DJ Max is probably the best rhythm game on the PSP, but that isn’t saying much since there aren’t too many on the system. The game has been well-known for its great song selection and addictive rhythm gameplay, but after so many iterations of the same thing, people were longing for some changes, and thankfully, Portable 3 adds something new. While it may not be enough, the game tightens some of the sloppy menus and other minor issues with the long-running series.
The new model has 3.2 and 4.2 tracks. You use the analog nub on the new sidebar that has purple streams running down it. You play the middle bar as usual, but when a purple stream runs down the side, you move the analog nub accordingly. It remixes the songs, adds a new layer of depth and fun to the game, and makes it even more addictive.
If you aren’t familiar with the series, you press the corresponding button (depending on difficulty) to see the track icons running down the screen. You are scored on timing, and a percentage will pop up after each hit, telling you how accurate that note was. You will see a little meter filling up in the middle of the screen, and when it’s full, you activate your fever mode to double your multiplier. In Portable 3, you can stack these up by getting your meter up again fast enough to add on top of the multiplier. Once you finish, you are scored, and as you level up, you unlock new gear and collectibles.
Portable 3 also lets the unlocking come much quicker, and there’s more to unlock. There are more characters, gear, notes, wallpapers, videos, etc., and it’s all great. Of course, if you get bored with the arcade mode, you can unlock missions, and these have certain parameters, such as getting a certain score, hitting a certain multiplier, or breaking under a certain number of times.
DJ Max 3 is well worth the purchase for series fans and newcomers alike. There’s enough content to unlock to keep you very busy, and replaying the excellent song roster is very enjoyable. I hope to see further changes in DJMP4 because this series has lots more potential.
Rhythm games are pretty much mainstream these days. The days of the rare Guitar Hero are long gone, and everyone and their mom plays Rock Band, but DJ Hero was a spark and a light to revive this, and while it didn’t, it does offer a different and new approach to rhythm games. Like the title says, you use your turntable like a DJ and scratch, crossfade, and freestyle your way to the top. There are a lot of songs, and the game requires some hefty skills to master.
Like Guitar Hero, you must use both hands in unison to hit colored notes at the right time to score points. The notes are presented on a record on-screen that is in a semi-circle, and when you see jagged notes, you press the button down while turning the record. Sometimes you’ll have arrows that are up or down, so just scratch quickly in that direction. The left or right notes will always have a line going down, and when they move to the left or right (which looks kind of like a bracket or a quick 90-degree bend), you move your crossfader in that direction. This can be tricky, especially in the higher difficulties, since sometimes you’ll have to scratch and crossfade at the same time, but over time you’ll nail it. You can do some mixing with the effects knob, but this seemed pretty useless. When the red line gets larger, you can press the red button freely and select one of your effect noises, but this just seemed stupid, and I never really used it.
If you nail highlighted areas, you can use Star Power, and your button on the turntable will turn red. When you activate this, the game will crossfade for you, but the fatal flaw here is that if it ends in the middle of a fade and your slider isn’t in the right position, it’ll kill your multiplier, so you have to babysit it anyway. One last feature is the ability to rewind the track a little bit to add to your score, but this isn’t as neat as you think. While the elements are nailed down, there are still a few issues.
There’s no real way to express your creativity since freestyle is so restricted. There’s no freestyle zone where you can scratch and crossfade at will. While the song selection is large, a lot of the mixes are repetitive and grate on your nerves after a while. It feels more like quantity than quality here. You have big names like Eminem, Jay-Z, Grand Master Flash, Run DMC, and some other rock groups mixed in, but only a select few are worth playing multiple times.
The game’s pretty customizable with lots of characters, skins, tables, stages, and all that good stuff, so it makes you really want to try for five stars. Other than that, the only thing is multiplayer, which allows you to use a guitar controller on songs with rock bits. The game looks like any of the recent Guitar Hero games, but the price of admission is pretty high. As of this review, the price has dropped almost double, but upon release, it was $130, and that’s pretty steep. I recommend DJ Hero even to people who don’t like rap music because there’s a lot of fun and skills to be honed here.
