0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Beat Planet Music

Beat Planet Music is an action rhythm game developed by Opus and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the Playstation. The game released exclusively in Japan on the 20^th of January 2000, a couple of sites I have found stated that the game received a US release, however I have not been able to find any evidence of this, and any copies that are for sale are for the Japanese imported version only.

Notable people who worked on this game, Takafumi Fujisawa had a long career in the games industry even before working on Beat Planet Music, He worked as a Sound Director on the Arc the Lad series, he also worked on the sound for Legend of Legala and as Sound Producer for Hot Shots Gold 2.

He worked as a producer on the 1999 release Ape Escape, prior to his work on Beat Planet Music. Since then he was Executive Producer on the 2004 release Arc The Lad End of Darkness and in 2003 he was the Sound Producer for Siren.

Yuji Oshimoto who worked on the games Design, the following year he worked on Wave Rally’s menu design, his most notable credit is for the 2012 release of Lollipop Chainsaw with Oshimoto working as an addition UI Designer on the game,

Yukari Kaneko prior to working on this game he worked on the CG Movie as well as being one of the Map Animators for Parasite Eve. Since 2000 and the release of Beat Planet Music she has worked on game like True Crime New York City, Call of Duty 3 and Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, most recently she was a VFX Artist on Gears of War 4. In 2011 she also started her own comic strip titled Reaching Alpha, which is about video game developers in LA and introduces everyday life of developers in a comical 4 panel format in Manga style.

Tetsuya Kimura worked on the Sound System Programming for the 2008 released Afrika. He was also a programmer on the 2011 Ape Escape game for the Playstation Move, his biggest credit comes in 2013 and 2017 when he worked on both Knack games. Working as the Lead Sound Programmer on the first Knack game, and as a Sound Programmer on the 2017 sequel.

Upon starting up the game you have three options to choose from, New Game, Load and Option. Choosing the latter you can switch the vibration function on or off, and centre the screen display. Starting a new game you are given the option of naming your character, up to eight letters with Pilot being the default name.

 

Once you have entered your chosen name you will be take to a map of the world with various city locations marked on the map, such as London, Moscow, Sydney, Tokyo and New York along with an avatar of the competitor or other pilots for each location.

Once you start a level a demo of the computer playing the level will be show, giving you an idea of what to do, this is the tutorial level, once you feel confident you can take on the level. The games premise is your are racing down a track your ship which appears as a golden coloured shape has a total of six lanes in which is can traverse the level.

 

There are three things to watch out for while going through the level, the first are small downward pointing triangles which will tell you which lane to switch to, these only appear for a short time. The second thing are packets, these appear as a similar colour to your ship icon and are a small cluster of circles, you use the circle button to collect these, a counter in the top right shows how many you have missed. This also act as the notes for each of the music tracks, once a level is complete the game will show you in a percentage how well your have done, along with the status either not clear or cleared.

The game also features a song editor which is by far the most meaty part of the game, as the player progresses through the various levels new song samples will be unlocked in the song editor. These samples can be used to create your own tracks, also the function to use samples from your own CD collection is available

The song editor has the six available lanes going straight up the screen, at the base of each of these lanes is a blank hexagon, this is where you select each of the samples that will make up your new track. 

Once one of the hexagons is selected a pop up screen will appear, on the left you will find the location list, this can be scrolled through using the L1 and L2 shoulder buttons, the remainder of the pop up shows the various song samples available to use, scrolling over each of the samples will allow you to hear the sample. Clicking the circle button will confirm you selection and the previously empty hexagon will be filled by your chosen sample.

With this being a Japanese only release, critic reviews for this game are very thin in number, with just two available for this game, with the game being pretty poorly received by critics with a 60 rated review and a 35 rated review.

As usual we will start with the best which is a 60 from German publication Video Games, the review calling the game a half baked mix of a pinch of internal section, at little tempest, some Bemani and a portion of Music 2000, with the reviewer finding it not much fun and easy to forget.

The review did however have praise for the Music Editor which they called nicely designed, however the lack of recoding ability and a bulk of sound samples that the reviewer called useless scrap, with the reviewer finding It limited to shallow synth music. Concluding the review had the following to say. So if you want to make serious music, you prefer music; If you want fun, you can not ignore the Bemani series - it's that simple.

The final critic review comes from Gamespot, who opened by commenting on Sony’s music games as being legendary, from the talents of Masaya Matsuura and his team Nana-On Sha, and games like Parapp and Lammy as well as the cult classic Vib-Ribbon, the review saying the standard has be raised again and again.

The review continued by saying, Unfortunately Beat Planet Music is a tired exercise in shallow gameplay, with more style than substance. A music game-cum-music editor, this non-Nana product fails to deliver in a variety of respects.

The review continued by praising the game style, as well as the game interface and graphics which were designed by Me Company, however the reviewer found that while there is style abounds, just about nothing else does. 

The game tries to go in two directions at once, and its viability is hampered by its abysmal failure to come up with a reasonable gameplay model to complement the decent music-editing, the review was also critical of the memory card requirements with the game taking an entire memory card.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese only release, same goes for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com. So we will quickly head over to Amazon.com in the hopes of finding at least one copy of the game.

We in fact find a good number of copies of Beat Planet Music available, with new copies of the game actually outnumbering the used ones on offer. The used copies that are available start pretty reasonably with the cheapest on offer at $8.97 and comes with free shipping, this copy is in very good condition as well.

Three other very good condition copies are also available priced between $8.97 and $10.89 with more coming with free shipping. Beyond this point the used copies may as well be ignored with new copy prices starting at just $11.01, with a good number priced within a dollar of this price.

Written by

P J Gibbon