beatmania
Just not feeling it.
Published: April 15, 2006
The first US home release of the game is loaded, though. Both the first and second beatmania games are here, letting you warm up on five key songs before tackling the more rewarding experience of playing with seven. Expert mode basically forces you to nail notes all the way through the song (it starts out at full and drops rather than building up from nothing), and there are a slew of tweaks like turning off notes, mirroring them, making them move faster and so on to mix things up.
Anything you play through on the standard mode unlocks in the other modes, including Practice, where you slow sections down to work on the timing and patterns (extremely useful, since I was actually training myself to hit the wrong notes for a while), Free play lets you tackle them with arcade mode rules but without the constant game over screens.
beatmania clocks in at about $65 bucks, which includes the controller. As we geeked out about in our preview, it's actually better than the official Japanese controller, offering the ability to slide out and flip around the keys for lefties, sturdier buttons that are rounded off on the edges, and a curved side that matches the contours of the turntable. It really is a nice piece of hardware, and feels solid. Little touches like having a rubber cap for the exposed end of the key board (since there are connectors on both sides) are a nice touch.
Though Konami updated the visuals with the latest version of the beatmania engine, it's still fairly fugly. The non-song menus are huge, gaudy, and lack any real sense of a cohesive design aesthetic (unless neon puke template buttons counts). Once you're in the game, it's more minimalist -- perhaps a little too much so -- but the game does stream in video content that you'll probably never see while you're playing, including the actual music videos for some of the licensed tracks like Moby and Timo Maas.
The actual organization of things is funky too. Because the turntable isn't analog, it tries to respond to constant turning by zooming through things, and there are times when just navigating menus can feel unresponsive and then suddenly touchy, mainly due to how quickly the turntable can flip through the selections. It's a minor gripe, but it's significant enough that it got to me after a while.
The audio, even when pumped through the digital out on the PS2, can sometimes be a little too quiet compared to the rest of the menu music. This isn't an uncommon problem with Bemani games in the past, and it's still annoying here. The tunes themselves are clear, as are the samples, though it may take a little fussing with your receiver to get to sound right if you have a surround setup.
I bitched a bit about the songs, and I really have to reiterate how poor some of the choices are. It's rare that the original music in a game actually sucks next to covers and licensed tracks, but there are just way too many chaotic or cookie-cutter examples of stuff without a hook. You'll hear a couple different Konami themes, stuff from other Bemani titles, and of course lots of stuff from the actual musicians at Konami, but by and large there's enough off-key singing, cheesy synth strings and bland hip-hop here to make playing through them to unlock the good stuff a chore.
If you do play through enough of those bad songs, you'll be rewarded with some good ones, though -- ones that stick themselves in parts of your brain that slowly leak out at the most random of times (usually when you're far away from the office and can't play the game to get them out), but by and large the song list is a dud. Given that this is a pilot for the series here in the states, I can only hope the game sells well enough to warrant a sequel.
Now that the ground work is laid; the controller is out, the interface all set to appropriate songs from Japan and more US covers alike, and people are quasi-aware of the game's existence on this side of the Pacific, all that's left to do is assemble a follow-up that actually delivers music that's on the same level as other Bemani titles. Right now, all we're left with is a great controller and a set of lackluster songs.
