Museca Arcade

The strangely named Museca is a game that has been released recently to Japanese arcades and with that big strange controller I couldn't help but give it a try.  With so many rhythm games available in the arcade just how does this one stack up?

Well, I did the first thing one does with every Konami game and I scanned my E-Amusement card.  If you're unfamiliar with how gaming IC cards work, please refer to this video for a quick primer

After typing in a name and setting a pin number I was met with a whole ton of story, which is strange for this kind of game, that I just skipped through and went straight to the music select.

The games music selections at the start are you standard Bemani rhythm game fare with lots of J-Pop and a couple of Touhou tracks which seems to be a standard every sine Sound Voltex.  Usually I like to crank up the difficulty level since I play a lot of rhythm games but I couldn't quite figure out how to do it and since it was my first credit I didn't care all that much. 

The most interesting part of this game is definitely the controller

There are 5 buttons in a sort of Pop n' Music style arrangement that can be both pushed and spun.  Under the machine there is a pedal for a special type of hold notes but 2 of the 3 songs I played for my first credit did not feature any pedal action so I'm guessing that's something that only shows up at higher level play.  There are 2 main types of notes which are taps, where you push the button in and spins where you spin the button like a turn table.  It's fun to play and for my first time, surprisingly confusing sometimes.  Considering that I play a little bit of IIDX I thought 5 huge buttons would be easy to adapt to but I still found myself losing my place on the pad a couple of times, guess I'm just a moron.

When you finish, assuming you have a card, you are given a screen where you can unlock new music.  I could only afford to unlock songs on their easiest mode because buying intermediate or expert tracks is outrageously expensive on the in game currency.  Then again, It seemed pretty easy to gather so I'm guessing it won't be too long before I'm able to try some higher level stuff. 

Well, that's enough reading.  All in all I think the game is pretty good.  I filmed a video of me playing the highest level song available to me at the time so check it out.  I'll be coming back to this game a lot so watch this channel for some cool videos in the future