Hot Tunes does for Korea what Fever did for the US: deliver the popular Korean rhythm game as a “best of,” but adds nothing new to the table that Fever didn’t already provide. The only thing you will notice right off the bat is the new “Lite” 4-button mode.
DJ Max is a huge rhythm game hit in Korea that uses a DDR-type gameplay style. There is obviously no dance mat, so you have to use the face buttons, and this works out just fine. There are 4-button, 5, 6, and 8-button modes. While 4 is the easiest, 8 can be damn near impossible. You select a song for each of the four stages, and each stage has harder and harder songs.
The game has some RPG elements, such as leveling up to unlock more gear, images, songs, etc. Notes, gear (the whole box in which the notes fall), and your character can have certain attributes that earn you more exp, gold, etc. There is even a speed modifier for people who want more of a challenge or if the game is going too fast for them. This can be changed during the song or before it.
After you get a certain score on a song, you can play a harder version of that song on the same stage by pressing left or right. During play, you must hit each note when it hits the bottom. Depending on your accuracy, a percentage will appear. If you miss a note, you will break your combo, but if you fill your fever bar and use it, your combo will double for a short amount of time. You don’t just hit single notes, however; there are held notes and even “scratched notes” that require you to spin the analog stick.
Once you finish a song, you are scored on how well you performed and given a grade, some experience, and gold. Gold is used to buy more gear. There are 50 songs, and each one has a wonderfully illustrated music video that streams in the background. If you get bored with the main mode, you can complete challenges that have set goals. Reach this score, don’t break more than this many times, etc. If you really love the music in here, you can even listen to the OST or watch the videos. There are dozens of images to unlock and lots of goodies for fans to keep playing.
The game may sound perfect, but it has flaws. There are already five other DJ Max games (including Clazziqai and Black Square Edition), and this is exactly the same as those. Hot Tunes takes some of the more popular songs from those games, but it is still missing some key gems. Playing with more than four buttons will frustrate most players; there’s no way to transfer the OST to your memory stick, and you can’t transfer songs from the other versions like you can within those. If you already own Fever or have even played the other entries, you’re not missing anything with Hot Tunes, but if you’re brand new to the series, this is a great entry.
DJ Max is a huge rhythm game hit in Korea that uses a DDR-type gameplay style. There is obviously no dance mat, so you have to use the face buttons, and this works out just fine. There are 4-button, 5, 6, and 8-button modes. While 4 is the easiest, 8 can be damn near impossible. You select a song for each of the four stages, and each stage has harder and harder songs.
The game has some RPG elements, such as leveling up to unlock more gear, images, songs, etc. Notes, gear (the whole box in which the notes fall), and your character can have certain attributes that earn you more exp, gold, etc. There is even a speed modifier for people who want more of a challenge or if the game is going too fast for them. This can be changed during the song or before it.
After you get a certain score on a song, you can play a harder version of that song on the same stage by pressing left or right. During play, you must hit each note when it hits the bottom. Depending on your accuracy, a percentage will appear. If you miss a note, you will break your combo, but if you fill your fever bar and use it, your combo will double for a short amount of time. You don’t just hit single notes, however; there are held notes and even “scratched notes” that require you to spin the analog stick.
Once you finish a song, you are scored on how well you performed and given a grade, some experience, and gold. Gold is used to buy more gear. There are 50 songs, and each one has a wonderfully illustrated music video that streams in the background. If you get bored with the main mode, you can complete challenges that have set goals. Reach this score, don’t break more than this many times, etc. If you really love the music in here, you can even listen to the OST or watch the videos. There are dozens of images to unlock and lots of goodies for fans to keep playing.
The game may sound perfect, but it has flaws. There are already four other DJ Max games (including Clazziqai and Black Square Edition), and this is exactly the same as those. Fever takes some of the more popular songs from those games, but it is still missing some key gems. Playing with more than four buttons will frustrate most players; there’s no way to transfer the OST to your memory stick, and you can’t transfer songs from the other versions like you can within those. Other than this, newcomers won’t know a difference and will have a blast with DJ Max Fever.
