music-generator
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Pixeljunk 4am's cube of sound
"You have to play it to understand it!" That's about as big a cop-out as I could possibly conjure up, but if I learned anything from my half-hour, hands-off demo of PixelJunk Lifelike during E3, it's absolutely true of this particular game. It's devoid of pretense, tutorial or any semblance of a UI, simply asking the player to grab a PlayStation Move remote and, you know, make music happen. The stars aligned after I had a chance to try out Q-Games' curious music generator -- now titled Pixeljunk 4am -- during Fantastic Arcade, while two of my contemporaries listened in to my on-the-fly composition. While the tunes I created couldn't be considered "club bangers" by anyone with two functioning ears, the game's mechanisms revealed themselves completely during my demonstration: It is, at its recondite core, a game about pulling techno-sounds out of an imaginary space-cube. Yeah, describing this is going to be tough.
