfunding campaigns, which I tend to be very hesitant to cover, the startup has form in shipping product and has to date sold thousands of Mogees Pros. The Mogees Play hopes to build on that legacy with a more mass market device that fulfils founder Bruno Zamborlin's mission to introduce non-musicians to the technology and encourage everybody to begin making music and exploring their creativity right out of the box. The Mogees Play will ship with three iOS apps: Mogees Pulse, a rhythm game, which is a little reminiscent of Guitar Hero (and has the backing of Guitar Hero founder Charles Huang); Mogees Jam, a recording studio in your pocket that enables you to build rhythms, melodies and loops using the acoustic properties of any object a Mogees Play is attached to; and Mogees Keys, which is a'smart' keyboard to trigger melodies, arpeggios and chords using the Mogees Play.