One of the first things to capture my imagination on the Nintendo DS has been Electroplankton. Yes, it’s one of the non-games the DS is renowned for, but it’s so much fun.
Back when I first began taking my DS onto public transport, I was wary about gaming under the watchful eyes of nosey strangers. Especially when it came to ‘cartoony’ style adventures that look quite childish if you aren’t actually lost in the game. So when things got crowded around me, I had a tendency to switch on Electroplankton and lose myself to it for an hour or more.
The premise is simple–there are ten varieties of plankton, and each can be manipulated in different ways to produce a variety of sounds and music. The only catch is, it’s completely performance based, so you can’t save your masterpieces while out on the road, you just have to keep on producing new music.
Back in the early days of usage, I was immediately drawn to plankton like Luminaria and Beatnes. Both are very musical and heavily quantised, so it’s difficult to create anything that doesn’t sound good. In the former, you’re altering the course a specific plankton can take by flipping arrows in a grid on the touch screen. In the latter, the array of FX from Mario games are all recreated, with a friendly dance beat running in the background while you tap out musical notes or sound effects, which are then looped for a few bars, allowing you to layer patterns. Anyone can do it and make it sound good, but it’s always different, so it remains fun.
But moving away from the easy starters, Lumiloop quickly became my train favourite, tapping into my experimental drone side. The faster you spin the plankton with your stylus, the higher the pitch it produces, and the more you spin together, the more tonal integration you’ll hear. You can also alter the sounds being produced, but I just love the choral droning. And the funny thing is, you probably look way more stupid to any onlookers as you spin these plankton as hard as you can, than if you were just playing a standard computer game, but it’s so easy to find yourself caught in a drone trance and spinning for ages.
Of course, with headphones on, no-one else really has a clue what you’re up to. There’s no hint of gameplay or purpose. There is visual action on both screens, but it’s purely nonsensical. The only real reward is aurally. And again, a lot of humour can be obtained when you’re using the sampling plankton out in public. Volvoice and Rec-Rec are two such examples, where you can capture real-life sounds and manipulate them in real-time. It’s tremendous fun to record the sounds of the train or fragments of conversation and turn it into a very temporary piece of art.
For me, the real thrill of Electroplankton is that it’s creative. Considering my current lifestyle is so crowded that I don’t manage to pick up a musical instrument let alone record anything, it’s remarkably fulfilling to experiment with plankton on the move and actual tap into a fun, artistic outlet instead of sitting like a passive zombie on a crowded train. The concept is simple, and is no more complex than those silly flash sites with music loops which you can interact with using your mouse. But port it over to a DS with its innovative user controls and you have one of the coolest little “games” around.