Beats (PSP)

When MP3 players came into vogue, Sony seemed to be making a big push to bill the PSP as an alternative thanks to its ability to play music as well as video games. Perhaps nothing better encapsulated this effort than the rise of games that would use downloaded MP3s as part of their gameplay, and Beats hinged almost entirely around the idea of a person importing their music collection to guide how the game would be played.

 

Beats is, mechanically, an incredibly simple rhythm game. The play area features one to three grey circles depending on the difficulty, button prompts drifting into those circles to tell the player when they are meant to press them. The player only really needs to make sure their selected circle is the right one before pressing either X, circle, square, or triangle, the player racking up points over the course of the song that can be enhanced either through a combo multiplier if they make no mistakes or the special boost power they can activate for an ever higher multiplier once it has been built up through properly hitting sparkling button prompts. While the game offers four different difficulties to select, the only one that really seems to be challenging or matches the rhythm of the songs well is the hardest one, and even then it’s not too demanding. For the most part, hard moments in Beats come from either having to swap your circle somewhat quickly or pressing buttons rapidly as a pile up of button presses comes drifting in. On low difficulties there are hardly any buttons and their adherence to the song seems slapdash at best, but on its highest difficulty, there is enough challenge to keep the player paying attention and mildly engaged while they listen to whatever tune is playing.

Beats has a few built-in songs in case you haven’t downloaded any MP3s to your PSP, but they are not a very interesting bunch. Many are electronic or techno songs taken from Sony’s EyeToy games, and while there are a few that brush against other genres, it’s a paltry selection and one that won’t really support the game on its own. However, Beats seems clearly designed for its My Music feature first and foremost, where you can take almost any song from your collection and play a Beats rhythm challenge based on its sound structure. To put it through its rigors, I slipped in a mixture of 50 different songs from all sorts of genres and musicians. From Toby Keith to Beethoven, video game music to hip hop, Tubthumping to Hips Don’t Lie, Beats does a pretty good job of adapting its gameplay to whatever is thrown at it. Naturally, more uptempo songs will have more button presses, but even the slower ones will still push forward a few button presses, although it will cluster multiple button presses around whatever anchors it can find in the slower and quieter tunes. Music with pronounced beats will line up about as you expect it to, but you’ll definitely need to keep a close eye on the buttons rather than relying purely on the rhythm thanks to button press stacking and the multiple directions they come from.

 

There is, however, an oddity in its points system. While I played songs of various lengths to see how Beats would handle them, it did expose a problem with the high score table. Rather than having each song have its own high score table, each difficulty instead lumps together all performances, and since Beats doesn’t cram in button presses where they’re unwarranted, a short song won’t really give you the opportunity to build up many points. Conversely, an incredibly long song will inevitably top your high score chart because it will have an incredible amount of button presses throughout its increased length. The 30 second tune I played had no hope of making the top scores, but the 10 minute one now will remain at the top unless I choose to play another ludicrously long one or clear my records. Spacing out point distribution would have rectified this problem, since in Beats’s current state, a perfect performance on a shorter song may not come close to the point totals of a so-so performance on an incredibly long one.

To entertain your eyes while your ears listen to your favorite music, Beats has a visualizer play behind the button prompts, and in some ways, Beats does feel like a lightly interactive visualizer for your music due to its simplistic gameplay. However, while there are over 70 visualizer options that feature abstract moving and evolving designs based on things like DNA, rainforests, space, and more… you have to select them from a menu set apart from the music area. Backing through menus to change your visualizer makes it often not worth the trouble, and there isn’t even an option to randomly select one so you can just shuffle between them as you play. They do look nice and react to your performance during a song pretty well, but the awkwardness of backing out of menus and opening new selection screens to change them between songs essentially buries this feature that seemingly had a lot of art design put into it.

 

There is one last feature to Beats that is a bit of an oddity. A music mixer exists that uses more songs than are available for regular Beats play, the player able to record their own twists on those songs by choosing which instrumental tracks are active and activating extra instruments as they see fit. Modes like these will almost always seem paltry beside proper computer programs for the task, and besides making new songs to play in Beats, the purpose of those mode just seems to be to tinker with a limited mixer. It might have been better to bulk up the available songs for play instead of giving the game this mess around mode, but just like with how the visualizers are structured and lower difficulty modes essentially just remove buttons arbitrarily from the music-based gameplay, this seems like the last of a bunch of odd little decisions Beats made despite the decent foundation of the main gameplay mode.

THE VERDICT: On the highest difficulty and with your own music playing, Beats is a lightly interactive way of enjoying your tunes as you listen to them, with a variety of visualizers that do their job well despite being cumbersome to switch. Despite the odd duck that is the mixer and the weak selection of built-in music, Beats translates MP3s into mild gameplay with a decent enough success rate to give idle hands something to do while enjoying music.

 

And so, I give Beats for PSP…

An OKAY rating. While having your music on something portable that isn’t your phone might be a little quaint in the modern era, Beats still gives you some purpose to having MP3s linger on the PSP memory card. A mildly entertaining rhythm game, Beats doesn’t distract from the music and scans songs pretty well into sequences of rhythmic button presses, provided of course you don’t play its odd lower difficulties where it doesn’t do the best job in choosing which button prompts to leave in. An overhaul to the scoring system seems like it would make the high score tables more interesting since long songs inevitably outrank ones the player performed well on, and making some of the menu options simpler to select like the variety of the visualizers could make things nicer. However, little touches in Beats are all a little awkward, such as the mixer mode that doesn’t have the tools or the source material to really feel like a mode you’ll feel compelled to visit often.

 

Interactive Visualizer is the term my mind keeps referring to Beats as. While it’s hardly the only game that transforms player owned music into gameplay elements, it’s simple and unobtrusive in doing so, meaning it provides something to do with your thumbs while listening to a song you enjoy. It feels less like a game you visit for its gameplay and more like a shell that contains a mildly more interesting way to experience your playlist, the game competent with the right elements that make that idea work out alright.