New Rhythm Games!

Holy goddamn all of a sudden at my local arcade there's been a couple of new rhythm games just popping up.  I've had a chance to give em both a go and since I'm having a bit of a slow period where it's hard to come up with topics, I'll spend a little bit of time talking about them.

The first is Chunithm, a rhythm game developed by Sega and apparently made by the same people who gave us that weird washing machine game Mai Mai

As what seems to be fairly standard for Sega-made rhythm games, the cabinet is all fucking weird and has all these bright lights and flashy bits on it for no purpose other than to look kind of cool and to pull your attention from all the other machines.

The game itself is fairly standard rhythm fare but the controller kind of looks like a piano keyboard but it's a touch panel rather than actual keys.  You have to slide, hold and tap your way through the songs but the game also has a sensor bar just above the controller so some notes demand that you throw your hand up in the air like you just don't care. 

The game also let's you unlock songs and characters with abilities as you play.  Last time I played there was an event for Persona 4 Dancing All Night so there are few Persona tracks and you can unlock the cast of P4 to help you clear songs.  At time of writing I've unlocked Rise and Kanji with Naoto on the way.  The music is also pretty good with plenty of stuff familiar to anyone who's played rhythm games for a while in Japan, there's also a few good original songs but best of all you can play All I Want (The Offspring) from Crazy Taxy and Concept of Love from JSRF!  What more could you want?

The second game that's just come out is CrossXBeat.  I can't for the life of me find a picture on the net of the cabinet so here's a shitty phone pic of me playing it

As you can see the game is just a big touch screen and notes fly at you every which way and you have to tap them in time with the song.  While it's not quite as fun as Chunithm, it still boasts come cool songs from Phoenix Wright and Megman 2 as well as a bunch of original stuff. 

There's not really much to say about this one, it's just your kind of standard rhythm game.  The one feature that does stand out though is the fact that if you have an Aime(?) card, I don't really remember if it's that, you can play once a month for free which is pretty cool.

However this game pisses me off with the way it presents difficulty levels to you.  Most rhythm games have a numbering system that's pretty consistent.  Level 1s are obviously the easiest, 8-12 is kind of medium level and 13+ is hard.  Cross Beat just says fuck all that where level 20's seem to be piss easy and the numbers go all the way up to fucking 60+.  This is fine but there's no good indication of what "Lvl 25" means the first time playing so there have been times when I've been wasting my time with easy shit when I want something challenging instead.

 After some practice I'll see if I can get some videos of these games up so keep an eye out for that.  If you live in Japan then you should absolutely give these games a shot, if you don't then I suppose you can just sit there and be jealous?  I kid, if you want to play Cross Beat there is a mobile version available on the Japanese app store so you could give it a try if you wanted.