When Rock Band was released back in 2005, it kicked off a whole new era of rhythm games in your home. With Guitar Hero still using only the guitar controller, Rock Band introduced drums and mics to the genre. This brought a whole new meaning to the music genre and spawned many copycats, but none could do it better than Rock Band. Now that Rock Band has hit the portable scene, you just beg to wonder what quality the game has, and how could a game using instruments become so wonderfully executed with four buttons? Well, Unplugged is not a disaster, and the following paragraphs shall prove this to you.
In short, Unplugged does some things really well with the gameplay but somehow manages to turn around and make the game not fun at the same time. Hold on to your desk, handrail, and controller because you have to play all instruments at the same time. Yes: bass, guitar, drums, and mic all at the same time. I know Backbone is a bunch of jerks, but it’s not as difficult as you might think. You see all four tracks on-screen (yes, singing is now a regular track), and when one starts coming down, you play the phrase, then switch to the next phrase using L or R. Phrases are silver borders around a certain amount of notes (each difficulty makes you play more in a phrase). If you play well enough, you’ll get to go to the next phase, but be fast! If you don’t switch right away, the phrase box will move up the track, and you must play all the darkened notes until you get there. In the meantime, other tracks are coming down around you, bringing down your crowd meter, and this last point is what makes the game not so fun.
When you’re actually playing the game, you use the left D-pad (red), up D-pad (yellow), triangle (green), and circle (blue) (DJ Max Portable vets will already have this down pat). As you can see, there is no orange present since the game only uses four buttons, but don’t let this misguide you into thinking the game is easy because it is far from that. To make the game a tad easier on recognizing what buttons to hit together, the orange bar that was used for the kick pedal on the drums now ties notes that are apart from each other. This helps identify when to hit two notes simultaneously and thus makes it a bit easier when all these little notes are whizzing by. Overdrive (or Star Power) is still the same and can be activated with the X button, but having to perfectly play every phrase can make gaining Overdrive a little hard.
One other thing that really makes playing this game somewhat annoying is the fact that instruments drop out if you leave the track alone for too long. I don’t mean drop out as in failing (you can save the tracks by using overdrive), but in an audio sense. This is supposed to be an audio aid or cue to go to that instrument and play the phrase, but it just makes the song sound really bad.
One major disappointment is that Unplugged does not have any multiplayer whatsoever. Yes, I know, I know—it’s alright; you can stop crying now. I am clueless as to why this decision was made because multiplayer is what really made Rock Band shine, and there’s no excuse not to have it in the PSP version. Besides the missing multiplayer, the game is really vanilla in models, as it includes only your Band World Tour, Quickplay, and Training; oh, and Options if you really like that. One request that Unplugged finally responded to was the ability to customize everyone in your band instead of just the musician you are currently playing.
The customization is actually really shallow compared to the console versions of the game since you can’t choose clothing categories (Goth, Punk, Metal, etc.), but only a few clothes for your torso, bottoms, and shoes. There aren’t as many accessories or even hair and makeup items, but this is OK since the game doesn’t look that great anyway (more on this later). When you start your band, you can name it, pick a logo (yeah, you can’t even make one!), name your musicians, and pick from some generic clothing, hair, makeup, and your set. I see that Backbone had the whole “portability” thing in mind, so you can whip up a band and go, but some people actually see customization (like myself) as the main part of the game and can really bring the game to life with your creations.
Once you start a band and enter the world tour, you’ll be in familiar territory. You have mystery setlists, make a setlist, and various sponsored setlists that have various amounts of tracks. You can select your difficulty (easy through expert), but not your instrument, and I really wish Backbone would have kept the game the way it was before with just one instrument track.
When you are actually playing a song, you are rated on how well you did with up to five stars and a score multiplier. Landing notes will increase this multiplier up to 8x (if you activate Overdrive) until you miss a note, when it goes back down to zero. Once the song is over, you see your percentage of notes hit for each instrument along with how many phrases you played, attempted, or failed. Eventually, you’ll unlock managers you can hire to change attributes of your play style that will earn you more cash and fans or get you gigs you couldn’t do otherwise. You unlock songs by earning a certain amount of cash, fans, and stars. In the beginning, this can be difficult since you have to get almost perfect scores on every song to start unlocking more gigs.
