[Music] [Laughter] touchscreen rhythm games have been quite appealing as long as they've been around with the rise of smartphones it was only a matter of time before touchscreen rhythm games started coming around with early examples like cytus 1 and tap tap revenge after consumers that spent some time with touchscreens in their everyday lives it made sense to bring touchscreen technology to many more parts of society touch screen ordering props at restaurants and businesses became very prevalent as touchscreen technology spread throughout the world and arcade games were no exception with some companies like dave buster's sporting redemption games that resembled those same games that arrived at the beginning of touch screen gaming like temple run and cut the rope arcade rhythm games eventually started making this move too and that brings us to beatstream beatstream abbreviated as bst or beasto is an arcade rhythm game developed by you guessed it konami beatstream is a 100 touchscreen rhythm game with all on-screen controls being managed by the player touching things on screen in time with the beat the game was innovative for its time and also took a lot of consideration into its aesthetics the machine is pretty unique looking featuring two screens however the top screen has no impact on gameplay a big feature of beatstream is the unique background videos made for enhancing the spectator experience so they dedicated the top screen to showing the video adding to the theming of the game is the game's mascot bisco a cute character capturing the cute and fun feel of b stream the gameplay is entirely contained within the touchscreen area and features a lot of unique mechanics since the freeform nature of the touchscreen allows for more unique features the main section for notes is centered dead in the middle of the screen with notes flying in from the outside to the middle when they hit their respective side of the octagon you tap that side to hit the note this leads to a frantic assault on the hit area from all sides and can be really fun to try and keep track of the standard tap and hold notes are sent in toward this octagon but there are also swipe notes where upon making contact with the hit area the note must be sliced so to speak in addition there are 6 extra target areas positioned around the screen these can also be used for their own types of notes that may appear throughout the song separate from the central octagon the last note type in the game are stream notes obviously to give some meaning to the name beatstream stream notes are an arrow with a path positioned around the playfield when they appear you have to drag them through all their hit points and finish the object while managing everything else happening on screen they're meant to be resolved basically as soon as they can and in my experience they're the least musically synced note in b stream ironically the game features four difficulties going light medium beast nightmare in order the game launched to some decent success and interest due to its appealing cabinet design and touchscreen gameplay and would quickly receive a second version beatstream animtribe also known as beatstream 2 would feature difficulty adjustments and new songs some minor features like character partners some judgment timings adjusted differentiations for ratings by score and a few other minor additions it also included a unique difficulty for one of its songs all songs in beatstream are rated one through ten in beat stream two nines and tens were re-rated and given plus and minus difficulties however at the very top end the boss song chernobog has a nightmare chart with a special rating of kami this is the only song that uses this communi rating in the final game during the location test for beatstream 2 the song koisuru uchu senso also had a nightmare chart with a rating of kami but the chart was never put into the final game and was never added in an update before the game was discontinued on screen right now is a recreation of the chart that i found as there are no videos i can find of this chart being played on the official game this is likely one of the rarest charts to be documented and not fully released as it was only playable during beatstream 2's two day location test however as may be seen by the cut content and relatively small additions to the core game only on its second version beatstream was facing some problems and it was not long for this world alright i'm going to address the elephant in the room because almost every person who sees or plays beatstream recognizes this issue your arms block the view of the lower notes and it's a huge problem the bottom left bottom middle and bottom right notes all get roughly blocked by your hands when you play b stream because of the angle the game puts your arms at you very often cannot see the notes coming from those directions they have a fix for this inside the center octagon there are three arrows placed on the problem sides to help you see when the notes are coming from those directions that said it doesn't really help it's nice that there is an indicator but again due to moving your hands all over the screen it's hard to pay attention to these small arrow indicators before a note blindsides you honestly it almost makes the game easier to play with one hand think about it you're blocking less of the screen that way there's actually a bunch of videos on youtube of a guy doing just that and it looks like he's managing just fine above nines the game really just falls apart the difficulty is too high to play with one hand and the assault of notes is too fast to deal with the issue of not being able to see half of them it's really just a major design flaw that absolutely kneecaps the game and it's a real shame because the seven to nine range is really fun and it can be a joy to play when you're not missing notes because you can't see them this design issue was almost certainly the main catalyst of this game not lasting very long and the signs of imminent death were soon to follow one of the major signs of the incoming death of the game was something we've seen before in the series the good old kac curse struck beatstream in 2016 with the game making no appearance probably a shock to no one considering the issues with gameplay this also came at a time around the death and scaling back of some other games a prevalent theory around this time is that konami was running too many active games at once and that removing beatstream was a way to trim the fat along with scaling back some other games in fact nostalgia's release timing may have actually been dependent on beat stream dying beat stream cabinets were given kits to be converted to nostalgia cabinets upon the game shutting down other than conversion cabinets being a large bulk of nostalgia's initial cabinet run beatstream actually would never receive an offline patch this is the first game of our series to have been released but have no way to officially play the game after its cancellation beatstream is an e-amusement-enabled game which means a connection to the server is required to start the machine and play beatstream never received an offline patch which means this server check was never removed the game will fail to boot with no network connection so there is no way to play b stream officially anymore unlike museeka that at least got an offline patch or keyboard mania that doesn't require an internet connection this game really is dead on september 1st 2017 beatstream was taken offline and became officially unplayable beatstream is a game for me that really is just a huge set of unfortunate circumstances the game and direction had a lot of promise in my opinion and there were parts of beatstream that were just really a lot of fun to play it really makes you wonder what happened during the location tests for the game this is a problem that almost everyone who plays bst experiences it is a massive design flaw and one that would ultimately lead to its death it's unfortunate the game couldn't see a rework or something before shutting down and a lot of its interesting ideas died with it nostalgia took some of the features like displaying stuff on the second monitor but overall the touchscreen parts of the game basically went away b stream is a game that really just couldn't stand up under the weight of its own design flaws and joins the list of dead rhythm games thanks for watching check out my twitter and my twitch links are in the description below you can also check out my patreon if you want to support my content if you like this video don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you guys next time [Music] you