An exhaustive set of tools, held down by the limits of the PSP.
As someone who writes music on a regular basis, I didn't expect much from Beaterator. I admit that I bought it almost only for the beats/melody creation tools. I travel a lot, and being able to quickly write down a groove that comes up in my head while on the train was appealing to me. After a few nights of messing around with the rest of the tools, I have to say that I was left impressed.
The greatest compliment I can give this "game" is that, just in terms of what it can do, I never ever felt like I was missing anything. Every tool I usually use on my PC is there somewhere, in some shape or form, and the very well-thought out interface makes them surprisingly easy to use, too. Even something like editing a sound (triming, reversing, adding fade, etc) or applying effects to a song is incredibly intuitive. The "game" comes with a large collection of samples and synth sounds, ranging from house music to rock'n'roll. There is something for everyone I suppose but the quality is not always top notch. Still, you can import you own samples, if you wanna go that far.
There is one problem though. Apart from the fact that a mouse and keyboard will always be more efficient than a PSP (making the whole thing feel kinda useless for most people out there), Beaterator is also held down by severe loading times. Having to wait 3 or 4 seconds to preview a sample might not seem that big a deal, but when you're scrolling through a list of dozens of them, it becomes tedious quite fast. Also, saving can take more than a full minute... yeah that's pretty bad. I played the MTV Music Generator games, I should've known better than to think it could be otherwise. I'm guessing downloading the "game" on the Playstation Store is the way to go, although I did not check for myself to see if the load times are any better.
All in all, Beaterator is an achievement, despite its flaws. It's powerfull, very well produced, and simple enough to use. The only question remaining is : who is this for ? Someone with no experience of writing music will undoubtedly be confused by the complexity, and the Live Play mode is definitely not enough of a game to satisfy anyone. As for the experts, well, odds are they already have some kind of sequencer on their Mac or PC. I guess that leaves only me, and everyone like me who travels a lot and has a bad memory for beats.
