Last year at around this time, we've had a Song of the Week "revisit featurette" of sorts in order to showcase with an already-heard-of track how hard it can be to play certain official Taiko games that -for a reason or another- are far away from the general knowledge, even among seasoned franchise fans.
Well, I'm doing that thing again today, but for the opposite side of the difficulty spectrum!
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beena |  |
★3 37 |
- | ★4 57 |
- | - |
97.8
???Original Song of the Week link
Ask your average videogames fan about what was the final home console release from Sega; chances are that the reply you're going to get is 1998's Sega Dreamcast, a system whose support was discontinued early on in Western countries despite getting steady releases in Japan up until the year 2007. Going on the 'technicality' route, however, the actual final Sega console release was a computer-shaped edutainment system aimed at the youngest gamers across Japanese households: the Advanced Pico Beena, a Japanese-exclusive system with model variations and library support spanning inbetween the Dreamcast's final years and aftermath, from 2005 to 2010.
The system is a revised version of 1993's Kids Computer Pico, a kids system that managed to also get sold in Europe and the Americas (as the Sega Pico); for both systems, its game library consisted of booklet-shaped cartridges to be lodged on the Pico/Beena's 'screen slot' and their contents could be browsed with the console turned in by turning the cartridge/book's pages, jumping between each title's story and activities. The input keys for the Pico's library consist of a toy pen to be moved across the tactile playmat at the system's lower portion and a few buttons on its left side: a big bright-red one and four vaguely-arrow-shaped colored ones right underneath it. The revised Beena release mirrors these five buttons on the other side as well, on top of a handful of extra features unachievable by the earlier Pico system such as multiplayer-compatible titles, data saving, off-TV gameplay and parental settings to limit playtime sessions, among other things. I might indulge myself for a few lines in telling our gracious viewers reading these lines that I've actually pulled a fast one on ya and that the Beena isn't the final FINAL Sega-spawn console release anymore (thanks to the launch of Sega Fave's ePICO from last year!), but let's go back on track into explaining what does the Taiko franchise have to do with the Beena to begin with, instead!
On April 15th, 2007, Bandai Entertainment has released for the Beena Taiko no Tatsujin Ongaku Lesson (太鼓の達人おんがくレッスン), one of the toy-making company's few titles for the system not to be related to any of the PreCure and Super Sentai series entries. A good chunk of the activities within the game cartridge's pages (again, I literally mean it) are based on simple musical note recognition, be it for following the scale by dragging the "Magic Pen" around and clicking with it to scoop up the right order out a pool or just matching the note shape and simple rhythms with buttons or in a tug-of-war endurance style (also in 1v1 multiplayer fashion, no less!) and the customary Pico/Beena "drawing" section at the end of each cartridge's book. This Taiko entry, however, has four separate couple-page portions that allow your standard Taiko no Tatsujin gameplay on home consoles! Four sets of 10 songs each are available to play this way in either Kantan or Muzukashii mode, each featuring a simple-melody custom version for each of the featured tracks, even for 'returning' ones from the more familiar "standard" Taiko releases like Anpanman no March.
The inputs to play each of the featured songs couldn't be simpler: the big red button for Don notes and any of the four cross-shaped buttons below it for Kat ones. A good deal of the standard gameplay screen layout from other Taiko released have received both visual and "scoring" (big airquotes here) changes, primarily with only the hit accuracy (in percentage) being tallied at the end and only two accuracy markers to track down: either you hit a note and get a 'O' or you miss it and get an 'X', no Good/OK scoring inbetween. While there's no score to track down, however, you can be sure that drumrolls are still to be found on this unique Beena release! It's also interesting to note how the Kat rim hits are visually registered on screen in a 4-quadrants split, each blinking with the color of the arrow/s hit while playing in the same way that regular Don notes are visually highlighted on the left side of the note scrolling bar. Last but not least, it's amusing to see such a simple title to be among the first multiplayer-friendly Taiko entries to allow players choose different difficulty settings for a 1v1 music match, to say the least!
Thanks to the magic of 'coming from the future' of writing the original TT blog entry on this Beena videogame about 13 years ago, nowadays we've also got many a video source to get you a better feel of how inputs for this unique game work in general, not just limited to video-recorded footage. Among other recorded play sessions online, see here in order to get a feel of working around with the Advanced Pico Beena, with handy cam footage for the "regular play" Taiko portions within!
