About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Beatmania

Encyclopedia : B : BE : BEA : Beatmania

The correct title of this } is }}}. The initial letter is capitalized due to [Naming conventions #Lower case first lettertechnical restrictions].
For the Playstation 2 North America beatmania release, based on beatmania IIDX, see beatmania (North America).

beatmania IIDX controls
Enlarge
beatmania IIDX controls

beatmania (ビートマニア) 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. 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.

beatmania gave birth to other related series, with one being the 7-button beatmania IIDX series (as opposed to beatmania's 5 buttons) and the other being beatmania III which featured a pedal for optional effects and a 3.5" floppy disk drive to save play records.

While the series was never ported to the PC, its popularity led to non-official simulators, with one of the most popular being BM98.

beatmania and its variants have a hardcore following in Japan and all around the world. The password based Internet Ranking service allowed competition wherever a machine is available. There are very few beatmania arcade machines in the United States.

Contents

Basic Rules

The player is a club musician 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 consists 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 left 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. BAD and POOR depletes from 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 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.

Additional Rules

Various game modes are available, with different rule alterations that provide suitable challenges for players of various degrees of skill.

Practice
First available in the arcade 2ndMIX, beginner players can go through the rules with DJ Konami. Two stages follow, where poor performance will not result in a game over. DJ Konami was not featured in any of the following games. Before the addition of the Practice mode in the original beatmania, players had the choice of playing a practice stage for every normal game.
Free
Introduced in 6thMIX, Free mode is another practice mode that follows all the rules of the Normal mode, with passing and failing scores, but allows the player to play all the predefined number of songs regardless of each song's grade.
Expert
A mode for skilled players with courses that predefines the songs to be played. The rules for this mode have been modified throughout different versions of the game.
*beatmania
*:Players must play through all the songs in a set order, with the audience bar dropping in greater degrees and increasing less. All the other rules follow the normal mode. Continues are allowed.
*2ndMIX
*:Different themed course are given, each running five songs long. The scoring rules follow that of the previous beatmania.
*3rdMIX
*:In addition to the courses format of 2ndMIX, the audience bar is now full from the beginning, and any decrease will carry onto the next stage, where good performance does not recover the bar. The audience bar is characteristically colored in red, and no continues are allowed upon game over.
*completeMIX and after
*:With the introduction of the Internet Ranking service, scores are now counted as 2 points for JUST GREAT and 1 point for GREAT, which makes the overall EX Score. Upon completion of the course, a password is given to the player to submit to the official website for worldwide ranking. All of the internet ranking services have ended and are no longer available.
*featuring DREAMS COME TRUE
*:Unique to this release is MONKEY LIVE that comes between songs of the courses. Players are given a set amount of time where rapid scratching of the turntable will replenish the audience bar. The remainder of the rules follow those set in completeMIX.
Expert+
First offered in 6thMIX, this mode is designed for the most skilled of players. A single course is provided, featuring ten of the hardest songs in a particular version. The audience bar functions similarly to that of Expert mode, but falling to zero doesn't result in an immediate game over. Rather, DANGER is displayed on the screen, and it will take another subsequent miss to end the game. The bar is restored after each song.
Easy
Available since 3rdMIX, the Easy mode offers simplified playing sequences for songs. The selection of Easy and Hard modes were discarded altogether from 6thMIX and after, with difficultly selection becoming options within the integrated Normal mode.

Main Artists

beatmania offers many musical genres from different disciplines of electronic music. Below are some of the artists who made frequent appearances in the series.

Titles list

Arcade Releases
The main platform for the series, most other releases were based on certain titles from the arcade series, or featured a selection of songs across several of them.
The following are arranged in the order of their release.
North American Arcade Releases
Konami released two beatmania games in North America under the name HipHopMania.
Console Releases

PlayStation
The PlayStation releases were only available for Japan. The first game acted as a key disc, which is required to play the subsequent releases through disc changing, and were called append discs. Special hidden songs could be accessed for certain append discs if the discs were changed through a specific order.
Game Boy Color
Three games were released for the Game Boy color exclusively in Japan. The first two were backwards compatible with the classic Game Boy.
Wonderswan
bemani Pocket
The benmani Pocket line were portable gaming devices with a monochrome LCD screen, each featuring a :number of songs in a specific theme. As with most other bemani releases, they were sold only in Japan. :All the games were bundled with a set of earbuds, as the machine lacked a built-in speaker.
PlayStation 2
Although a game was released in the US on March 29, 2006 under the title beatmania for the PlayStation2, it has two modes of gameplay, one being of the classic 5-button layout and the other consisting of the 7-button layout of beatmania IIDX.

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: