This is going to be an extremely short review.

An oddity among the collection of titles available for the DS, Electroplankton is more of a generative music application than an actual game. Created by the brilliant Toshio Iwai, Electroplankton is his latest attempt at creating mainstream music software that anybody can use to produce funky beats. His latest hardware attempt comes in the form of the electronic music instrument Tenori-On, which allows the user to set up a series of samples on a looping time line. Electroplankton behaves in much the same way as the Tenori-On, and one could make the supposition that Electroplankton was an early software prototype of the device.

Electroplankton is delivered as a series of ten activities that generate different types of music from user input by producing a varying library of samples depending on the specific activity and how the user participates. These activities all have a range of sound effects that they produce, and all involve some aspect of the marine life aesthetic. Going down the entire list of each and every activity would be a waste of time, considering the relative niche demographic this sort of thing is geared towards. If you’re into generative music, you’ve either already heard of Electroplankton, or you’ve already got it. Quite frankly, the best way to explain how and what Electroplankton can do is to show you. In an effort to do just that, here are a couple of videos detailing some of the activities that ship with the “game”:

While these toys are all fun to play with, the simple fact that Electroplankton has no ability to record anything you can create with it negates the entire reason for messing around with the game in the first place, and this is really the product’s only major flaw. However, it is possible to record the game’s output by making use of a 3.5mm male to male audio cable, connecting the DS’s headphone jack to a computer’s microphone jack while running an appropriate audio program, so obviously individuals used to dealing with audio software and hardware won’t be that hard put to capture their creations.

Electroplankton is several years old at this point, and if you can actually find a copy, are into generative music software, and somehow haven’t given it a shot, it’s definitely worth a look. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to avoid this unique, if limited, collection of music-producing applications.