Video games - Beatmania

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	Video games - Beatmania

Beatmania (ビートマニア) is a rhythm video game by the Japanese developer Konami, released in 1997. It's the inaugural game of what Konami soon entitled the "Bemani" line, after this game. Beatmania, like all Bemani games since, is a music-based game. It can be found in arcades and in console versions. Simulators of the official games have been made for the home computer.

Description

The concept behind Beatmania is that you are something somewhere between a DJ and a keyboardist; in the original games you have five plastic keyboard-like keys in a zig-zagged pattern to press down on and a turntable which you can spin to "scratch" the music — beatmania IIDX uses 7 keys, while beatmania III uses 5 keys and an effect pedal.

The actual play is purely about rhythm. Each key and the turntable has a corresponding vertical bar onscreen—in these bars, horizontal notes cascade down. The player must hit each note, which will then play a sound sample, as it reaches the bottom of the bar, and is rated on how close to the actual timing he hits. The result is that the player adds instruments and effects on top of the existing song in real time. The challenge comes in the fact that a record of good and bad hits are recorded and represented in a life bar with a green and red portion. The red portion is at the high end, when the player does well. The green portion is much larger and represents the cut-off point where the player will "fail" the song, ending the game once the song is finished.

Unlike its successors such as Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania is very unforgiving of incorrect moves. Not only does missing existing notes quickly lower your bar out of the red range, but hitting non-existent notes will also count against you. The scoring system is like the one used in Dance Dance Revolution, where players are graded on their ability on a letter scale (from E to AAA) at the end of each song played. However, additional modes are available which grades a player cumulatively over the course of a predetermined set of songs. These modes are often more challenging, as a player must sustain a high level of play through several songs.

Beatmania and its variants have a hardcore following in countries other than Japan. There are very few Beatmania arcade machines in the United States, but the number is gradually increasing. In addition to its arcade versions, Konami produces home console versions for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation in Japan. Official or custom-made controllers for Beatmania can range in price from under one hundred US dollars to several hundred US dollars. As with other Bemani games, players often compete and share high scores on message boards or other communities on the Internet.

The Beatmania series features many different styles of songs, ranging from rave and trance music to J-Pop and classical. Some regular artists featured in Bemani games include dj TAKA, TaQ, Orange Lounge, Mr.T, Ryu☆, good-cool, and Osamu Kubota, among others.

Releases

As of 2005, there have been 13 arcade releases of Beatmania:

beatmania (1997)
beatmania 2ndMIX (1998)
beatmania 3rdMIX (1998)
beatmania completeMIX (1999)
beatmania 4thMIX: The Beat Goes On (1999)
beatmania 5thMIX: Time To Get Down (1999)
beatmania completeMIX2 (2000)
beatmania ClubMIX (2000)
beatmania CORE REMIX (2000)
beatmania featuring DREAMS COME TRUE (2000)
beatmania 6thMIX: The UK Underground (2001)
beatmania 7thMIX: Keepin' Evolution (2002)
beatmania THE FINAL (2002)

However, there are other Beatmania releases, such as the ones for the Game Boy Color:

-Beatmania GB -Beatmania GB2: Gotchamix

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Beatmania ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Beatmania; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Video games - Beatmania

Description

Releases

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