Mark's taste in music always was a tad fishy...

Brilliant, banal, fun, pointless, audio-visual to the point of simplicity, yet madly busy and bafflingly bizarre: Electroplankton is all of these things. In fact, it's like nothing you'll have played in your life. If the Marios, Metroids and Metal Gears of this world are the special occasions in the gaming calendar, then this is the most artistically abstract interactive non-event anyone ever had the tangent of thought to consign to cartridge.

It's also the one title that, more than any other, makes us glad we don't use a scoring system. After all, how do you grade a game with no definitive objective; no ulterior motive, and, on first inspection, no sense of progress, incentive or depth?

So yes, Electroplankton is an odd one. But somehow, in the esteemed company of the DS' erudite back catalogue, it seems neither nonsensical nor out of place.

A visual music motif

Best described as a visual music motif, Electroplankton presents ten different ways to form apparently random musical compositions with the DS stylus. The method for this is perhaps the oddest thing about the title: instead of selecting notes or chords as the usual musical representations, you're required to create chimes, tones and tunes by poking, plonking and weaving many forms of water-based plankton life around the DS touch screen.

Despite this however, it's not a dedicated music making tool; it offers no built-in record function with which to amass your imagined-up melodies, and no special scientific staple to apply in order to produce repeat composition.

Neither, however, could it be labelled a 'game' - not in the classic sense. Indeed in only one of the ten different types of water-based beings will you find anything approaching a conventional visual reward for your stylus-scribbling efforts.

That plankton, the second one, named Hanebow, presents a plant with six leaves, all of which can be angled to catch the sealife jumping from the water. These collide and bounce, pinball-style, with the foliage, giving off a tone each time, and enough successful hits on all of the plant's leaves will cause a flower to bloom. It's reasonably addictive, and, interminably difficult to achieve that final flower, and because of this, no two times you play will be the same.

Pure playing rewards:

For the rest of the nine plankton, the pure act of playing proffers its own rewards; all to an unpredictable array of bumps, clicks, chimes, beats, and rhythmic, colourful cues.

Take Lumiloop, for example. Selecting this, you'll see five circles on the screen - rotate these and they'll produce a harmonic humming sound, with clockwise or anti-clockwise spins and different speeds giving altered combinations of pitch, volume and colour. Just like the famous spinning plates circus trick, some will slow down as you turn attention to others - the single incentive for your frantic screen scratching being the continuation of, and fluctuations in, this affecting (even beautiful) sensory arrangement.

And the others are all variations on this basic theme. Many involve moving types of electroplankton around a blank, liquid canvas; following colourful musical trails in Tracy, colliding with each other in Nanocarp and Marine-snow, or happily chiming along in order in Sun-Animalcule. Luminara asks you to move a set of arrows on a Chu Chu Rocket style board to create a path for your plankton, while Beatnes gives you a backing track to add beats and sounds to - the Invincibility theme from the Mario games, complete with familiar jumping and power up sounds, amongst others. This can be speeded up or slowed down with the D-pad - a trait shared by Rec-Rec, which allows you to record sounds and play them over a backing beat. Recording sound works better in Volvoice, however, in which you sample your own voice or anything else you wish, then play it back through different plankton that warp it in all sorts of funny ways.

And that's about all Electroplankton is - a simple concept that, in traditional gaming terms, holds some major flaws. The package suffers from an overall lack of sophistication, and would undoubtedly be more engaging with improved execution in the sound creation side of things, while an element to store arrangements would be most welcome. Also, the plankton themselves are an acute visual metaphor for musical instruments largely too hit-and-miss in their implementation to offer any kind of prolonged feeling of achievement. It's an irony not entirely remedied by the completely non-interactive Audience Mode, which merely bops out the ethereal chimes all on its own. This last aspect is ideal to have on in the background while you go about your business, but also utterly unfocused as far as being an actual videogame goes.

Yet, we get the feeling that was never the point. Electroplankton is less a game, per-se, and more than anything else, a playable music visualizer - one intended to entertain in doses, but, more specifically, to purposefully enchant and entrance, with near-hypnotic results.

Pointless joy

So, addressing that second paragraph, then. What's the point? Well, there really isn't one - besides some pretty trippy stress relief, perhaps. It's certainly too underdeveloped to appeal to discerning music mixers, or to sate those amongst the DS fraternity with a hardcore staple of adventures, Advance Wars, colourful eastern RPG's and online Wi-Fi play.

But that's the obscure joy of Electroplankton: it's all manner of artistic and abstract, proving both melodic and magical for it. Far from aiming for the engrossingly epic, this throwaway musical medley engenders the ultimate in interactive sit-down sandbox chillout titles: Not a game to spirit you wholesale into a far-off fairytale as an escape from real life, but rather, for those who appreciate its high-brow conceptual nature, a truly unique and mesmerising departure for the mind that's best enjoyed - a lot like sushi - in delectable small slices.

GAME's Verdict

• A unique, hypnotic and harmonic offering to the games-as-art debate.
• Achieve mesmerising and magical melodies with a simple stylus stroke.
• Beautiful, colourful and even therapeutic visual arrangement.

• No built-in option to record compositions renders it all slightly shallow.
• A little too abstract for its own good.
• Not really any 'point', to speak of.

Review by: Mark Scott
Version Tested: DS Review Published: 08.03.06