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Tech

A Review of a Game for the PSP that allows you to make beats with Timothy Zachery Mosely (kind of)

Aged four, with crayons and a pad of blank paper, I asked my mum what I should draw. She attempted to nurture my self-expression. She told me I should draw "anything I like". But with everything possible, nothing came to me. So I asked again, what I should draw. Three days later, her eyes sunken from a lack of sleep, she finally replied, "Jesus, draw a fucking unicorn or something". I've pretty much just drawn unicorns since. I'm not alone. Us humans, we're regurgitators, not creators. It's just that some people stuff more into their mouths and chew it for longer before they spit it out and ask you to look at it. It's a world that flatters Beaterator's design – a three-hit drip-feed introduction to hand-held music creation.

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The first challenge: don't scare off the idiots. That's what Freeplay is for – a playground of looped noises in which you can't really do much wrong. There are eight tracks you can play with, each disguised as a friendly speaker, with four options for each of the tracks. So, you bumble around the tracks with your D-pad, setting off one of the four options with the Playstation shapes. Everything's designed to harmonise, so the worst you can manage is a chaotic, but not discordant, mess that your mum wouldn't say passed for music – at least not in her day.

This really is the equivalent of a toddler-distracting activity blanket or musical Fuzzy Felt. But it does serve a purpose: you can record what you do here, and take it into the studio. That means no blank paper and no drawing unicorns. By the time you're ready to get some filthy semi-quavers under your fingernails, you've got a cacophony to fanny about with.

So, how does it work as a studio? Surprisingly well. Moving tracks around, inserting new loops from the huge Timbaland and Rockstar-sourced library and previewing your pretty mess is fairly intuitive, with only a few latent rules that might make you wonder why what you wanted to happen isn't happening. But when you're boiling down an application best suited to a powerful PC into a handheld with 15 buttons, that it doesn't happen more often is a miracle.

Finally, you can go inside the loops, and edit them: this is the point at which you realise you do have a fundamental say in what's going on. You can control every noise. It's an odd thing to learn, when just two short steps ago you were thumbing around some noises and making big stupid "baaaw" sounds.

I'm a sceptic when it comes to creative stuff like this being made available to morons like us: you don't make people better, you fill the world with shit. But Beaterator actually turns the whole process into a welcoming experience – and that's no shit feat. You might not make anything spectacular – I know for a fact that I didn't – but that's hardly Beaterator's fault.

JON BLYTH