i can't do it so do it with me you are the dj hit the key do his flash bend the plane feel the beat let's do it again [Music] beat mania is a scratch dj arcade game franchise that began in 1997. the game consists of scrolling notes and you smash the keys and scratch the turntable with the music and if that sounds familiar it's because beatmania spearheaded what we now know as the rhythm game genre and that same team would continue to innovate on the concept with games like dance dance revolution in the years to come if we went through and talked about every single little thing that makes beat mania awesome then we'd be here all day so let's just do some bullet points instead alright alright so the first thing i want to talk about is the aesthetics beat mania's presentation is consistently experimental and interesting every single game has a different style from the last this one's hip-hop themed this one's in space this one's themed like an airport it was always doing something new while still keeping the fundamentals intact and the fundamentals remain intact through the 20-plus years of content the series has to offer when you get into beat mania it just feels like this endless rabbit hole the turnaround time on these games was so insanely quick back in the day that konami just banged out a billion beat mania games one after [Laughter] look how many another there are there's so many having a quick turnaround time does lead to a lot of the older beat mania games feeling pretty busted and that's not always a bad thing the jank is a trademark of classic beat mania the people that don't appreciate jank like i do usually end up forgiving the game anyway just because it's a genre trailblazer from before the new millennium i just think the jank makes the games feel as funky as the soundtrack in this game is because the music in these games is very good very good soundtrack i mean you would hope that that's the case considering that this is a dj game where music is the focal point for a large percentage of the first generation of beat mania the music was like just weird like weird music i don't know if it's fair to say that it's objectively bad it can be hard to defend sometimes it didn't take them too long to figure their stuff out and like set a standard and it was pretty consistently good after that point okay moving on we're gonna talk about the control scheme the control scheme is so cool like the turntable is such a brilliant piece of engineering i'm gonna do an ign here and say that beat mania really makes you feel like a dj the biggest thing that contributes to that feeling is that the game is key sounded and that means when you press the key it emits the sound so if your timing is off or you press the wrong key or something then it makes the song sound weird beatmania invented that and it was adopted by lots of other rhythm games like guitar hero you don't have to know anything about music theory to know when something sounds weird key sounding takes advantage of this primal feeling and gives you immediate feedback and it gives so much motivation to improve at the game nobody wants to go up on stage and play the piano and just suck in front of everyone when you're learning an instrument you just practice forever so that when you're up on that stage you're totally ready for anything that's what i mean when i say the beat mania makes you feel like a dang dj it feels like you're actually learning a musical instrument but unlike a musical instrument beat mania has many many different play styles for you to choose from and that's one of the coolest things about the game is that there isn't one single right way to play it with beat mania there are no rules you can play with the turntable on the left or on the right you can just play without the turntable all together you want to play with 5 keys 7 keys 14 keys go for it have fun you can position your fingers any number of ways it's all up to personal preference and another freedom that beatmania gives you is how the arcade machine sounds in the arcade you're given access to analog eq sliders so you can tune exactly how you want the arcade machine to sound in the arcade how many arcade games do you know that do that there's only one that comes to mind for me and it's beat freaking mania all of these reasons and i'm sure many more are why beat mania is the flagship rhythm game in japan in the late 90s when it came out it was stupid popular in japan like pac-man levels of popular and it's been riding off of that residual success ever since it remains at the top of the charts beat mania is the grandfather of all rhythm games but despite how important and influential the game is most people outside of japan have never even heard of it and that's because sans a few experimental worldwide releases beat mania has always been japan exclusive and as a result people outside of japan have to jump through a ton of hoops to experience the game your first option should be to find out if you have a beat mania arcade cab near you xenius eye vanisher's arcade locator is a very valuable tool if you do have one near you then congrats my nearest beat mania cab is like an hour and a half drive it is quite the investment to go there i know an hour and a half is not much compared to people that are like well my nearest speed mania is an entire country away we can all agree that playing the video game at home is very convenient my number one recommendation for playing beat mania at home is to acquire a playstation 2. now specifically a playstation 2 for a few reasons first off it can play ps1 games as well as ps2 games and across those two libraries you have a lot of beat mania games to choose from usually japanese games wouldn't work on consoles that aren't from japan but a playstation 2 can easily be soft modded to permanently region unlock the console using mechapone so it'll load any disk you put into it regardless of where it's from regardless of