E3 06: Traxion Hands-on

The rhythm action genre is more popular than ever, but there's been nothing to cater to the market on the PlayStation Portable. Traxion is a brand-new title that's early in development, but was being shown off at E3 2006 at the LucasArts booth. The game is set to be released in November and is being developed by Kuju Entertainment. We had a play on an early build of the game to see how it's shaping up.

The idea behind Traxion is that it takes your music collection from the MemoryStick, and devises a series of 24 minigames around the audio. The style and pace of each game will vary depending on the rhythm of the beats, and it will also analyse the ID3 tag in the MP3 file to look for the genre of each track. Traxion will then alter the background and objects in the game depending on whether you're listening to jazz or punk rock, for example. The game will also come with a selection of prelicensed tracks for those without access to a music library on MemoryStick.

The first game we played was reminiscent of Amplitude, with a long bar of notes that you have to hit in time to the music. It's far more forgiving than Amplitude, as you can be quite off the note to still score a point, but the bar loops up and down and it can be difficult to see what's coming next. The idea is to hit long runs of the same colour beats, but avoid the cursor hitting the bad notes that are liberally scattered around. Played with a fast dance track, the speed can be difficult to cope with, but slower songs result in an enjoyable if simple accompaniment to the audio.

The second thing we see is a cooking minigame, where food flies at a chef in time to the music and he chops it up into sushi if you press the face buttons in time. The plan is to include different styles of minigames that will cover puzzle and arcade genres, in addition to interactive drum kits and visualisations such as the Bellagio fountains for people who just want to chill out. Other games that have been promised at this stage include a karate fighting game in which the opponent's clothing will change depending on the music's genre, and a Tetris-style game whereby blocks will drop in time to the music.

Multiplayer games are unfortunately a difficult area for the team to develop, as copyright restrictions make it impossible to share music between devices. The build that we saw was supposedly made in around two and a half weeks by a couple of programmers, but the promise of a great quick-burst game is clearly there. We'll have more on Traxion on the run-up to its release.