A cardinal rule of Audiosurf, and perhaps the thing that makes it manageable to play on faster/denser songs, is the notion that a full column with a match in it will immediately register and remove the match when overfilled, allowing you to pick up long strings of the same color without worrying about whether they will overfill the column (so long as there are at least 3 available slots in that column or a match already identified farther down in the column, of course).
But lately, I've been seeing some inconsistency as far as the Paint powerup is concerned. I can't tell you how many times I've fired off a Paint after carefully filling each column, aiming for the Match 21 bonus, only to hit a block immediately after painting the entire grid and having that column get treated as an overfill and removed. The remaining columns still get painted, flash, and disappear, crediting me for the match of 14 blocks. So clearly I used the Paint before hitting the extra block. (It was in my possession using either Vegas or Pointman - if I'd hit the block before using the powerup, the powerup would have been forfeited and no blocks would have been painted).
My guess is that it takes a few split seconds for the painted blocks to finish changing color, and during that brief window, they're still treated as their previous colors, even though they all look the same to the user. Since a match of blocks that were acquired from the track rather than using paint starts flashing immediately, this seems inconsistent to me.
Also inconsistent is the behavior of lightning bolts. Two problems I'm having here:
1) If you fire off a Sort powerup while blocks from a lightning bolt are being "flung" into the grid, they all disappear and aren't taken into account during the sort. (Though this also happens with a brick you've hit that hasn't "settled" yet.)
2) If you fire off a regular-colored lightning bolt while one or more columns are full, no extra blocks appear in that column. If you fire one off while all columns are full, no new blocks appear at all. But if you fire off a wild card lightning bolt (which produces three glowing blocks in the same column) while positioned in a full column, you overfill and get penalized. Yet if you fire off the wild card lightning bolt and one or two spaces are available in that column, the wild card bricks that show match with whatever's below and disappear, while the remaining bricks settle down from above.
That last one only happens in Vegas mode, of course, but is a particular point of contention for me, as I seem to have the worst luck when waiting for the precise moment to paint an entire grid, only to have that nefarious glowing lightning bolt show up in my queue at the exact moment I right-click intending to release the paint - so I overfill and lose the paint powerup. Aargh. Maybe that's just the luck of the draw for a character whose performance does depend to some degree on luck, but it still takes skill to fill the entire grid with no matches when and have Paint in your possession (or Sort and at least 3 of each color plus no whites), so it's annoying to get robbed of that so quickly that you had no way of anticipating it.