Sometimes before you start a gig, a screen will come up and ask you if you want to gamble with your gig (in a sense). By getting 4 stars or more, you can get quadruple the cash or nothing at all. If you get 5 stars, we’ll double your fans and all that. It’s fun and all, but we’ve seen this before, guys! The World Tour seems to be the meat of the game, and it’s nothing new or original—just the same old stuff we’ve seen from previous entries in the series—and this is a bit disappointing since it makes you feel like you’re just playing a rushed port.
There is also downloadable content available (as I write this) for people looking for more than what’s on the disc. Currently, there are 10 songs available (assuming this is an experiment by EA) for $1.99 each on the PlayStation Store. They are great songs (Disturbed-Inside the Fire, Paramore-Crushcrushcrush), so this is a great way to keep Unplugged alive and kicking. Since this is a band game, how does it sound? Very good, actually, as the songs are MP3 quality thanks to the UMD’s 1.8GB storage capacity and the PSP’s memory size. There are 41 songs on the disc, featuring The Jackson 5, Lacuna Coil, Pearl Jam, Bon Jovi, Boston, Tenacious D, The Police, and a ton more. Most of these songs (again another disappointment) are from previous Rock Band games, but these seem to be the best of them and almost feel like “Rock Band: Greatest Hits.”.
However, when it comes to the actual ambiance, the game fails. Crowd noise sounds like static, and the menu noises sound muffled and very monotone—almost like you were playing DS (Ha! Take that Nintendo!). and really makes the experience kind of dull, aside from the music. If you want to talk about graphics, you should cover your eyes and run away because the game looks kind of ugly. The characters don’t have realistic animations like the console versions, detailed textures, or nice lighting effects. Everything looks flat, plain, and really dull. The characters use the same retarded animation over and over again, and it makes you wonder if the game is really a third-party creation. I realize the PSP has limited hardware, but c’mon, they can do more than that; Kratos was able to!
While the menus look nice and crisp and remind you of Rock Band 2, I still wish there was more to the graphics and sound of the game. This is a real disappointment for me, but what saves the graphics department is that you don’t really look at the characters. Your main focus is on the tracks and the notes, which look crisp and clear. Rock Band: Unplugged is a great departure for the series on the portable scene. With 41 songs on disc, great controls, downloadable songs, and an extensive World Tour mode, there are a lot of reasons to come back to Unplugged again and again.
Don’t let the bad sides, such as mediocre graphics, poor ambiance, awkward gameplay, and the wee bit shallow selection of modes, bother you. Unplugged is probably the best portable rhythm game ever made, and it doesn’t even need a guitar hand grip.
Rock Band stole the show from Guitar Hero as the best rhythm game and broke the boundaries with the drum peripheral and the excellent multiplayer to really make you feel like you’re in a band. I’m not going to explain how Rock Band is played since most people have already played it, so I’m mainly going to focus on improvements and updates.
Well, everything here that you loved about the first game is still here, but improved. I’m going to start with the hardware, which is actually much better than the original, and the most noticeable are the drums. The first game’s drums were poorly designed, with pieces constantly coming apart and a lot of plastic parts. Rock Band 2’s drums have a metal cover on top of the kick pedal; it’s bigger; the drums are quieter thanks to the pads being a softer material than just rubber; the base of the drums actually stays together since there is a whole locking mechanism on them, so moving your set won’t make the base come apart. Other than that, everything on the drums is the same; there are, however, three extra-colored plugs for the cymbal attachments (which are very poorly designed and not recommended), along with the drumsticks being a couple of inches longer. The best part about the drums is that they are wireless, and the batteries last forever. With three AA batteries, I only changed them once in a five-month period, and I played a lot.
On the guitar, it is also now wireless, with a wood-type texture on the next (instead of that ugly plastic), and the buttons are a little further apart so you can feel which button you’re hitting. For some reason, the bottom buttons are still the same, and I still find them useless. The microphone is a little bit lighter, but otherwise, I found no difference between this and the original. While all the hardware is well designed, it’s also more solid, stable, and responsive.
