Electroplankton Review

In his keynote address to the Game Developers Conference 2005, Satoru Iwata laid out Nintendo's plans to not only appease its core audience but to introduce new types of experiences that gamers "may not even know they want."

At the fore of this charge is Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai's latest synaesthetic foray from the art world into the game world.

Well known and highly regarded as a studio artist - though not yet the most household of names - Iwai has been deftly blending light, sound and tactile interfaces in every medium, including games, for two decades.

"Players interact with musical marine life as seen through a microscope, which responds to the player's touch or voice commands"

Otocky, his first commercial title, was a Famicom Disk System musical shooter in precisely the same fashion as Rez, predating it by some 15 years.

Iwai was also the driving force behind Maxis' SimTunes (reborn from the ill-fated Super Famicom project Sound Fantasy), PlayStation 2's 'scribble performance' game Bikkuri Mouse, and a small handful of mobile phone and non-commercial WonderSwan works.

With DS, it appears that the hardware has finally caught up to where Iwai's heart truly lies, and Electroplankton is an accumulation of the interactive experiences he's been experimenting with in a gallery setting all his life, mass-produced and topped off with happy-face accessibility.

In it, players will interact with 10 different phyla of musical marine life (autonomous musical creatures being one of the most prevalent themes in his art) as seen through a microscope, each of which respond uniquely to the player's touch or voice commands.

The San-animalcule, for instance, act as simple trackers, responding with a sequential melody based on their position on the touch-screen.

While the Tracy and Luminaria follow the paths laid out by stylus strokes or by manipulating directional gates, all creating something between symphony and dissonance according to the actions of the user.

Others, like the Rec-Rec and Volvoice, allow for four-track beat-boxing and similar vocal interactions, and - in a fitting tribute to its publisher and to the hardware that first inspired the artist - the aptly named Beatnes allow you to lay down 8bit beats and effects over Mario's invincibility-star theme.

All footage of the game shown thus far points toward a highly engrossing and hypnotic experience, if a solitary one.

There's no word yet on wireless communication with, or accompaniment from, fellow plankton, and the package - as with Band Brothers - is rounded out with a free pair of headphones, leading us to believe that this is a title in which the explicit purpose is to lose yourself.

Accompanying the release of Electroplankton will be an exhibition of the game itself at the Laforet Museum Harajuku, creating a full circle - a lifetime of Iwai's collected gallery works, condensed to a game, and back to the gallery again.

Electroplankton is out for now for DS in Japan. A UK release date is yet to be confirmed