Game Play: Elite Beat Agents

I actually brought my nice headphones in from the office to play Elite Beat Agents on the DS over the weekend. This oddly caused something of a problem as the Flash I was playing with earlier apparently started to sing on its own after I left.

Ooops.

Elite Beat Agents is a spiritual sequel to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan - a Japanese rythm game which had such a high import rate that EBA apparently became something of a no-brainer. It has a unique setup for a "dance game" which takes advantage of the DS hardware. The game really is something of a great example of using the DS ... except the normal DS speakers are really woefully underpowered. Get yourself some headphones, really, it's night and day even for the non=audiophile.

I rented EBA from Gamefly ... which was a little odd since it means some of the game was already unlocked. In fact, that was really distracting because it meant that the normal ramping up of difficulty was a bit of a hunt. In an afternoon I managed to beat all the scenarios on the easiest difficulty except for a couple.

Elite Beat Agents is a great game that everyone should at least try. I haven't decided if I'll keep it or send it back yet. It's kind of an odd, interactive, way of listening to music at the very least. I may keep it around long enough to see if I can beat the easy mode and then go from there.

Fun Fact! Keiichi Yano, vice president of iNiS and director of the game explained in an interview with 1up.com, selling the game at retail in Western markets would have been infeasible due to the game's innate reliance on Japanese popular music and cultural references.[1] It was due to this fact that when Yano and iNiS began work on the North American version, the black-clad cheerleaders of Ouendan were removed and replaced with a trio of men styled after government agents, using distinctly American references such as the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and Men in Black for inspiration.(Wikipedia)

tagged: game, gaming