Beatmania is a rhythm video game developed and distributed by Japanese game developer Konami and first released in 1997. It contributed largely to the boom of music games in 1998, and the series expanded not only with arcade sequels, but also moved to home consoles and other portable devices, achieving a million unit sales. The Bemani line of music games from Konami is named after the series, and was first adopted in the arcade release of beatmania 3rdMIX and kept ever since. The series came to an end with the last game being beatmania THE FINAL, released in 2002.
While the series was never ported to the PC, its popularity led to non-official simulators, with one of the most popular being BM98.
The player is a club disc jockey (or DJ) who must manipulate the controls according to the instructions on screen to win the praise of the audience. Each game consists of a set number of songs of various difficulties, and each song must attain a certain degree of satisfaction from the audience in order to progress to the next.
The game controls consist of five plastic vertical rectangular keys that are arranged in a zig-zag pattern alike the letter "M". They resemble the layout of the keys of a piano (e.g. C, C#, D, D#, and E) and are color coded, in the same fashion, with the lower row white and top row black. A turntable is to the right of the five keys, and is turned, or "scratched".
Each key has a corresponding vertical bar onscreen, as does the turntable. The bars indicate the path which rectangular icons cascade down towards a horizontal line near the bottom of the screen. The player must hit the corresponding key or rotate the turntable when the icon matches with the line, which will trigger a preset sound sample and recomposes the song properly. Players are judged for each key press for the accuracy of the timing on a scale of GREAT, GOOD, BAD and POOR. Hitting keys/scratching when corresponding notes are absent will deplete a bar indicating the audience satisfaction. The passing range is shown on the bar as a red region on the right, and green for the failing range on the left. The game may end pre-maturely if the bar is completely depleted, but this depends on individual machine settings.
The unit of score in the game is "money". A final grade (A - G) is given at the end of the game to indicate the player's performance. This grade is not directly based on the "money score", but is instead based on the player's overall accuracy.
Beatmania in Europe includes a few unique tracks over the original Beatmania. Beatmania Euro Mix comes on only 1 CD, No Append disk. The game is available with the official Konami Beatmania
controller or separately.
Song List:
- Sing It Back (Radio Edit) Classic Garage
-Shake What Ya Mama gave Ya Break Beat
-Jaques Your Body Electro House
-Cydonias Face Trance
-Going Global Euro House
-Dreaming Belearic Anthem
-Very Baad Man Gangster Breaks
-Shake What Ya Mama gave Ya Break Beat
Manufacturer's description:
The European edit of Beatmania features club classics from the likes of Moloko (Sing it Back), Ruff Driverz (Dreaming) and Les Rythmes Digitales (Jacques Your Body). If you wanna make the DJ hall of fame you've gotta make the floor jump. Step up to the decks and take control.
Features:
First person perspective
2D graphics
Cartoon graphics
Music & DJ themes. |
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