0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Beatmania Append 5th Mix Time to get Down

Beatmania Append 5th Mix Time to get Down is the fifth append disc release for the Konami developed and published Beatmania franchise. The append disc like the previous append releases was released only in Japan, and released on the 2nd of March 2000.

Notable people who worked on Beatmania Append 4th Mix, Koji Okamoto who was worked on many of the Beatmania append discs, prior to working on this series he worked on the pop’n music another Konami developed music and rhythm franchise.

Mitsukuni Murayama who also worked on the 4^th append disc for Beatmania working as a composer, he also worked on Dance Dance Revolution Club Version for the Dreamcast as a Sound Data Analyst. Prior to working on these games he worked on the Sound Effects for the 1999 released Legend of Legala.

Hideki Hashimoto who worked as a programmer on this append disc as a Programmer, a role he also held for the first in the pop’n music franchise, prior to these games her worked on the Software Programming for Night Stalker, Battle Shark, On The Ball and Growl in the late 80s and early 90s.

Toshiyuki Kakuta had a long career at Konami, before joining them however he worked on Freestyle Boardin' '99, with Katkuta producing all the music and sound for the game. After joining Konami he worked on many of the Beatmania releases along with Konami’s other music related games.

Kakuta also worked on game other than music and rhythm based ones, in 2001 he worked on the Music composition for Zone of the Enders and provided an additional rhythm loop for Metal Gear Solid 2 Sond of Liberty. He also worked on the composition for Zone of the Enders  The 2nd Runner, and worked on the music for Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dawn of Destiny in 2004.

This section won’t have much new information, below you will find the previously posted gameplay information, with Beatmania Append 5th Mix Time to Get Down a DLC style add on for the base Beatmania game that was released back in 2000. As with the previous Append mix that was released this add on also required the first disc of Beatmania Arcade 2nd Mix in order to work.

This 5^th append disc for Beatmania consists of all the new songs from the Arcade 5^th mix release unlike previous ports to the Playstation there are no exclusive tracks, with the 5^th mix being a direct port of the Arcade release. The 5^th mix is also the first Append disc to feature western artists, this is also the first Beatmania release to feature the Dance Mania licenses.

The game also features every some that appeared in the 4^th mix, an additional option that has been made available is the Sudden option, this delays the appearance of the next note right until it is almost about to hit the horizontal bottom bar for an extra challenge to Beatmania veterans. Another option that has been added to the 5^th mix is Hi Speed, which doubles the scroll speed.

Difficulty modes wise the game has the choice of three, the first is basic which is the easy mode and for players who are just starting out with the Beatmania series or have been away from it for a while and need easing back into it song level difficulty ranges from 1 to 6 with four songs per round.

The next step up is Hard mode, with track difficulty reaching 7, again this mode has four songs per round, the final mode is the Expert mode, the player is free to choose any of the courses on offer each of which is made up of five songs, this mode each of the songs in a sequence must be completed without pausing the player must also prevent the energy bar from completely running out

Gameplay wise it is more or less identical to the original Beatmania release. The game came with its own custom controller, modelled after the Arcade version of the game, you have five keys that resemble those of a piano, these key are positioned vertically, the keys are also colour coded the same way as well with three of the keys being white while two are black.

Alongside the keys on the controller is the turntable, the player is able to turn or scratch the turntable, the game also supports standard controllers as well. With turntable movement and scratching keyed to the circle and triangle buttons, piano key are controlled using the D-Pad Left, Square Button, X button as well as the shoulder buttons the game has a key config menu.

Each of the keys or buttons have a corresponding vertical bar on the screen, as does the turntable, each of the bars indicate the path in which rectangular icons cascade downwards towards a horizontal line near the botton. The aim for the player is to hit the corresponding key or rotate the turntable when the icon reaches and matches with this horizontal line.

When hitting the corresponding key or button you will be graded on how well you have done with Great, Good, Bad and Poor appearing on screen, the better you do the more audience satisfaction you will receive, miss time your button or key presses and turntable scratches will result in your audience satisfaction decreasing.

The Audience satisfaction is displayed by a red and blue bar, the audience satisfaction bar does not go from red to blue as you would expect, the blue part of the bar is the lower audience satisfaction with the player needing to get into the small red section at the end of the bar in order to pass the song and move on to the next one.

Upon completion of the song/level, the player is awarded a score which is money, also show is the total number of notes and how the player performed on each of those notes, breaking it down into accuracy levels Poor, Bad, Good, Great and an additional Great coloured in red, next to each of these is the number of notes hit at the various accuracy levels. in addition to being a single player game up to 2 players can play.

  

 

This being a Japanese only release, critic reviews for this game are none existent, so we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings. We find that Beatmania Append 5^th mix is currently sitting on an average user rating of 3.79/5 from a total of 7 user ratings.

Like the 4^th Mix recently covered the games user ratings are pretty positive, with the exception of one user who rated the game at a lowly 0.5/5. Other than this single user rating the game did not receive a rating below a 3/5 which came from one user, another user rated the game at a 4/5, while two users each rated the game at either a 4.5/5 or a full 5/5.

Moving on to the games difficulty, which is a carbon copy of the previous 4^th Append mix with six users rating this category and all six users rating the game as having just the right difficulty level. So we will quickly move on from here to the game lifespan.

When it comes to the games lifespan we find that that the number of users that have rated this category don’t give us an accurate estimate to the game lifespan. With just four users rating this category with a three to one split in favour of around an 80 hours lifespan opposed to a 2 hours lifespan from the single user, averaging out this comes to a lifespan of 68 hours.

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, the same goes for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com, so we now head over to Amazon.com in a last hope of finding a copy of the game.

 

We do strike lucky and we find a pretty good supply of the game available, a similar level of stock as the 4^th Mix, with prices starting at a very similar price point with a very good condition and complete copy of the game available for $8.02 and comes with free shipping as well.

The majority of used copies that are on offer are in pretty good shape as well with most being good or better quality, with used prices remaining competitive as well with a majority under the $16 mark. A good supply of new copies are also on offer with prices starting at $27.67, a slight jump up in price for new copies with prices ranging from $36 up to $44, all bar one of these copies comes with free shipping.

With the exception of one new copy on the market new copy prices rise pretty steadily up to the $51.55 price mark, the final remaining new copy that is on the market does take a jump up beyond that coming in at $67.94 once you have added in the shipping costs.

Written by

P J Gibbon