Beats (PSP)

[sjewkestheloon]

Anyone played this game?

I picked it up for £5 from the PSN today (I believe it's $5 in the US) and am quite smitten.

For those not in the know, it's a rhythm action game that runs off your MP3 files. Obviously the charts are nowhere near as complex or tonal based as something like Rock Band Unplugged but they are great fun to play.

It seems to pick out the beat of the tracks as a primary source for the notes and it alternates between on and off beat patterns. Depending on the track it will also chart certain musical fragments as well.

I've now tried it out with a variety of tracks and I have found that it works best with dance music and anything with a lot of repetitive beats, but I also got positive results with a Boris track and a couple of Anthony Braxton pieces. The ultimate experience so far has to be Steve Reich's Pulse I-X which was 40 odd minutes of trance like fun.

As a point of comparison if Guitar Hero was Every Extend Extra, this is Every Extend Extra Extreme. It's all about the experience rather than the challenge. You can, however, play on a variety of difficulties and Expert features quite challenging patterns. It is strictly no fail but there is a good multiplier based scoring system so you can work at beating your scores.

For the money it's superb.

Also there is a loop based music creation tool but I've not played with it yet. I'll post with impressions when I've spent some time with it.

[Thunder Force]

I played it a lot a few years ago. Neat little audio visualizer program from the Singstar dev team I think, quite relaxing - works better with some kinds of music than others, mostly with instrumentals. More accurate on higher difficulties, iirc.

[sjewkestheloon]

Yep hard makes a lot more sense than Normal does. Also medium tempos work better than high ones.