Fluid

So Fluid is a strange concept to me, though any console based music production "game" is especially odd. Fluid is strange in the way it's presented, you control a dolphin and swim around in the ocean until you get your first theme. The first one you get is "Peace", this transports you to a psychedelic FMV backdrop whilst the preset musical composition of "Peace" plays in the background, you can control the dolphin to do little twists and hold down the face buttons and the D-pad to play some lead musical instruments in a random progression that either sounds okay or it doesn't. But if you press start you're sent back to the ocean where you can find the loop editor which is where the bulk of the game will be spent.

Once you unlock your first theme then a small selection of loops is presented to you, to this day the diversity of the loops surprises me. You get a selection of bass drum loops, cymbal/hi hat loops, snare loops, bass loops, percussion loops, and three lead loops all of which you can pan, adjust the volume of, apply effects to like reverb and chorus, you can speed the composition up and down and disable and swap out any loops at will, you also get a second bank that you can switch to so when in the FMV area you can switch between one of your compositions to the other. As the game progresses and you acquire more themes and loops then you've got a substantial catalogue of hundreds of loops which lets you make many compositions. You can save your compositions to your memory card but that's as far as keeping your compositions go.

I myself had a load of fun making music in Fluid but at the end of the day it will never match anything you can make in a digital audio workstation and some free samples online. Still for the sheer novelty of the 90's beats and sound effects that will bring you rushing back to the murky ambient sound of that decade, it really can't be compared to.