if it's a backup or not it'll load anything which is very convenient and that convenience is very much appreciated although it is overshadowed by konami's ultimate inconvenience that is append discs now the way that append works is that there's a whole collection of beat mania append games in which if you put them into the playstation they won't start now what they want you to do is they want you to load in your key disk like this close the lid boot up your game and then in the game's menu you hit the change disk button and then you can open it up take your disk out put your append disk in and then close that boot that up and only then will the append game work apparently the reason they did it was due to some legal kerfuffle with sony where they were only allowed to release a certain number of games per year but they could only do it if it counted as an extension of a game they already released so they started making a pens i don't know if that's true it's just a plausible rumor that i've heard luckily the playstation 2 beat mania games were a lot easier there was no append crap you could just put the disc in and play the game thank god if you want to play beat mania on playstation there are a ton of controller options available to you here are the ones that i have this right here is the ascii beat mania controller released in 1998 it is by far the most common controller you'll see for sale the buttons aren't very good you have to press exactly in the center of each button in order to get it to actuate if you're too high or too low the button will just tilt instead of actually pressing the turntable doesn't have much texture to it which can make it quite difficult to grip with your fingers when you try to turn it depending on what condition it's in the turntable can also build up quite a bit of resistance making it even more difficult to spin i mean aesthetically though i think it's a very pretty controller it's got some nice decals you know it's not too large and the pricing for these things is unbeatable about three to five dollars before shipping not 35 three to five dollars before shipping and that is why i have so many of these uh you know this one's new in box um i have probably i think five of these sitting around somewhere because they're so common and they're so cheap very nice box very pretty i also have a few variants this one is the tv panic original premium model it is exactly the same as the ascii controller with the addition of a distinct decal on the turntable this unit was never actually labeled for sale it was used as a kiosk demo for a japanese game store called tv panic which advertised the beat mania playstation game in 1998. i asked around on the beat mania 5 key community and nobody had ever seen anything like it i am convinced that it is one of a kind i scored this thing for eight dollars and i am very proud to own it it's a piece of history it's got a cool story behind it i like it a lot the final variant that i have of this controller is the animal of airs famitsu limited edition it's the first beat mania controller to ever have lights in the buttons you know i see red on the top and green on the bottom look at that oh it's beautiful disco [Music] i've asked a bunch of people apparently the gibberish on the front is just gibberish the story behind this thing is that if you bought a specific issue of famitsu wave magazine in the late 90s you could send away for this controller people can't seem to agree on the number of how limited edition it is but i've heard that there are only fifteen hundred to two thousand existence which i don't know if i believe i see these pop up for sale all the time for relatively cheap if it was that low of a number i feel like i would see far less of them than i do i got this thing for roughly twenty dollars and considering the condition it's in it was well worth the price next up we have the dj man now this controller is transparent plastic it doesn't really work too well on the green screen the chroma key it kind of messes it up so i'm just going to turn off the green screen for now i'll turn it back on the next segment show all your dj skill now play with your hands and whole body let's cool now you'll immediately notice that the buttons are modeled after actual piano keys every single key is lit uh in a weirdly pressure sensitive way like look at this look look at that what the heck is going on there it also has a stereo composite pass-through so you can plug your playstation's audio into it and the turntable lights will glow based on the amplitude of the audio that's pretty cool i was actually getting it to happen just by touching it just i guess because the noise of the cables is doing that so that's kind of cool yeah look at it it's doing the thing i plugged it into the playstation now it's doing it but that is not the only gimmick it has to offer it has a 3.5 millimeter jack on the bottom if you shove your headphones in there it's not going to do anything because that ain't for your headphones that's for the rumble wrist sets that jack is for a peripheral that you strap to each of your wrists and it rumbles to the rhythm of whatever song you're playing and as far as i know every beatmania playstation game supports them i can't even find a photo of the rumble wrist sets so here's something that's pretty close the only evidence that i could find of these things existing is from a written description on ebit mania fan's website from 1999 kind of a stupid gimmick i would much rather it just have a headphone pass through kind of like what the dj station pro has some poor sap paid 7 800 yen for this thing i did not pay anywhere near that much 7 800 yen is not retail price as far as i know this thing retailed for 10 000 yen which equals to around 100 bucks this person paid like 78 bucks i paid 16 for this inbox with a copy of the game which is absolutely sinful considering how good this controller is so here it is