Do you like music in your videogames? Then buy Rhythm Heaven.
Rhythm Heaven, to be released Sunday for Nintendo DS, is a throwback to the days when music-based videogames were a tiny niche part of the business and the words "guitar" and "hero" had never been uttered in sequence by game designers. It is a collection of more than 50 mini-games that use just two simple control mechanisms — tapping or flicking the DS' touchscreen in rhythm with the beat of a song.
It is the perfect example of a game that takes a simple, easy-to-master mechanic and spins it out into a game experience that is complex, challenging, hilariously entertaining and lengthy. Once you've mastered one mini-game, another awaits to test your rhythmic ability and ask a very simple question: Can you keep the beat, while chaos goes on around you?
The screenshots above illustrate three of Rhythm Heaven's mini-games. In "Built to Scale," at left, bolts roll down an assembly line to the beat of a rising scale: do-re-mi-fa-sol. You listen to the rhythm, and at the exact moment the scale reaches sol, you flick the stylus to send a rivet through the bolts.
"Fan Club," in the middle, puts you in the role of a monkey that is a big fan of a pop star. As she sings her song, the entire crowd reacts in perfect unison to certain lyrics by clapping and cheering in predetermined bursts of controlled enthusiasm. (This is, not coincidentally, very much like attending an actual Japanese pop performance.)
In "Glee Club," at right, you are the performer — you hold the stylus on the touchscreen to keep your mouth closed, then let go to sing. So you have to pick the stylus up on the right beat, then put it down again with the correct timing. Occasionally, you and your partners will sing in unison, and you flick the stylus to do that.
Each of the games in Rhythm Heaven features a tutorial you play before the game begins to teach you the musical bits you need to learn. The tutorial will go on until you can execute the basic moves reliably. For a game like "Built to Scale," you just learn when to flick the stylus. With "Fan Club," you practice both of the predetermined call-and-response claps before you go in.
You will need these tutorials, because Rhythm Heaven can be really hard.
Oh, I'm sorry, did the adorable graphics throw you? Did Nintendo's family-friendly casual image make you think this was Wii Music all over again? From a challenge standpoint, Wii Music is to Rhythm Heaven what picking your nose is to brain surgery. Same general area, extremely different learning curve.
Prepare to suffer for your art. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. When I played the Japanese version of Rhythm Heaven last summer, I got totally slammed just learning how to flick the stylus properly. But picking up the U.S. version last week, I realized that somewhere along the line I'd figured it all out.
One of the games that might give you a great deal of trouble is "Crop Stomp," at right. This shows up later in Rhythm Heaven, once you've mastered the basics.
In "Crop Stomp," you have to continuously tap the screen to maintain the rhythm of the farmer as he walks through his field. Each stomp makes a turnip pop out of the ground, and you then flick upward to toss the veggie into your bag. But some turnips are actually moles, and you flick upward — but in a different rhythm — to toss them aside.
As if all of this were not enough, each of Rhythm Heaven's six sets of five mini-games is capped off with a "Remix," which takes the five games you just played and crams little bits of them into one extended song, so you have to remember all five different control schemes.
This is actually a lot less difficult than it seems, and it's all thanks to the fact that Rhythm Heaven is about music. Music is memorable. Music follows patterns. Memorizing the Declaration of Independence is hard, and yet (paraphrasing Dave Barry) our brains seem to assign top-shelf space for the memorization of songs we hate. Rhythm Heaven's songs are infectious and catchy in such a way that they lodge themselves into your brain. So once you're over the learning curve, it is actually much easier than you'd expect to react to gameplay cues.
Without the music, these games would resemble something out of
Nintendo's WarioWare series, the collections of "micro-games"
that task you with completing a variety of clever but brief tasks while entertaining you with goofy graphic designs. But adding the musical element changes everything, since your cues for what to do are almost entirely aural, not visual. You could play many of these games with your eyes closed — and sometimes that might even be preferable, since Rhythm Heaven's graphics are often used to distract you from keeping the rhythm. It's all part of the challenge.
Once you've finished the mini-games, there's still a lot to do. You can go back and try to get "Medals" in each game, which open up even more mini-games and virtual interactive music toys that you can screw around with. Occasionally, the game will ask you to try to play a mini-game perfectly, rewarding you with more bonus content if you nail it. Rhythm Heaven is so packed full of content that even the game's credit sequence is a playable mini-game.
If Rhythm Heaven could be said to stumble anywhere, it is that the English-language songs in this version seem a little less authentic, a little cheesier than the ones in the Japanese game. And although the tap-and-flick touchscreen controls work well, Rhythm Heaven is actually the sequel to a Japan-only game that used standard buttons, which worked better.
These are mere quibbles. Rhythm Heaven is exactly the sort of novel, deep, challenging game that people accuse Nintendo of not creating anymore. Play it.
Images courtesy Nintendo
WIRED Addictive, unique gameplay; great design; catchy music; lots of replay value
TIRED Unnecessary touchscreen controls; English vocals are a bit cheesy
$35, Nintendo
Rating: 
Read Game|Life's game ratings guide.
See Also:- Video: Beyonce Promotes Rhythm Heaven, Nintendo DSi
