Music. It can give people the opportunity to express themselves; to say things they normally couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Music can help bring people together, and enrich their state of mind through imaginative lyrics and sublime acoustics. On the other hand, it can turn an otherwise composed person into the biggest knobber on the dancefloor, surging through muscles to create a reaction as unstoppable as breathing, or digestion. For those people who think themselves the next Fat Boy Slim, or Carl Cox, or are just too cheap to buy their own music, Codemasters quench your musical thirst with the third instalment in the MTV Music Generator series.

From the get-go MTV Music Generator 3 is quite overwhelming. A lot of effort has been put into the game. A good point is that you don’t have to appreciate all the elements of the game to make a music track. The whole “create-your-own track” thing does feel like you’re chucked in at the deep end, but luckily they’ve included a load of easy-to follow tutorials in the options menu, spelling things out pretty slowly and easily. The only problem is that there are twelve tutorials to soldier through before you can get going on making something remotely catchy, and they do start to get boring after about the fourth one.

So the studio’s the place to be. The layout has been changed quite a bit since MTVMG2, adopting a much more user-friendly interface, much like the excellent Music 2000 for the PSone. The grid to stick your music riffs into is in the middle, with the different sound channels along the left side, arranged vertically, with the other modes along the top of it, meaning you can go in and out of each of them pretty easily, which is quite useful when you’re trying to work quickly. Once again, I chose the style of “Flawless” (house), and then was left with an empty slate and an idea in the back of my head….

Most of the music comes in riffs, lasting at least a bar, and at most four bars. This means that all you have to do is pick the right riffs and put them in sequence. Sound easy? - You ain’t seen nothing yet! Each sound channel has only 2 riffs in it when you start, so you have to go to the database to find the ones that you want first. The game has about 3000 riffs in its database, so going through each one is pretty laborious, but it’s good when you have of a sort of “boom boom ting!” effect in your head, and then it pops up as “Boom crash 1”, in the list, exactly as you want it. The track itself has a memory limit, meaning you can only have so many riffs in your track at any one time. Personally, I thought that was a good thing, because it meant that it made sure I didn’t just put in a new riff every bar, making it sound like some contemporary art piece (i.e.: complete pants).

Strangely there is no option to simply start from scratch, without a tune. At first look the game seems to be catering for the more mainstream musical tastes, and tries to avoid making things too heavy right away. Have a good look however, and there are some options that appeal to the more advanced musician. If you don’t like the riffs on the database, or have a tune in your head that would sound good, you can go to the melody menu, where you can create your own melodic riff. This is a good option, but it has very few sounds to work with, so ends up out of place in your track, because it can only be played in “organ”, when it would sound better on a synthesiser.

A better option is the Beatbox, where you can create your own drum riff, which does sound rather good (if you can get a good one going). If you heard something cool on a CD you’ve got, you can also rip a track from it, find the bit you want, cut it out of the track, and import it into your tune. The only trouble with this is that you really can only rip a “clean” sample where there is only one audio thing going on at the time, such as a synthesiser, or rapping voice. Otherwise the drums or bass on the track clash with the ones on your track. You can also take the riffs from the database, and mess with them too. In the Waves mode, the riff comes up as a cool wave pattern. You can then create fade in or out, change the volume level of it, or cut a bit out, and repeat one part of this. I did this to great effect. The only problem was that the changes applied to all of the riffs in the track then, and I only wanted the one at the end changed, so I never used it in the end.

Another problem is that it does take a lot of time to get a good track going. I finished my track, which was three minutes and six seconds long, in about 3 hours. Most parts of the track end up as cutting and pasting, but messing about with individual volume levels and when to take tracks on and off can suck up your time like a hungry mosquito.