Fluid

Ecco meets mixing deck, err.. underwater

User Rating: 9 | Fluid PS

By Joker_Wylde | Review Date: April 15, 2009

This game is unlike anything I have ever played before. Its basically just a music creation tool, but you create it by swimming around with a dolphin. You can't die, there are no lives or other characters, and you progress linearly to open new levels and sound effects. When outside of the "worlds" you swim around in a shallow pool and bump into objects to interact with them. This was clearly testing out early graphics capabilities of the Playstation, as there are lots of spheres that transform into pyramids. Its very like the music reactive graphics package that came with all the early demo disks. And the dolphin is like the manta ray / T Rex demo. You can load up different sets of sounds first, and then select loops, modulate them, change volume etc in a menu system where the polygons control the changes. Then you swim off in a level where every movement or button combination uses a different set of instruments to improvise. I think you can then record a few minutes of this, and play with it after, but the recording functions in this are severely limited, its really about the improv.
Its a great concept, if you like relaxing and swimming about. Maybe it should be classified as edutainment, as its the kind of thing you'd give to a child to encourage it to be musical. Obviously professional musicians would quickly find it boring and limited. Still as an artistic experiment, I think it was great. Of its time, and terribly dated, but a great interactive museum piece.