Electroplankton

[Pandarbock]

looks like this one may be an import.

http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/action/thelegendofzelda/news_6120358.html

GS: Do you feel that developers "get" the DS?

RF: A large reason why we're here at GDC and why Mr. Iwata spoke was to help the development community really get Nintendo DS. We showed off Nintendogs that uses voice activation to control your virtual puppy and it took the crowd by storm. We also showed a very unique "game" called Electroplankton that also took the group by storm. I'm not sure that Electroplankton will make it to this country as a game, but I can envision a touchscreen-and-voice-driven hip hop or rap music game that utilizes all that same technology and pushes Nintendo DS out there and really drives it in the forefront, in terms of what the technology is capable of doing. So I think part of our job is truly teaching the development community what the system can do. In my view we've only scratched the surface. We probably, as a worldwide development community, have only touched about the first 30 percent of what Nintendo DS can do. As games like Nintendogs and Electroplankton come out I think we're going to start seeing more and more. This system is truly robust and we look forward to bringing out some fantastic product ourselves that truly take advantage of Nintendo DS.

[Gadfly2317]

Although it looks like there's still a good chance for a US release, I just couldn't wait anymore. I'm ordering this one for import. It doesn't look at all like there will be any language barrier issue to this one.

Planetgamecube's "review" of the import was the final straw. I need this now. I'll post impressions after it arrives.

http://www.planetgamecube.com/impressions.cfm?action=profile&id=783

[Gadfly2317]

First, the question many have asked: WHAT is Electroplankton. Is it a game? A toy? A musical instrument?

It's not a game at all. And in many ways it is pretty damned sophisticated if you wanted to call it a toy. And yeah, it is vaguely related to music, but any musician fond of structured songs and instruments that precisely serve that structured song will throw this thing into the fireplace.

That said. . .. I FREAKING LOVE ELECTROPLANKTON.

First, when it arrived in the mail, I ripped it open like a fiending junky (which is what the DS has made me into) and was greated with the sight of the deep ocean blue double size pack. The size of the box is boecause they include both the game and some nice looking color-matched ocean blue Electroplankton headphones (that are painfully uncomfortable. But the game is SO much better with headphones make sure you have some good ones.

And do NOT worry about importing; there is NO language barrier with this at all; there is no need for language at all.

Before I tell you about the game, let me tell you who I think will like the game. First, any bright creative open minded kid who likes messing with stuff to see what it does.

Beyond that, its a sophisticated and strange musical interactive experinece. It is THE ultimate trip toy, or as an after-rave come-down plaything. It's amazing and beautiful and even though some musicans may hate it, the kind of musician who will love to play with Electroplankton is the type of experiminatlist space freak who might plug an acoustic guitar straight into the recording machines input and then scream at the electric pickup in the hollow body of the guitar just to see what it does to their voice on tape.

So for me, Electroplankton comes at a good time in my personal musical evolution, since I'm less into "songs" right now and more into complex sound collages.

Enough. To the description.

ELECTROPLANKTON

Opening screen is simple, deep blue and bubbling like an aquarium with the sound of orchestra strings tuning up. You have two options: Performance Mode and Audience Mode. Audience Mode lets you set back and watch the computer play the plankton.

Performance Mode is where its at. From the very first you are able to play. You get to select between 10 different plankton screens. But each plankton also has a colored dot at the bottom of the screen and create a ten-note non-western sounding scale of some sort of asian stringed instrument I can't name. So just cycling through the plankton preparing to pick one to play, you can actually create music.

Before explaining the specific plankton The general experience of playing with the plankton is to let your brain loose in a synaesthasiac experience of shape, color, and sound. It is a fully kinestic, audio, visual way of creating soundscapes, rich, odd, alternately serene or cacaphonous. . . its in ways a set of sound pallettes that are reminscent of some of Ryuchi Sakamoto's work, like his film score for Derrida, or even Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II.

And control: While most plankton are controlled solely with the Stylus, buttons and other interactions come into play. The X and Y button allow you to zoom in and on on the top screen, which is displaying a circular view of the area around the plankton you are currently manipulating. Some plankton use the direction button for everything from creating waves in the water to speading up and slowing down tempo, or even for changing it from night to day. The Select button for many of the plankton lets you cycle through up to 3 different sound pallettes for each plankton.

1.) Plankton One is called "Tracy" and consists of six different colored arrow-shaped dual-finned plankton that you can draw lines with. Length of line, shape, and location on screen determines a number of variables. The tones range from Piano to bell. You create sound loops of different link and shape. Not my favorite plankton, but still cool.

2.) Hanebrow is WAY cool. You are basically launching little shrimp looking guys at a plant (or plants depending on your choice.) The sound is like a harp, and the angle you place the leaves on each plant determines the planktons riccochet pattern and location of the "string" it hits (the spine of each leave is the harp string.) Color comes into play as if you are able to manage to turn the entire green plant red it will grow a flower. Also, by accident I found out you can push up on the directional pad to launch plankton out will, sending them out like machine gun fire if you so desire.

