San Francisco, CA–CEO and President David Gould of Lightsoft Interactive said friday evening, “We lost everything in the most balls out awesome nerf battle ever.” According to information the office had over twenty stress releasing nerf guns, including but not limited to,  the N-Strike Vulcan fully automatic nerf chaingun with ammo belt, Longshot CS-6 nerf highpowered sniper rifle, and “some of those bitchin’ new nerf swords for whoopin’ on your friends when they aren’t lookin’.”

Lightsoft was developing what many gamers were calling “The coolest game ever seen.” Lightsoft was without a publisher and was hoping to gain one by the end of this year. In a phone interview David had this to say about the tragedy.

“It’s a huge loss. Not one of those oops we lost a few hours of work kind of losses, we’re talking about two and a half years of hard work ruined by a single stray nerf dart. I mean what are the chances of a nerf dart hitting the massive red ‘irreversible format drive button.’”

When questioned about the massive red drive formatting button David had no comment. However David did say he wouldn’t give up and his team returns to work on Monday saying, “This will be the best Hamtaru DS game ever.”

I’m going to start this review off by stating that I’m not a huge fan of rhythm games. For the most part I find their gameplay needlessly difficulty and more than a bit tedious for relatively little reward. That said, I’m a huge fan of some rhythm games, as certain titles not only deliver a fantastic original sound track but surprisingly addictive gameplay in the short-term. Japanese games like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, Gitaroo Man, and now the recently released Rhythm Tengoku Gold, all fall within this narrow selection of rhythm games I actually enjoy playing.

Rhythm Tengoku Gold is the DS released sequel to the wildly successful Rhythm Tengoku for the GameBoy Advance. The primary difference between the two games is obviously in the hardware, as RTG takes advantage of the DS’s larger dual screens, stylus interface, and significantly increased memory and general performance capabilities. Players play the game by holding the DS open-book style, and use the stylus on the right side of the unit to interact with the game. The Rhythm Tengoku series is traditionally a large collection of minigames, each with its own original music and unique style of play. The game presents these minigames as a grid of three columns, each with four games followed by a surprisingly clever remix stage, which combines aspects of the previous four games together into a final stage before allowing the player to move on to the next column of games. Each of the games has a short training sequence the player can choose to skip if they wish, and while the game is entirely in Japanese, all it takes is a decent handle on the skills of common sense and patience to pick up the gist of each of the minigames fairly quickly.

The DS provides a strong foundation for the game’s addictive gameplay, and each of the games is graphically unique and simply oozing with charm. Rhythm Tengoku Gold uses the DS hardware to effectively blend quirky 2D art with simple 3D assets to produce some ridiculously entertaining scenarious with characters and settings ranging from hooting moai statues to trippy soccer-ball juggling spacemen to beaker tossing lab assistants in love. All of these games are delivered with catchy and even sometimes downright brilliant music tracks, all of which simply add to the game’s excellence. Your reasons for not playing this game are quickly diminishing!

Unless you happen to be one of the many DS owners out there with the means to import the game or otherwise acquire the game through various homebrew solutions, you might be wondering what the hell good this review will do you since you’re unable to even purchase the game to begin with. I’m happy to report that as of E3 2008, Rhythm Tengoku Gold will be releasing in the United States under the title Rhythm Heaven, which means you will have absolutely no excuse to head to the nearest establishment that enjoys making money through the sale of video games and buy it!

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.