Electroplankton (Nintendo DS)

With ELECTROPLANKTON, players use both the stylus and their voice to compose music. Electroplankton are tiny musical creatures that live in an ocean inside your Nintendo DS. By touching them with your stylus or singing, you can help them compose music. Players can watch musical plankton in the audience mode or interact with them in performance mode.

In performance mode, players choose to create music with 10 kinds of plankton. With the Tracy plankton, for example, you draw a line on the touch-sensitive screen and the Tracy plankton will follow or "trace" the lines. There are six colors of Tracy plankton, each producing its own tone. The player can influence the tone by drawing from left to right to make the sound go higher or from right to left to make the sound go lower.

This is the creation of Toshio Iwai, the talent behind the 1996 award-winning SimTunes computer simulation game. It's a compelling playground in which to explore music. Playing with the plankton is fascinating because each of the 10 kinds produces music in different ways, and all of the music is accompanied by mesmerizing visuals.

Electroplankton will enthrall kids who enjoy exploring sights and sounds in an unstructured environment. It will not hold the interest of kids seeking structure and winning. A minor frustration is that kids can't save their compositions, nor can they combine two kinds of plankton. Nonetheless, this is a magical way to explore the components of music.