April 06, 2005
New Game: Electroplankton (JP)
Title: Electroplankton
Platform: Nintendo DS (JP)
Publisher: Nintendo
Where: Dreamland
When: April 5
How Much: 4,380 yen (4,571 yen w/tax)
I've still got a bit of catching up to do, but I wanted to take a break for today so I could post my latest acquisition: Electroplankton, interactive media artist Toshio Iwai's latest experiment in computer-generated sound. I honestly have no idea how well-known Iwai is in the west, but personally, I know of him because of an infamous Super Famicom game he made back in the day that was completely finished and almost ready to ship when Nintendo pulled the plug on the project: a music game that was being billed by some as a spiritual successor to Mario Paint called Sound Fantasy. After Nintendo canned it, Sound Fantasy went on to become SimTunes, which was published by Maxis for the PC back in 1996.
Now, Iwai and Nintendo are together again, only this time, he managed to get his game out the door and into stores before Nintendo got cold feet, and the world is a better place for it. Electroplankton is kinda hard to describe, so I'll just link to some brief impressions I posted on Gaming-Age yesterday, and you can go from there.
BTW, the packaging totally rocks:
It comes with free headphones (thus the oversized box), and it's the first and only DS game so far that doesn't have the traditional "Nintendo DS" logo bar down the left-hand side of the plastic case. The genre is listed as "Media Art," which is probably Nintendo's justification for this bold venture into new packaging territory, but whatever -- I just like it 'cause it looks cool. :)
More to come soon...
Posted by john tv at April 6, 2005 10:21 PM