3.)Luminaria are cool and too hard to explain. But I'll try. Four different colored balls of light that travel at different speeds and with a differnt tone each. The travel around a square graph-paper like grid of dots and each dot has an arrow. Each dot is also a different note. as you change the direction of the dots arrow, you can change the travel paths of the Luminaria. Pretty strange, a lot more depth than you'll think at first.

4.)Sun-Animalcule. . . This one is a great space trip. You place little "suns" anywhere on the screen, but where you place them will change their tone, and the timing is set by the timing in which you place them. Also, like real suns, they get bigger after each note until they finall explode and play no more. BUT, you can push right on the keypad and make it go dark instead of orange. Your suns will still be there playing through their cycle, but you will be able now to place moons, which have a super cool haunting two toned sound.

5.) Rec Rec. . . to start hurrying up here, this is a looping four track recorder basically. Four fish travel by, and you click one, next time it crosses the screen it is "recording" what ever you do (human beat box, scream, hum, bang a can). Neat, but not that useful.

6.) Nanocarp: awesome chime-like critters, small and swimming in the briny blue deep; they react to water ripples you create. I can trip on this for quite some time.

7.) My favorite: The Lumiloop. Five donut shaped plankton, you spin them with the stylus and there is quite the set of sounds with this. Three variations of Lumiloops, and two different sounds for each depending on which direction you spin it (also this changes the color.) Also the speed you spin them. If one spins really fast, it projects an aura that covers the whole screen in its colored light and creates a harmonic tone a whole octave higher than the first. Again, someone with no imagination of love of soundscapes might play for a minute, and go "okay, so you've got some choral ambience and move on without really finding the subtleties you can eak from these suckers.

8. Marine Snow. Odd arranges of snow shaped plankton, soundset one is a very well sampled piano, and 2 and 3 are bells. Hard to explain, but basically, its like playing a piano where the keys are everywhere, and after you hit a key, it floats away to swap positions with a corresponding and complimentary key. This one is fun to play, and I plan to do some multi-track recording with marine snow over the top of the choral Oohs and Ahhs of the Lumiloop.

9. Beatnes. This one just doesn't do it for me, but then I wasn't a big eight bit gamer. Three different beat patterns on these plankton that look like kites. Create looping rhythms and melodys out of 8bit nintendo game sounds.

10. VolVoice. I love this one too. This one uses the mic to record your voice. You touch the plankton to start recording, touch him again to stop. Then there 16 wave form maniplators, all in the shape of a differnt plankton. This samples your voice pretty well for a standard slit-mic, and it then can warp it into any number of things. I've been wanting to sample my digeridoo, but my arms aren't long enough to start and stop the recording while still having a six foot long digerdoo aimed at the DS mic. Oh well. :D

Dissapointments? Not really. But plenty of wishes. Wish you could create longer loops. Wish there had been the ability to record and save loops and paste them over to an editor screen to combine loops of the various plankton. But its not the end of the world. I'm going to mic-out to a multitrac record and play with putting together a couple little pieces with various plankton.

Sound Quality: Really good. But its odd that it puts out such a quiet sound from the spoeakers. Most DS games sound quite loud if you turn them up, much louder than the PsP. BUT, it sounds rich and loud with good headphones. Stunningly good really, very little of that cheap sound sample hum that you get on cheap keyboards. . . its there, but so much better than I'd expected. For what its doing, and the amount of sound in this game, it sounds better than anything on any handheld at the moment.

Graphics. Simple. Utterly basic, inexpensive looking, but none-the-less beautiful and add in everyway to the experience. You can get lost in the hypnotic aquatic movents and the colors as you manipulate your strange sound washes.

Replay: Totally dependent on you and your personality. I spent at least six hours on it the first time I played it. And its something I will pop in anytime. It's a great zone out object, better than a lava-lamp, a fiber-optic bloom, or the Windows Media Player geissworks music imaging rip-off. Electroplankton is also really nice as a meditation, relaxation device. It's also going to be one of those things I can mess around with try to see how I can tweak it and warp it and mix it into other musical experiments. Some people could get bored after they hear all the sounds, but a trip-happy person who could play with legos for days will find endless little varations of sound to wring from this aesthetically drenched masterpiece.

Not really an instrument, not really a toy, and not a game at all, but one of the most innoavtive fun little pieces of odd diversion to come my way in a long time. Electroplankton may not be for everyone, but I hope I've given you enough to know whether or not its for you.

[theWacoKid]

I tallked to a nintendo rep the other day and he said electroplankton would definitely be released here. It was featured at nintendo's E3 press conference and is featured in their product catalog which I had a good look at.

[Gadfly2317]

I tallked to a nintendo rep the other day and he said electroplankton would definitely be released here. It was featured at nintendo's E3 press conference and is featured in their product catalog which I had a good look at.

