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So imagine you’re a world-renowned video game review monkey (and that such things exist),
staring down a pile of deadlines, the dry, stale end of the beginning of the NES Library,
dreary weather, your Super NES won’t output color for whatever reason and the Thai joint
up the street is closed on Mondays. And it’s Monday. It’s enough to make you lose your
mind, throw the country A through K rack out on the street and go become a hermit somewhere...
Until three large men wearing suits and strange haircuts show up and DEMAND you shake your
thang in order to make everything work out. It’s an odd, almost laughable line of reasoning.
Add music, add dance, and everything’s going to be hunky dory. Nuts to that. It IS laughable.
And right there, your day is a little bit better. Paradoxically, by having no chance
whatsoever of working, it works. That is the magic of Elite Beat Agents. Absurdity to the
rescue.
What we have here is a rare breed: A rhythm-slash-music game that doesn’t have the words “Bemani”
or “Harmonix” anywhere on it. There aren’t many of those, especially not in the states,
and the ones that do see the light of day are somewhat hit-or-miss. For every Gitaroo-Man
there’s an Ontamarama, for every Unison, a... well, Unison. But Elite Beat Agents is
a Nintendo idea, crafted specifically as a rhythm gaming experience utilizing the DS
touchscreen mechanics to its fullest. And then they just made it absolutely deranged.
And not just deranged deranged, I mean pants-on-head, Johann Gambolputty, Eddie Izzard covered-in-bees
weird.
As members of the Elite Beat Agents, a secret task force charged with combating Epic Failure
whereever it rears its ugly head, you’re dispatched by the Commish to aid persons in
need... after being briefed on their plight by way of a comic-book-esque series of panels.
Once the subject hits their breaking point (as indicated by a desperate plea for help),
you swoop in, brandish microphones, and proceed to bust out Born to Love You or Rock this
Town or the numerically-named Sk8r 8oi. (Vriska’s favorite.) But it’s not enough to just show
up with a snazzy tune and hope everything rights itself; no, you’ve gotta get all
up on the dance floor. Or other words like that. I can’t speak to the social implications,
but I can lay out the mechanics: There are dots on the touchscreen. You touch them. Contracting
circles around the dots indicate time until the quote unquote note hits; unfortunately,
they’re all the same color. It can be a royal pain to tell an eighth from a 12th,
especially if you’ve never heard the track before. Unlike DDR or Rock Band, you don’t
have a linear movement of notes from which you can gauge these minute differences; in
fact, the action can take place in any direction on the bottom screen. Occasionally a note
will be followed by having to roll a ball along a track, not too fast, not too slow.
It sounds strange, but it’s a comfortable strange, once you’ve gotten used to it.
The music used are all cover tracks, though they’re of a better quality than I’d usually
expect after using those words. Nope, my only real issue with the game is in how much is
going on at once; while you’re trying to concentrate on the bottom screen and not fail
at the game, there’s a whole slew of strange events taking place on the top screen. In
this way, anyone spectating the action is going to be quite entertained; but who the
heck watches people play DS games anyway?