Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 6/27/2002
Date Played: 1/27/2020
Region: Japan
Time Played: 1 hour
What’d you think?: I grew up playing rhythm games. Mostly DDR and a little Beatmania, lots of other ones are very hard to find in American arcades. The pop’n franchise is one I still have yet to play in an arcade. I’ve come close to building my own controller for it to play at home, such is my curiosity surrounding it. It’s got a 9-button approach that, while you can map it to a standard controller, the charts really aren’t built to be played like that. I emulated the experience as best I could, trying to play on both a normal arcade fight stick (assigning the two outermost buttons to U/R and D/L on the joystick, and evoking IIDX‘s 7 key setup with the remaining 8 buttons, leaving the two center buttons on the bottom row to both be the same center note on the chart, to be hit with either thumb) and a Hitbox-style controller I built myself to play fighting games with. I strongly preferred the Hitbox-style controller and went with that one for my official attempt. The controller was adequate, though the SOCD-cleaning functions made a few button combinations impossible to hit together. It paled in comparison to playing on a proper controller with the buttons laid out in the configuration that the songs’ charts were built to be played on, but it was certainly a better experience than playing on a regular analog gamepad. I’m looking forward to the next beatmania game I get, using a fightstick with the joystick mapped to the turntable seems pretty close to using a real controller.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SPnBK5MgKc