On to the game now. When you start the game, you’ll notice a nicer menu, more modes, and a longer World Tour. The first mode you’ll want to try is the training mode (if you haven’t played Rock Band before), but there is also the new drum trainer mode. You can work on your rhythm or just hit along to your own songs via the Xbox Guide, which I found fun and great. I know a lot of people tap things to their favorite songs, so now you really can while choosing several different drum set sound schemes. When you pop into the World Tour, you’ll notice there’s a venue in almost every city in the world, it seems. I bought this game in February, and it’s now June, and I still haven’t finished the World Tour (and I play several setlists every day).
While the fan, setlist, and star systems are still intact with a new manager element added, You can hire new managers that gain you extra fans, cash, or something along those lines. While there are 25–30 cities in the game, there are at least 2-3 songs plus 3-5 setlists in each city. By the time I got around to unlocking the hidden cities (including the endless setlist, which is an 84-song marathon), I had thirty million fans and over 2,500 stars. Yes, that is a lot of playing, and the World Tour is actually almost impossible to beat. The best part about Rock Band is the multiplayer, and Rock Band 2 adds some greatness to it with a few new modes.
There is now the long-awaited Band World Tour, so you can take your whole band through the World Tour and complete it that way. While the other modes are still here (Tug of War, Band Duel, Co-Op), nothing else has changed. There are some other cool modes, such as “Never Fail” and “Break Neck Speed.” These are cool modifiers for people who are really bored. On to customization: there are more items, including the new Thrifty section, but everything else is the same. The graphics are exactly the same, and customizing hasn’t changed. You can create a band logo, but it’s not any deeper than you’re familiar with. Now my favorite feature about the game is that you can import songs from Rock Band 1 into the game (for a $5 fee, of course), but this is well worth it.
When you’re done with that, head to the store, which has 500+ songs available to download in every genre imaginable. After you get bored with the songs on the disc, buy some songs! Rock Band 2 is such a great rhythm game; it’s solid, smooth, fun, heavy with songs, and has lots of quality.
… For 99.9% of people, GHIII is the same as GHII, yet we get online play (which is just as awesome as you’d think) and tons more songs, yet it is probably the most disappointing GH when it comes to cover songs. You get songs like One, Number of the Beast, School’s Out, Cult of Personality, and more, but they aren’t showstoppers like in GHI and II. GHIII, however, has the best song list for more indie music and lesser-known covers like My Curse, Stricken, Before I Forget, Through Fire and Flames, Prayer for the Refugee, and more. This is also the first GH that’s impossible to beat! While the game is hard enough on Hard, good luck beating the last few sets on Expert. It’ll take you months to master these songs, if at all. Through Fire in Flames is probably impossible for most GH buffs on Medium or Hard. Luckily, after hours upon hours of practice, I barely scraped through the song on Expert.
Some new features are the updated graphics—they’re finally next-gen! The game has great physics with bouncing and swaying clothes and high-definition textures, so denim looks like denim. The characters also get more of a sexual upgrade! (thanks, Neversoft!?) Judy Nails is as hot as ever, yet they left out Pandora and added a preppy Japanese chick. There are a few great new characters, like Slash, Tom Morello, and Zeus the Rock God. Speaking of Slash and Tom, you now get boss battles. These don’t play out like you think. The first few are easy, but the last one, playing Devil Went Down to Georgia, is just pure luck. You have to hit sequences like when you get Star Power, but instead, you get weapons. These include breaking your string (you have to press a button really fast), raising the difficulty, blowing your amp (all the buttons flash on-screen), or doubling the notes. This is fun, but some may never beat it on Expert.
Minus all of that, you can now play a co-op career, which is really fun as well and pretty self-explanatory. Overall, GHIII is more for indie and lesser-known band fans. If you want famous songs, then you’re out of luck. Thankfully, the game has lots of downloadable songs now. I just wish the GHII songs were compatible.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.