33w ago - FuturLab Managing Director James Marsden has detailed Beats Slider and Fuel Tiracas for Sony's new PlayStation Mobile service today.

To quote: Hello folks! Earlier this year we were shouting about shouting about Velocity, and now we've got some new things to be excited about. We've been hard at work coming up with more simple, elegant and clever ideas, and crafting them into fun and addictive games.

The first of these games is called Beats Slider, and it's called that because you slide beats around. It's simple, rather elegant, and pretty clever too...

Beats Slider - Conquer Those Blasted Slider Puzzles!

Each block of the sliding puzzle represents MIDI data, which is basically musical notation that computers can read. MIDI data can be used to play back any instrument, synthesizer, drum loop or whatever you throw at it, just by changing the instruments or samples that are triggered by it.

So what we've done is allow the player to push a drum loop MIDI pattern into a synthesizer slot, or a melody pattern into a bass line track, and every combination you could think of within the limits of each level. It was quite the brain teaser to write music that can be rearranged in this way whilst still sounding good, but we managed it.

What we're also...