Videogame dance party

We've been throwing around some ideas for a kind of 8-bit dance party event for awhile now, and I think I've come up with a way to DJ the event using my DS, Wii, and Macbook. I never realized it before, but Nintendo makes a buttload of music creation software.

This is really exciting for someone like me. Some of my favourite video gaming experiences aren't, well, games in the strictest sense of the word. I really, really love the ability to create something in a videogame, and as my area of expertise is generally in the music arena, games like Wii Music (which I've already defended to death) and Mario Paint are just games that I have to love.

Here's my plan. First, start off with something simple – a little Rec-Rec action in Electroplankton to get the party started. Or maybe some Beatnes. If you're unaware of what Electroplankton is, it's this fantastic (and fantastically out-of-print) Nintendo-produced oddity without any objectives or points or the standard conventions of what we would think of as videogame.

My next gambit would be to mix some Luminaria plankton with a beat that I'll create on my laptop, which could make for some serious craziness. I also have the KORG DS-10, which is basically a facsimile of a KORG microsynth, turned into a program for the DS. I've yet to unearth all of the secrets of this program, but I'll point you towards this website so you can see some fantastic music created by our good friend Johnny Amore using this program.

I mentioned in my Wii Music article that I've used that game to make some pretty fantastic stuff, so I've got a lineup of tracks ready to go from that, not to mention that I might use it for its drum feature to do some live drumming over a few of the songs.

I also recently got WarioWare D.I.Y., and while I haven't had much time to play around with it yet, it includes a fully featured, Mario Paint-style composer, which you should check out. Watching videos of people transcribing popular songs into Mario Paint is literally one of my favourite things to do…

OK. I'll stop being a wanker, and just say that you should stay tuned. If you live in the Regina area, this could all become a very real possibility in the next couple of months!