right here here's here's the boy himself this is the best sweet mania 5k controller for playstation by a long shot i absolutely love this thing it has this gorgeous silvery plastic finish with the glossy decal on the top this is the professional edition it's too cool the buttons are all lit also in a weirdly pressure sensitive manner look at this what's that what's that going on there they also have a very short travel which i find to be very fun to play on the turntable is raised up really really high and it's super super smooth which i find to be very satisfying to play on and the gimmick is that it has two sets of composite ports this right here is the playstation you plug the playstation in on the left and then this goes out to here which is the headphone jack right and then goes back out to your tv so that it can go out through your tv speakers so that way you can plug in your playstation here and then have headphones and also go out to your tv brah it's so cool and the sliders right here these control the volume of your headphones as you know as you can see it says have a volume right there and you would think like oh yeah the one slider is for the headphones and the other ones for the tv right that makes sense but no both of these are for your headphones one is for the left ear and one is for the right in what situation would you ever want one ear of your headphones to be a different volume to the other that is genuinely bizarre like every time i adjust the volume i have to make absolutely sure the sliders are as equal to each other as possible like highly recommended controller really really actually good controller why are the sliders like that make this one for the headphones and this one for the tv don't make it each ear individual oh i'm thinking of having my right ear be louder than the left one today i love you dj station pro you're so good and next up we have this thing wait no this is a different game next up we have what's known as the 2dx uskoc and that stands for united states kwanami official controller it originally shipped with the united states beat mania 2006 release which i have right here this was my first ever beat mania controller and i paid 130 dollars for it that is way too much but i had no idea what a good price would have been at the time buying it was my gateway into the beatmania community where i would later find out that you can easily find these for as low as 30 to 40 bucks i paid quadruple that because i just didn't know any better but all things considered it's not that bad of a controller and it has this pretty cool thing where you can pop this entire panel out uh you take this little thing out right here take it out take it out get out of there oh man it's really in there oh man i don't have fingernails i can't get it out screwdriver to the rescue oink yeah yeah flip it around and you shove it right back in there flip the whole thing over and now your turntable is on the right always good to have inclusivity for paws or people that just prefer it this way i think it's pretty neat next up we have the beat mania da da da controller uh which has a lot more buttons than you'd expect way more than the average beat mania controller so let's take a look at it yep there it is all these buttons and they couldn't put a turntable on it and of course it only works with one game like okay thanks konami get it out of here and now i will carefully put everything back in the box this controller cost me forty five thousand dollars so that's all the retro controllers that i have but there are a few more goodies that i imported that i wanted to show you this is the beat mania pocket one it's a cute little lcd game from 1998. i paid about 42 bucks for it but i was fine with paying that because this was sealed when i got it this is all the original packaging i don't know why but i really like little old lcd gadgets something about them is really charming to me i've also got its big brother here the beat mania pocket 2. this one i got loose it doesn't have any of the original packaging but i paid a lot less for it as a result this was like maybe 25 bucks they also had another way to play these games portably which was beat mania gb monomi was all about making weird game boy versions of their rhythm games i'm just gonna move these fellas out of the way real quick there we go this one doesn't have a plastic clip-on little controller you actually have to use the buttons on it for the five keys it's you know left up right ba and start is to scratch these had a very specific market in mind when they were created uh one that doesn't really exist now you can emulate the big boy beat mania games on pretty much anything nowadays so if you wanted to play beat mania 5k portably back in like 1998 through 1999 i mean you got some good options for doing so these are pretty cool i'm actually pretty impressed at how cheap i was able to get this game i got this for 584 and that was sealed like this was in box i opened this for the first time next up i've got books books galore i've got the beat mania press mix as well as the beat mania second mix official guide for the playstation game this was eleven dollars somewhere around there uh and it's pretty basic it shows like a lot of the different charts and patterns and like how to play them and stuff like that but the reason why i wanted this was because it has a copy of beat mania original cd in there with one of the best beat mania songs ever cat song i love that song it's really good and yeah i'm really glad that the cd was in here because that makes me very happy to have is a great little piece of little piece of history right there but uh sadly i did not get so lucky with the beat mania press mix the the cd was stolen out of there and that's fair i mean this book is from a long time ago i imagined that you know they put that with their cd collection or something it's not like a thing you leave in a book like you know