Retro Rearview: beatmania |
Written by DarkTetsuya |
Sunday, 30 May 2010 11:49 |
So hit the jump for the rest of this look back at one of the world's first music games!
I'm sure you've heard a certain videogame review show on a once half-decent (but now completely crappy, IMHO) network claim the game was nothing more than a Guitar Hero knockoff. While I wasn't exactly in love with that game's limited songlist, I still think it's kind of difficult to call it that... seeing as how the original Japanese release of the game debuted in 1997! Anyway enough about that, let's talk about the series that put BEMANI on the map! 'BEMANI' of course being leet Japanese short-hand for 'biitomania' (beatmania spelled out in romaji.). The game sounds simple, but gets very challenging. Select a song, and using the special turntable controller peripheral, start playing! As the notes fall to the bottom of the screen, press the corresponding key or scratch the turntable at the right time. Of course nowadays games like that are commonplace with Guitar Hero and ROCKBAND, but back then it was totally unheard of to have a game like that that needed a special controller (that wasn't like a driving sim or light-gun game) beatmania had several arcade and home releases, and even a couple of US and Korean arcade versions! (AC = arcade)
US:
Also unheard of at the time, was the concept of an 'append disc'. Before the advent of XBOX Live! and ROCKBAND's weekly 'downloadable content', if Konami wanted to release additional songs for its games, they had to put out 'append discs', which had a special yellow and black icon noting the need for the user to own one of the other games that served as a 'key disc' (several of the home versions of beatmania also doubled as a 'Key Disc' which could play any of the songs on these append discs) In addition to the main series releases and arcade games, there were also several special console-only releases of beatmania, many of which were these 'Append discs' (key discs are in bold):
(roughly translated, This is compact!) Which definetly helped for those Japanese arcades limited on space... although I'm not sure if it was compatible with all the mixes or not... I believe they all used the same hardware. beatmania III had a similar layout to the original 5-key version, except now the game had the addition of an effector footpedal down at the bottom of the machine, and if you stepped on it, you could change the effects during the song, in a similar fashion to beatmania IIDX's effectors... infact, the IIDX controller was originally designed with a jack for a possible home conversion of beatmania III, but that never materialized. Even more ironic, is the jack for the footpedal was actually carried over to the new controller that came with the US release of beatmania on PS2. (released in 2006) From the pamphlet that came with the controller: 'CONTROLLER BASE PLUG' This plug should always be attached to the BM CONTROLLER base to protect the delicate connector underneath. There is no need to remove this plug because this section of the BM CONTROLLER serves no function with the game software. Until a specific use or need for this connector is determined, please leave the plug attached to the controller base. Interestingly, I read online that you could plug the footpedal included with the drummania MIDI drumkit and on the JP versions of IIDX you could use it to switch effector settings. While it kinda sucks that there was no home version of beatmania III (or any other american home releases of beatmania, but that's a rant for next week) there were however, a small handful of arcade versions:
One other interesting thing about the inclusion of the foot pedal, is there was even a dedicated mode that integrated the foot pedal as one of the notes you needed to hit in tune to the music. Also cool about the beatmania III cabinets, were the gigantic speakers that sat on both sides of it. These things were fucking huge, and thusly, really fucking loud. Back when my local arcade had a beatmania III: Append 6th MIX it was almost too loud to spend too much time on... but that's probably just me. Another feature was that you could save your effector settings and high scores to a 3.5" floppy disk (if you can still find them, I heard Sony actually pulled the plug on those old floppies...) You could also unlock things on certain versions of beatmania III. Also interesting is the inclusion of a headphone jack, almost a decade before the DJ MAX Technika games did it. Unfortunately, as you've probably seen in the games lists, both of these games concluded in the middle of 2002, with the release of each series' respective 'THE FINAL' versions. But tune in next week, as I take a look at the history of the 'Next Generation Version' of beatmania, beatmania IIDX! I hope you'll tune in for that next week. |
Last Updated on Tuesday, 01 June 2010 12:08 |