Imagine Guitar Hero, only with a turntable, then take out all of the fun!

Beatmania is another music game made by Konami, makers of Dance Dance Revolution. Dance Dance Revolution is the most popular music game and is done right. Beatmania tries to emulate the fun that you get in Dance Dance Revolution, only there are a few problems....

Gameplay

You get a bulky machine that is supposed to be your turntable. On the right you have a little "record" to spin around and make unexciting noises and on the right you have seven buttons. As the songs play you will see little white lines on the side of the screen start falling down. When it gets to the bottom of the screen you have to press the right button at the right time. Faulty design has made this process really hard. Here is my attempt to recreate the button layout on the controller, (pay no attention to the -s:

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The layout can be so confusing and you are going to not be sure which button to press as they fall down and you will be pressing one on the bottom when you should be pressing one on the top. On the bottom of the screen it shows you a picture of what the machine looks like so you don't get confused about where your fingers are going. Once you make one mistake, it is really hard to get back into the song and fix it up.

The game features 50 songs, (that are really short), and due to the button layout, the songs are always generally hard and it even takes a challenge to get past the first song on the regular game mode. The game isn't very lenient on you at all and you will think you are doing pretty good and you get an overall rank of "good" on a song and you will still fail.

There are five modes in the game and the modes are: Game, practice, free, expert, and training. The game mode is just a series of songs in which you have to beat. The practice mode is a mode where you can just practice the songs without worrying about the score. Free mode is just when you play the songs that you have unlocked in game mode. Training mode lets you customize your songs to make them slower or faster so you can practice them more. Expert mode lets you select courses of predetermined songs to play and you can also create and play your own original courses.

Guitar Hero made it actually feel like you were playing the guitar, and DDR made you actually feel like you were dancing, but unfortunately Beatmania really makes no attempt to make you feel like a DJ. You do not remix songs, you just play songs that stink and you get some chances to use the scratching pad, but you rarely will ever use it.

So all in all, this is a very poorly made music game and I definitely do not recommend buying it. There are much better music games out there and I would suggest getting Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution because this game is overly difficult and a hassle to play.

Graphics

Like all other games of the music genre, the graphics are just fair. There really isn't much reliance upon the graphics because you are looking at the left hand part of the screen and all the other stuff is on the right side, which is basically just a cheesy little music video with overall poor animation.

Sound

The big part of a music game is obviously the sound. The sound is crisp and clear but too bad the music is just downright awful. They obviously take about three songs that people know and then put them on the back of the game, then the rest of the songs are just downright unheard of. Let me tell you how to emulate the majority of the music, go get your seven year old cousin, take him to a turn table. Give him a few records, watch him go. The music sounds like amateur techno for the majority and there are a few rap songs in which they say the most cliched rap phrazes over and over again like "Let me hear you seah yeah" or just a simple "Yo."

I'm not even going to bother listing the tracks because no one would have heard of any of the songs on the besides a few of them. The songs that you have probably heard in real life is a Moby song, the Britney Spears song "Toxic, and the song "Funkey Town," all the rest just sound like random sound that is unbearable to listen to at times.

There are fifty tracks in the game but all of them have been considerably remixed and shortened so that they are only about a minute to two minutes long making there be only probably around seventy five minutes of sound tracks. Since the songs are so short, it doesn't give you much time to rebound if you are doing bad on a song and once you lose one song in the game mode there is no retrying, your done, yep, game over!

Last Words
Baaaad music game, and not in the sense of meaning good. This game is just bad and I definately wouldn't recommend making the mistake I did and buying it.