What’s this? Beaterator? A Rockstar game where no one gets brutally murdered? That’s like fish without chips, or Phillip Schofield without a ludicrous gameshow to host. It hardly sounds like the sort of thing the Grand Theft Auto creator would dabble in. And yet, this music making bundle of breaks, loops and joy is shaping up to be one of the best handheld games it’s ever produced. We’ve just had a first play, so read on to find out why we’re smitten.
We call Beaterator a game, but only because we can’t think of a better name to call something you slot in the back of a PSP (Fine, UMD). In fact, it’s a music sequencing app, and a powerful one at that, with a fantastic, finger friendly, novice layer slapped over the top to ease newcomers gently in. And it’s gold.
You’ve probably played something like Beaterator before. Even as far back as Music 2000 on the PlayStation, people have tried to bring powerful music creation tools to consoles in a bid to make you the next Calvin Harris break-out. But why Beaterator bests them all is how it merges difficulty levels seamlessly.
When you load up the game, all you’ll see at first is the beginner friendly overlay with producer Timbaland’s avatar. Jumping in to Live Play mode doesn’t change that view, and playing around with it for a few hours will teach you the basics. There are no bars or track grids in sight: just start loading up different loops from 8 different sound banks, and if you’re feeling a bit plucky, switch them out for more with the left bumper. They’ll start merging together and will cue automatically so you won’t jar your timing, ever. You can still make some epic creations in Live Play mode mind, as there are thousands of samples to mix in from 8 different genres – including your usual rock and pop, and even UK Garage, RIP. And once you’re done, you can export them as WAVs, or even upload them to Rockstar’s Social Club site.
But once you know what you’re doing, Beaterator’s real power comes to the fore inside the Studio mode. Cartoon Timmy’s long gone, and you’re left to your own devices to come up with choons. The micro managing aspect here’s astonishing: you’ve got a grid mode to show what happens when, of course, and you can edit in realtime as the track plays back, but you can dive in to individual loops and edit them too, to get different drum sounds at different points in the bar, for instance. You could spend scores of hours in this mode perfecting your sonic creations, and here’s the kicker: even with a tiny PSP screen and just a few buttons to lay everything down, you’d want to. That you could still get hooked on Beaterator without ever even knowing the advance mode is there says a lot about how broad its appeal is.
There’s no getting around the fact that something so intuitive might be even better on a PC, say, but with a simultaneous PSPgo launch and an iPhone version of Beaterator coming too (to go with GTA Chinatown Wars), it’s a smart move on Rockstar’s part to make that power portable and fill up all that idle time on the bus on as many devices as possible. We’re hooked, so if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to pre-order a copy.
Out 2 October | £24.99 | Rockstar
