POSTED 7/2/11


BEAT SKETCHER

Sony
PS3/PSN/Move

Will you stop that fucking sketching and give me a beat? Cheers.

What is it like? What it’s like, anyway? Well, Beat Sketcher’s no game; it’s a diversion. Think stress balls, zen gardens or silly putty. You mess about, but nothing serious comes of it. You know what I mean?

OK, no more Neneh Cherry steals.

Sceptically, we’re talking a basic demo of what PlayStation Move can do that costs bucks, although there’s some fun to be had on a primordial level. Actually, we’ve got it – Photoshop + Cubase + brains stabbed with cotton buds = Beat Sketcher!

Pick a basic rhythm backing and wield Move to smear basic drawings upon backgrounds or your lounge room via the PlayStation Eye, utilising a handful of brushes and colours. You tie brushes to a sound – anything from pizzicato strings to old-school sampled vox or synthy arpeggios. Then splot your masterwork onscreen, which works much like a keyboard: lower notes to the left, sweeping to higher notes at the right.

It’s all rather random. Polyphony – or amount of voices able to be played simultaneously, if you’re not a music nerd – is limited, so that funky bass groove you want looping throughout will just pop in and out. While all the sounds were more-or-less here to rip off anything from OMD’s awesome Dazzle Ships, limitations scuppered us.

Substance comes with challenges that eschew creativity for being a slave to the rhythm, along with some multiplayerness if you’re not the only one off your face – which is the perfect state to not scream whilst continually calibrating to avoid cavorting from one side of the room to the other to cover screen extremities. You can even inflict videos of your, erm, ‘creative process’ on YouTube (please don’t!).

File under ‘ephemeral’, sucker... (damn!)

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