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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Rhythm game mashup on Taikojiro

It's not rare that rhythm gamers would want to see their favorite songs on one rhythm series on another, to try them out using different mechanics and playstyle. This happens a lot with licensed songs, but not so with others....thankfully rhythm game simulators are plentiful on the PC, allowing for exactly this sort of play with user-created charts for different games.

Below are three songs from three different rhythm games, played on Taikojiro with custom notecharts. Try to see the song's original gameplay too!



Original gameplay

The first song, GIGA BREAK, comes from the Konami arcade series Jubeat. In the game, players have to tap the markers that appear on Jubeat's 16-square touch screen, also involving simultaneous taps with two or more fingers, like a rhythmic game of whack-a-mole.

The Taikojiro rendition above (among the many available on Youtube) features long note streams combined with 1/6 clusters; however, the mild scrolling velocity makes this custom 10* a little less scarier than it appears.



Original gameplay

After an arcade-exclusive brand of rhythm games, today's second song is the final stage of the videogame Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, developed by iNiS for Nintendo's first touch screen console. Indeed, the game mechanics made the best use of the Nintendo DS's touch screen, which has to be touched in different ways according to rhythm, like tapping on circles and sliding on paths. Ouendan's unique gameplay spawned many other touch-screen derivative rhythm games after many developers found Nintendo's trick to be novel and interesting.

Like all the other songs in Ouendan, Ready Steady Go is a cover version of the original performed by the rock band L'Arc-en-Ciel. Even this Taikojiro mapper uses Tetsushi Kimura's cover version with all the hitsounds directly lifted from Ouendan! Someone's been doing a little ROM ripping.



Original gameplay

Back to Konami, the final pick - neu - comes from the colorful Pop'n Music series, quite popular both on arcades and on PS2/PSP systems. The original gameplay revolves around a cascade of falling notes, which have to be hit by the player with the arcade's 9-button board, resembling most other vertically-inclined music games except with Konami's original songs.

neu has four different versions and this Taikojiro chart takes the Extra version, the hardest difficulty level in the Konami game. Lots of Kita Saitama 2000 in this custom chart with a final speedup section. Can you handle the heat?