![]() ![]() Firstly, there really isn't a clear way to associate a certain tone/note with a certain response, or at least no tangible, marked up relationship that I can tell. That generally doesn't really exist in Electroplankton for a couple reasons. ![]() Musical instruments have a sort of rhyme and reason to input and response: if you play a certain way or use a certain fingering/key, then you'd expect the same note(s) to come out every time. That isn't to say that there needs to be depth in a plaything like this, but to try and elaborate where I'm coming from, I'm actually somewhat hesitant to use the "musical instrument" description, despite lack of a better term. Maybe I'm being a little harsh on this, but I suppose I found Electroplankton a bit disappointing because there's a certain lack of depth to this all. There are also a few minigames that use the DS mic (as expected of most DS tech demo games), though these are mostly fancy recorders that will take your voice input and run it back to you with minor modification. ![]() And there's also a minigame where you can place plankton eggs and watch their smiley faces get bigger as they emit light and sound while slowly growing larger. Then there's a minigame called "Luminaria" where you can change the direction of arrows to alter the trajectory of the plankton on screen as they loop around and produce notes. To its credit, the minigames are distinct enough: for example, the most famous minigame, "Hanenbow" (you may have heard of it from a little known game called Super Smash Bros Brawl) has you changing the angle of leaves on a plant and watching plankton bounce off of the leaves to produce notes that sound like a xylophone. You generally tap the electroplankton or drag/draw lines to create some form of movement, and various tones are emitted based off the type of movement and specific minigame/feature interacted with. Anyways, this is a collection of ten different minigames akin to tech demos on the DS that are generally controlled with the touch screen, though sometimes the D-pad can be used to produce waves that also create vibrations in the electroplankton. I say "toy" because there's two modes, and one mode dubbed "Audience Mode" actually has the game play itself more or less and automatically produce sounds, though you can still interrupt whenever you'd like to provoke sounds of your own alongside the CPU input, whereas "Performance Mode" is just strictly left to the player's discretion. Like others before me have mentioned, Electroplankton is less of a game with clear objectives/guidelines or a beginning, middle, and end, and more of a "toy" that sort of functions like that of a musical instrument (not entirely accurate, I'll elucidate this later) or an early audio-visual experimentation on the DS. ![]()
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December 2022
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