Ever since Disney's The Little Mermaid was first shown in theaters, it has been apparent to mankind that creatures that live in water are brilliant musicians. The next step, of course, was making a video game based off of this concept. Thus the creation of Electroplankton was not so much an innovation as an inevitability. The basic premise behind this new game for the Nintendo DS is that the player must utilize a variety of tiny, smiling, brightly colored plankton to make sweet, sweet music. With the variety of the little buggers available it's fun to just sit and mess around for a while, creating a mixture of tunes that span the gap between simple, NES-style bleeps and bloops to some much more sweeping stuff that definitely pushes the DS's music hardware. However, once you're done wasting some time, chances are you're not going to feel too compelled to pick the game back up again.

   But let's backtrack a little and take a more detailed look at a typical game of Electroplankton (word count, man, word count!). Once you load up the game in your Gameboy DS (after unlocking your safe and removing your precious electronic companion from its' vacuum-sealed casing stored within) you are presented with two modes; Performance Mode and Audience Mode. In Audience Mode you just sit and listen to the game play music. I guess this is kind of cool [I am going to go out on a limb and enter a plea of "NOT!" here - ed.], but this isn't really any different than just putting on a CD, except the music on a CD isn't randomly composed and it's probably better than anything Electroplankton would make (unless it's a country music CD) [my point exactly! - ed.]. So let's focus on Performance Mode.

Performance anxiety.

   Once you select Performance Mode you'll be presented with a variety of different plankton to pick from. Each style presents a different set of sounds and a different method of assembling those sounds. One set of plankton are donut shaped and produce sounds when you repeatedly circle them with your stylus on the touch screen. Another set resemble kites with long tales, and each time you touch a part of a tail it adds a note to a sequence that you assemble. Others look like little fish and respond if you sing into the microphone (obviously these are the kind you want to play with when in a very public setting such as a board meeting or a biker bar). [According to completely unconfirmed and totally unreliable rumors, a mod that will make the plankton look like tiny flaccid penises is also already on the way - ed.] Initially I was slightly disappointed when I discovered you couldn't combine the different varieties of plankton into the same composition (i.e. you only use kite plankton with other kite plankton, fishy plankton with other fishy plankton, etc.), but once I had played for a little while it made sense that it was set up that way. After you've selected your particular variety of plankton you'll be deposited in the water and can go to town. Essentially all interaction with your wee musicians is done via prodding the touch-screen with the stylus, but occasionally touching the directional buttons will perform an action that affects the whole screen. You can also view a close-up of the action on the top screen, but this never really feels necessary as you can see things perfectly well on the lower one.

Planktastic!

   You'll notice almost immediately that you can't really compose bad music [clearly, Mike is not nearly the musical cripple I am! - ed.]. Each group of plankton can only produce a set amount of notes (which is why you can't combine types), all of which sound okay regardless of the order you string them together in. So even if you're Tonedeaf McSuckymusic, you'll be hard-pressed not to produce something at least moderately pleasant to the ear. [Hah! Step aside - for I am Vaga, Lord of the Tonedeaf! - ed.]

   Another thing that will become apparent rather quickly is that you don't really have a lot of control over the plankton. Most of the little guys you use tend to move rapidly in set patterns or just randomly, and your jabbing at them with the stylus serves to get them to deviate from this. It's sort of like throwing bricks at a guy doing skateboard tricks; sure, you'll get him to change what he was doing, but you're not really making him do the tricks yourself. As such, it's kind of hard to actually "compose" anything intentionally. Sure, you can noodle around and make a little tune that would sound bitchin' as background music for a Super Nintendo game, but try and copy Beethoven's 9th or even Happy Birthday and chances are you'll wind up having wasted several hours with nothing but your boiling rage to show for it.

Games with objectives? How last season!

   But, really, there's no point in being able to compose any massive symphonies, since the game offers no way to save your hard work. [Somebody CLEARLY skipped out on Gaming 101! -ed.] Once you exit the screen where you play with your plankton (eeewww!) your music is as gone as a deadbeat dad the day the child support is due. When it comes right down to it, it's really hard to call this one a game at all, since there are no rules, no objectives, and no real way of measuring success or failure. Sort of like rugby.

   As a handheld game, Electroplankton is serviceable, since the best way to enjoy it is to pick it up when you have a couple minutes free, play around for a little bit, then put it down and move on with your day. But when it comes right down to it, you're still shelling out $35 for something that you can't really DO anything with. In the end, Electroplankton is a fun little diversion, but I'd definitely wait for it to drop in price before you spend any of your ill-gotten gains on it.

       ... Mike Zeller

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