Electroplankton
January 15,2006 - While the debate over video games as Art may never reach a determined and measurable conclusion, the team behind Electroplankton wishes to muddy the waters just a bit more with their new Nintendo DS entry. Combining sound, light and motion is nothing innovative, as any fan of ELO can attest, and in fact the coalescence of these basic principals could be called the origins of the species for video games. Electroplankton unquestioningly merges the three into something new, but what kind of video game is this?

Using the stylus metaphorically as a baton, gamers become conductors of their own plankton orchestra, tapping and drawing their way to what publisher Nintendo considers a symphony of innovation. Electroplankton breaks down into a collection of minigames, each available from the onset of the game, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Tracy
In Tracy, players are presented with an underwater scene, or a blue circle growing darker as it nears the edges of the screen. At the base of this screen are five triangular plankton of varying colors. By drawing a line from any plankton to anywhere else on the screen, the plankton will repeatedly travel that drawn line, creating a sound which varies in pitch and tempo depending on the curve of the line and its length. Each of the five plankton at the bottom of the screen creates a different sound and, by drawing a line for each of the plankton, a larger and more complicated sound is created. Lines can be redrawn at any time, and the whole screen can be reset simply by pressing the “A” button.

The problem with Tracy is the sheer chaos of the screen. With no notations for scale or pitch locations, lines drawn randomly across the screen have as much semblance of reasoning to their sounds as lines drawn straight up and down or sideways. In other words; none. Creating anything aside from a cacophony of similar sounds is impossible, and Tracy ends up as a showcase or introductory piece rather than an interesting sound mechanic.

Hanenbow
Tadpole-like plankton shoot from an angled leaf, jutting up from the surface of a pond. On the other end of the pond stands a tree, with six more leaves. The leaves, including the shooter leaf, can all be angled differently, in the hopes of bouncing the descending tadpoles around. Each time a tadpole hits a leaf, a sound is created similar to a harp. By angling the leaves different ways, more sounds are created and the semblance of a melody emerges. The tadpole shooting is, if nothing else, steady and creates a solid tempo. After multiple hits, the leaves begin to change from green into yellow and red, turning back to green the longer they go without a hit.

Hanenbow suffers from outrageous drudgery. While visually interesting at times, especially the detailed zoom of the tadpoles themselves, the sounds created are fleeting and mostly either too repetitive, or uncontrollable. Attempts at creating patterns or controlling the melodies become frustrations. Yet aiming at the artistic goal of unrepeatable musical pieces, Hanenbow succeeds by utilizing angles as pitches, a difficult task to handle using the stylus.

Luminaria
Four sunshine plankton of different colors sit in the corners of a giant grid, waiting to be activated. The grid is made up of different arrows, which can be rotated clockwise by tapping them with the stylus. Activating the four plankton sets them moving around the grid, following the arrows and playing different pitches at each. The four plankton move at different speeds, but all in tempo with one another, creating a sense of melody. As the plankton move about, the arrows can be tapped to change their repeated paths.

Luminaria provides one of the most enjoyable excursions in the game. Since the four plankton remain on the same beat with each other, the light and ethereal sounds they make tend towards a melody, and small changes create new melodic lines which all fit together regardless. The major frustration with Luminaria is that the arrows can only be rotated clockwise, so attempts to create different sections of the melody are often foiled by reaction times. Given the scope of the game as a whole, this seems to be a deliberate attempt to foil anyone’s music-making.

Sun-Animalcule
The same watery backdrop from Tracy is back, this time fading from bright to dark red at the edges. Touching the screen produces a plankton bubble, which will emit a sound depending on its placement on the screen. Using a repeating measure, subsequently placed bubbles are timed to chime again and again, growing each time they sound. After a few rounds of sounds, the bubbles get too large and disappear, and new bubbles can be added.

Unlike the previous games, the plankton in this game expire quickly, so sounds are deliberately fleeting. While many of the minigames present at least a reasonable distraction, Sun-Animalcule presents the most arrhythmic and atonal entry in the Electroplankton group, and will most likely bore before the bubble bursts.

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