when you get a bonus disc and a book and i'm just gonna leave it in there like come on so this book was made to promote beat mania third mix when that was still new and it was coming out it's got interviews with a lot of the musicians that produce music for the game it's got lots and lots of different diagrams for song charts in the games this book was particularly interesting to me because at the end it catalogs all of the merch there's a there's an ad for pop and music i have never seen some of these but yeah what of these do i have well i'll show you i have this ridiculously bright orange beat mania beanie it is so gaudy it is unbelievable i got this for 37 that might seem like a lot but hear me out i got this sealed i opened this for the very first time now this is from 1997. you know you don't want some dude sweat hanging out in there for that long it's gonna ruin it another weird piece of apparel that i have is this beatmania bag with the classic hard and fat marketing uh that that was so big in 1997 1998 every piece of beat mania merch had this exact copy on it but yeah i mean this is nice you know i use this uh whenever i go to the arcade i throw a bunch of water bottles in here and then sling it over my shoulder it's a nice little thing i like it got this for about 17 bucks you know that's about as much as i would pay for one of these that didn't have a beat mania logo on it so there you go the reason i've been giving prices on every single item i've shown you is because it's very easy to overpay for these sorts of things like i mentioned earlier with the us koc i didn't know any better and i ridiculously overpaid in this segment i'll be talking about where you can actually get beat mania stuff without getting price gouged out the wazoo now this segment is sponsored but i was going to talk about it anyway and dubai was kind enough to let me say what i wanted to say while sponsoring me to do so first off if you're looking on ebay you're in the wrong place you're going to want to import your beat mania stuff directly from japan using a proxy service and bae is my proxy service of choice this video would not have been possible without them so what actually is a proxy service okay so here's how it works right you go on by e.jp and you buy some goods from a japanese storefront like yahoo auctions japan or mercari you got some beat mania controllers in your cart it's looking all good you pay for them and then they're shipped to bayes warehouse where they will handle all the customs add a ton of protective packaging so it'll be sure to survive the trip and then ship it overseas to you now the best way to take advantage of bayes service is that they will keep items in their warehouse for you until you're ready to have them shipped out so what you can do is order a whole bunch of things over a period of 30 days have them all sent as one package with only one shipping fee to worry about that's something that you just can't do on ebay bai was feeling generous and wanted to give you all 2 000 yen off of your first time purchase using this link and that's equal somewhere around 15 you can genuinely get a beat mania controller and a copy of the game for that much the link is on screen and in the description if you wanted to go snags and beat mania stuff now's a good excuse to do it so thank you bye i really appreciate you guys if you're planning to get a retro controller from bailey make sure you're prepared to use it on a real playstation console from my own experience attempting to adapt retro playstation beat mania controllers to work on a pc is a fool's errand i've tried this thing i've tried this thing and i've tried this thing and none of them have worked properly people swear by this one this is the one people recommend for beat mania controllers and it equally didn't work the generic blue one was the closest to actually functioning but the polling rate was so embarrassingly low that it tanked my accuracy numbers the only way i've seen people use these old playstation controllers on a pc is by opening them up and hard modding them completely swapping out the control board with a fan made solution for instance a usb money but that's a ton of work and the majority of people don't have the experience or know-how to make something like that happen so the long and short of it is if you want a beat mania controller for pc you got to get one that has that capability built in that's just the way it goes and lucky for you there's a lot of options to choose from in that regard but the only one i have personal experience with is the dj dao phoenix wan the phoenix one does everything it can to be as close to the arcade experience as possible the buttons the springs the micro switches the turntable everything is arcade accurate the fenix one is widely considered the gold standard when it comes to beat mania controllers if you're serious about the game you're getting one of these things no question about it it'll run you about 300 bucks maybe a little more depending on shipping they also very recently released the fenix oneplus which is a little bit more expensive it is hyper customizable in the hardware and software end as you can see mine looks a little bit different than the standard phoenix one because i have customized mine i made this custom turntable decal i also made all my custom little buttons you press the button on the back you can open this little panel here and when you do that it gives you full access to all of the switches and everything in there you can easily swap your switches your springs your buttons and tweak it exactly to your preference it also has that thing that most 2dx controllers have where you can flip this panel over and then boom you're in two-player mode it's that easy but i'ma switch it back because i like it the other way around boop and flip-a-doo on the software end there's a ton of different controller modes so you can make it compatible with all