Beatmania [ビートマニア フォーワンダースワン] Game Sample - WonderSwan

Original Air Date: October 15th, 2009

If you thought Rhyme Rider sounded impressive, "Beatmania for WonderSwan" is by far the most impressive WS game, aurally speaking. While Rhyme Rider combined pretty impressive audio and visuals together, this game is somewhat lacking visually, but has an amazing soundtrack. The game is easily one of the hugest WS games as well, with over a dozen MB worth of audio. From my understanding, this game includes music from the "3rd Arcade Mix" of Beatmania. It is also the only one to come with a snap-on mini turntable from my understanding (to make the game easier). It is one of MANY games within the popular Bemani category, but the only Beatmania game for WS.

If you've played a Beatmania game before, then you've played this, though the play control requires a little more precision for good results. The game includes ten songs and one hidden song for a total of eleven songs. While this may seem limited compared to other handheld Bemani/Beatmania games, the tradeoff is through high-quality songs with lyrics and more clarity than, say, the GB Bemani games. I play one song and auto-play the other two ("basic" songs) so you can get an idea of what the game is like. I'm not huge on the Beatmania games, but what should have been a popular handheld seller was relegated to obscurity. Enjoy.

Note: This game is played holding the WS vertically. It's advised that you watch in fullscreen HD when available, as vertical games aren't suited well to YT and it will look and sound better. The game is mostly in English, so it's import-friendly.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Beatmania
• for
• WonderSwan
• Konami
• Bemani
• 3rd
• Arcade
• Mix
• ビートマニア
• フォーワンダースワン

[hsb17]

You HAD to test the waters if you intended to compete with the Game Boy in the 90's! Nintendo pretty much dictated when it was the right time to have color-screen handhelds. It wasn't a big deal back then for the NGP and WS to be B&W, since the games looked great even in B&W and people didn't exactly ran to stores to get the GBC as soon as it was released. But as history has taught us, only Nintendo seems to get away with beating their competition with inferior technology.

[Vysethedetermined2]

@hsb17 I'm not arguing so much with testing the waters; that's sound logic. However, as you yourself pointed out, Nintendo dictated what was appropriate on the handheld market, and even they knew that going towards the next millenium with a B/W handheld wouldn't be wise. To test B/W in 1999 (barely even the 90's at this point) seemed illogical, especially with past failures to use as examples like Tiger's Game.com and the Watara Supervision, among some things. Still, Nintendo was king, lol.

[hsb17]

The very own b/w GameBoy proved back in the mid-90s that color wasn't determinant in what made a handheld good, having crushed the Sega GameGear and Atari Lynx (both color-enabled and back-lit). Small color screens were still expensive to produce back then, so both NeoGeo Pocket and Wonderswan "tested" the waters first with non-color versions before releasing color versions (They did relatively well in Japan, but the GB was just too huge). Handheld gaming was different back then, not just small

[Vysethedetermined2]

@hsb17 The thing about that though is that the Game Boy was made in the late 80's. I can't see them really testing the waters when the GBC came out in 1998; the b/w WS came out in 1999. I could see if they released it in like 1996 or 97, but to compete with the now color Game Boy, it would make sense to me to make your starting unit in color, especially as Nintendo were (and still are) the handheld titans. They technically made GB games color with the Super Game Boy even sooner. Just saying.

[Fluffykun08]

1997-1999 wasn't the wonderswan color out before then?..

Don't get me wrong this leaves me even more impressed with this game but the question is why was it made?...

[Vysethedetermined2]

According to Wikipedia, the B&W WonderSwan wasn't released until March of 1999, and the WSC wasn't released until almost 2001 (December 30, 2000). The SwanCrystal (last iteration) was released in July of 2002.

This is why I always pondered why the WS and NGPC started with B&W units to begin with. Seeing as the Game Boy Color (the main competition) came out in 1998, it seemed pretty illogical, even if the hardware might have been better. Your guess is just as good as mine or anyone else.

[argancyamat]

The audio quality on this is amazing. The arcade games sound 99% identical. There's only a tiny bit of quality reduction.

[Fluffykun08]

Huh... for some reason i always thought the wonderswan was the japanese gameboy.

Well i guess i know now.

Even so... the sound is pretty impressive.