I wonder what's taking them so long. There is NOTHING in it to localize. . .just translate the instruction manual. There is some additional text for each electroplankton on the selection screen (only the creature's name is in English.) I wonder if the extra text is some sort of "scientific" description of the plankton sort of like the log in Pikmin.

Anyway, with what I still consider an overall small current US catalog of games, you think they'd get their butts in gear and get games like this over hear. I wonder if its a matter of marketing and distribution, or they want to wait until after Nintendogs and other bigger hits show off the DS. This non-game is cool, but probably not how they want to define their system in the US consumers mind.

It seems like the type of game that might alienate and freak out some american consumers if they didn't understand clearly what they were buying.

[Aylmer]

Wow Gaddy, you've convinced me to get it when it comes out. I cannot say why there is a delay in the English language release, but I can say that the music in Polarium-Japanese and Polarium-English is way different.

I am playing Kirby right now and with headphones it is fantastic. Regarding Electroplankton, is there a way to get music out of it? I've used a splitter on the headphone jack of handhelds to record game music before. Is that the method that you can see to get music out of the game?

I am very curious about that title. I, too, am getting jazzed about the DS.

[Gadfly2317]

Wow Gaddy, you've convinced me to get it when it comes out. I cannot say why there is a delay in the English language release, but I can say that the music in Polarium-Japanese and Polarium-English is way different.

I am playing Kirby right now and with headphones it is fantastic. Regarding Electroplankton, is there a way to get music out of it? I've used a splitter on the headphone jack of handhelds to record game music before. Is that the method that you can see to get music out of the game?

I am very curious about that title. I, too, am getting jazzed about the DS.

I haven't had an opportunity to do it yet, but I was just going to use a 1/8th inch headphone out to a 1/4" input (easy to get a 1/8th to 1/8th headphone cord and then get the 1/8th to 1/4" adapter) and plug it into my four-track and just do analog taping of it, and also run it through some different effects processors.

No reason you couldn't out the DS to yoru PC and record there, I just don't currently have any editing software (I had an old version of Cakewalk, but I haven't gotten new music software compatible with XP). I'm kind of old fashioned anyway; I like laying down tracks live on a four track.

I planned on mixing some of the Electroplankton stuff with thumb drums and tribal hand drums. Electroplankton is not a complete instrument, but I love messing around with sound. Like I said, you could pretty easily produce something that wouldn't be out of place on a Ryuchi Sakamoto film score.

But without all that extra stuff, its pretty enjoyable all by itself as just a pretty, escapist meditative trip toy. But I can't stress enough that its NOT a game, zero structure, zero point, just pure doodling fun some personality types would not get into.

It's definitely not a something I'm trying to convince everyone thye should get, just let people know what it is to make an informed decision.

You know, you mention the music being different between Polarium versions. That was my biggest concern about the US release is that they are changing the sound palletes and tonalitys to be more western. To me it is perfect and beautiful and haunting and very japanese. I hope they bring it over as is. But then again, if it is very different, I could just have both versions.

[Pandarbock]

Now they just need to bring Jam with the band over here. I will get both games if they do indeed release them here in the US.

[Aylmer]

hmmmm...I think I can find way to get it into my Mac. Wife's mac, actually, tho I have cubase lite on it.

The music was one difference I noticed in Polarium, the other was in Challenge Mode. There the beginning puzzles were much easier in the Japanese version. They do get more difficult, but for the first fifteen minutes or so in the Japanese version it's an almost meditative thing, more about the patterns themselves than solving them in a timely matter. In the US version, you need to get humping right away in comparison, or so it seems.

I am going to play Cubivore on the GC again pretty soon, as soon as I'm done with a couple of PS2 titles. I had about 20 hours into it a couple of years ago and got distracted by a deep RPG, I forget which one. But Cubivore had the same mello aspect to it that the beginning of Challenge mode in Japanese Polarium has.

A strange game, Cubivore, having to defecate the correct colors and all.

[Gadfly2317]

hmmmm...I think I can find way to get it into my Mac. Wife's mac, actually, tho I have cubase lite on it.

The music was one difference I noticed in Polarium, the other was in Challenge Mode. There the beginning puzzles were much easier in the Japanese version. They do get more difficult, but for the first fifteen minutes or so in the Japanese version it's an almost meditative thing, more about the patterns themselves than solving them in a timely matter. In the US version, you need to get humping right away in comparison, or so it seems.

I am going to play Cubivore on the GC again pretty soon, as soon as I'm done with a couple of PS2 titles. I had about 20 hours into it a couple of years ago and got distracted by a deep RPG, I forget which one. But Cubivore had the same mello aspect to it that the beginning of Challenge mode in Japanese Polarium has.

A strange game, Cubivore, having to defecate the correct colors and all.


Long live Cubivore (one of the sadly overlooked titles of this generation.) It has some of the best music of the generation.