your different games and whatnot very good stuff the thing is if you're getting a phoenix wand you have to be prepared to be a nerd i'm a super nerdy guy i restore arcade machines troubleshooting is my bread and butter maybe the same goes for you but if you're looking for a controller that you can plug and play and have it just work then look elsewhere when it's working it's amazing but from my experience you have to be prepared for it to stop at any moment i got my brand new phoenix one out of the box plugged it in and it wasn't working properly my inputs and my lights would intermittently go out so i opened it up and noticed that it got a little knocked around during shipping and some of the quick disconnect terminals had popped off of their respective buttons no big deal you just pop them back on not so easy some of the terminals weren't making proper contact i reached out to them in an email they said to use pliers to crimp the connector a little bit more and that didn't work they said they could send me another connector but i'd have to pay shipping i didn't want to do that long story short after a month of troubleshooting i eventually got fed up and i just soldered the dang wire directly to the connector a friend of mine got the same controller and had the exact same problem in a different spot for 300 that is unacceptable it getting knocked around during shipping isn't their fault i get that but if the terminals are fallible enough that they can die during shipping they should at least include some spares in the box or something externally it is fantastic these buttons are unreal the turntable is the best i've ever felt in my life maybe it was just a fluke between my friend and i but my experience was negatively colored because of all the technical issues i had with it maybe you'll get lucky and you won't have any of these problems but i felt like it would be dishonest if i didn't mention it alrighty moving on in this video i focused primarily on the late 90s generation of bead mania and that's for no other reason than just because i really like it it has this smokin hot attitude this wild funky aesthetic and a heavy overtone of underground dance culture but beat mania has come a long way since then today's video game scene is completely different than it was in the 90s and beat mania grew and changed with time modern beat mania 2dx has the benefit of 20 years of polish tons of quality of life tweaks along with a massive selection of content means that the franchise is more palatable to newcomers than it ever was when it comes to buying controllers you have this generational gap where buying an older controller limits you to only being able to use it on old games while buying a new controller limits you to the new i felt like there didn't exist a good entry-level controller that broke the traditional boundaries of strict button layouts and could enable anyone to experience whatever generation of beat mania they please so without further ado i would like to introduce the project we've been working on for the past six months the bemini it's a low-profile mechanical keyboard controller primarily focused on beat mania yes it has a turntable and yes it feels amazing that the mini does everything it can to empower the flexibility that beatmania encourages five keys done seven keys no prob popping music make it happen turn table on the left or on the right you want to pop the turntable off and replace it with a button whatever we don't care man playing simulators emulators infinites it'll do it all although it was heavily inspired by the phoenix one it is not an outright replacement for it that the mini was not created to be end game it was made as an accessible entry point so you can be confident about what to pursue further and it comes in clutch by being significantly smaller than the average b mania controller so you can actually bring it with you when you're out and about if you're interested head over to our new website kboards.com smash your email address into the newsletter box and we'll let you know when they're next in stock diva mini is fully open source so if you want to build your own you can absolutely do that too if this video got you all hyped up to try beat mania i highly recommend you check out 2dx.org which is a brilliantly verbose english guide on getting started with the game lots of good resources and information it's certainly worth a read you can also feel free to join my discord server at discord.glue if you have questions about the mini about beat mania or if you just want to reach out to me that's the best way to do it my dms are always open i also have a patreon at patreon.comclue and when you subscribe there with any tier you get access to my discord premium blog where you get to see what i'm working on before anybody else i apologize for this video taking so long to come out the the script was drastically reworked multiple times i was originally going to go into the politics of the game like a lot of its shortcomings and how konami could make it more accessible it was very critical and i'm not used to writing stuff like that so it took me a while i even got all that vo recorded just for it all to be cut out completely because it was boring and it didn't make sense in a video that's supposed to be introductory to the game that sort of thing can take a long time to figure out it's hard making videos is hard and on top of that i lose a lot of time from days that i am completely disabled by my horribly depressive brain so you factor that in videos like this just end up deleting a percentage of my life from this point forward i'm going to try and make videos that are a bit smaller in scope but that i can get out at a more reasonable pace that's my goal but yeah thank you for sticking with me thank you to everyone that believed in me all the people that i worked with to make this video happen it means the world to me i love you all so much [Music] you