Beaterator Final Impressions
Back on September 29, Rockstar released Beaterator for the PSP. You may be wondering why we haven't reviewed it yet. The answer is simple: Beaterator isn't a game. It's a music-making software application that happens to have been made by a game publisher for a game system. Yes, those...
Back on September 29, Rockstar released Beaterator for the PSP. You may be wondering why we haven't reviewed it yet. The answer is simple: Beaterator isn't a game. It's a music-making software application that happens to have been made by a game publisher for a game system. Yes, those close ties to the gaming world have led us to preview Beaterator, but it's not something that our review scale is designed to evaluate. That's why you have not and will not see an official review for Beaterator on GameSpot. But in case you're still on the fence, I'd like to share some personal impressions of Beaterator now that it's out and I've spent some quality time with a retail copy. (Here's the quick version: I like it a lot.)
For a basic rundown on all the features be found in Beaterator, you'll want to check out the preview I wrote last month. There you'll find a basic summary of the different methods of making and recording music. No major features have been added or removed since I previewed it; you're still going to find the Live Play mode for taking the 3,000+ loops and playing a song on the fly; Studio Session for playing live songs with a few more options for customizing the sound; and Song Crafter to get into the real nitty gritty of your music.
Here's an example of Live Play in action.
We'll start with Live Play. You don't need anything more than a rough sense of musical timing to get the most out of this mode. You're basically just given a template of loops (hip hop, house, etc.) broken down into various instruments and ability to start and stop them at will. It's a simple system, but one that lets you feel like you're actually making music even though you're only controlling which loops play and when. Besides serving as a friendly way for newcomers to get a feel for making music, the cool part about Live Play is that you can record your performance, then take it into the other two modes to fine-tune your work.
Studio Session is sort of the bridge between Live Play and Song Crafter. What it does is allow you to fill all the loop slots manually, edit the individual loops to your liking (more on that in a bit), and just generally do the same thing as Live Play but with more customization. I honestly didn't find myself drawn to Studio Session much at all. It's nice that it exists as an option, but I usually found myself attracted to either the mindless fun of Live Play or the all-out creative potential of Song Crafter. Studio Session doesn't really offer either one, it just sort of sits in the middle all on its own without either of those benefits.
But that's just as well, because once you jump into Song Crafter (the third and most advanced of the three modes) you won't want to leave any time soon. Song Crafter is the real heart of Beaterator, and it's where you'll find yourself feeling most rewarded for your creative endeavors. It resembles a traditional music-editing software app in the way you're given a grid-based view of the entire song with color-coded audio loops to help visualize everything. And while there's a lot of depth here, the act of quickly making a song and then taking the time to fine-tune that song are separated enough that you won't need to be a music software expert to make something that sounds great off the bat.
One of the many tutorials you can find.
A lot of that is thanks to the huge library of quality loops, which are separated between those made by the in-house musicians at Rockstar Leeds and those recorded by Timbaland. I found myself using the Timbaland loops way more often because of their more compelling sound, but the Rockstar ones are pretty good too, with selections running the gamut from techno beats to jazzy guitars to atmospheric synthesizers. If there's one problem with the loops, it's that previewing each one requires three or four seconds to load when running off a UMD copy of Beaterator. It's not a problem if you know what you want right away, but if you're trying to decide which of the 18 "Drums Groovy" samples to use in your intro, those load times add up. However, I also tested a copy downloaded from the PlayStation Network store that I got running on a PSP Go, and the load times were much, much better. Not quite instantaneous, but noticeably improved.
If you're not content with the 3,000+ loops that come with the game, you can edit each one of them or make something brand new. Audio loops (i.e., ones recorded from real instruments and not emulated) can be trimmed, cut, repeated, and faded in and out, while MIDI loops go a step further and let you go in and change each individual note right on down to snare hit velocity or synthesizer waveform oscillation. Yes, there's a lot you can do, but I found myself perfectly happy to learn everything there was to learn, and didn't find myself struggling with the menus or interface much at all. In fact, you can pull up helpful tutorial videos any time you want from the main menu, and the interface does a good job of remembering previously used samples so you don't go hunting all over the place when you want to recycle something from earlier in the song. Some form of edit-undo would have helped for those times I goofed up and deleted a chunk of song that I had meant to copy, but those gaffes were pretty few and far between.
Playing your song back in Song Crafter.
While I could go on and on about the myriad ways you can create and tweak sounds to put your own personal touch on your songs, the bottom line is that Song Crafter will gladly steal away hours of your life at a time. There's a lot to take in, but you'll feel rewarded every time you finish a new song. And when you've done that, you can take those songs onto Rockstar's Social Club website and share your tracks with other players and also follow the uploads of those you've deemed to be your favorite artists. The song upload process is a pretty painless one: You just need to register for a Social Club account, connect your PSP to a WiFi network, and upload your song right from the system. There's no delay, either--we uploaded a song and found it on the site within seconds. It's a surprisingly easy process to go through, and there seem to be quite a few standout tracks on the site already. You can also export your song to a raw WAV file and transfer it to your computer from the PSP.
Beaterator may not be a traditional game, but anyone who owns a PSP and has an interest in making music would do well to check it out. It's not as full-featured as the more high-end music editing software applications out there, but it carries the dual benefits of being a fraction of the cost and portable enough to craft songs on your morning bus ride. I definitely recommend it.
I won't be quitting my day job any time soon.
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- Release: Sep 29, 2009 »
- ESRB: Everyone
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