Nintendo never brought Rhythm Tengoku, the superb Game Boy Advance predecessor to Rhythm Heaven, to the US But they did let Sega bring it to Japanese arcades. I played it in Tokyo on Tuesday. McWhertor filmed the action.

Rhythm Tengoku Arcade, which was introduced to Japanese arcades a couple of years ago, appears to include the same roster of musical mini-games as the original GBA edition. I had played through that GBA version a couple of years ago, so I was able to easily get through several sections of the arcade game on just 100 yen (AU$1.25).

After I plunked in a coin, the game allowed me to choose one of several groups of mini-games and then try to clear each of the mini-games in my chosen group. I believe that clearing all mini-games in the group would let me play a mix that combines all of them — that’s what capped off each group of mini-games on the GBA. But I didn’t have time to play through all of the mini-games.

The controls in the arcade edition involve banging on giant versions of the GBA’s d-pad and action buttons. Nothing special there. The arcade machine supports two-player, which the GBA one did not. We weren’t able to try that mode.

The mini-games in Rhythm Tengoku, like those of the 2009 DS game Rhythm Heaven, are not complex. They are barely more involved than the micro-games in the WarioWare series, a series whose developers also made Tengoku. The Rhythm Tengoku games may even be simpler than the stylus-driven ones of the DS Rhythm Heaven. Most of the Tengoku ones require the player to simply tap a single button to the rhythm of both the game’s music and the animations of actions on the screen.

On the video you’ll see me try the onion beard-plucking rhythm game and a disco hand-clapping one. After we finished shooting the video, I also played a baseball mini-game, which involves hitting home runs into outer space. As I walked away, our Brian Ashcraft took over, testing the karate-man-punches-rocks one.

The machine was fun, but my experience was no different than it was on the GBA. The controller and graphics were simply bigger, not necessarily better. Maybe the game couldn’t be improved by this arcade port, because the GBA release was top-flight, succeeding not with fancy graphics but with simple, stylish looks and a catchy conneciton of player to action via the rhythm of the soundtrack.

The GBA Tengoku is still worth checking out, if you can find it in Japan or through an importer. For the arcade game, come to the Sega arcade in Tokyo’s Shibuya district.

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

This review was submitted by Cameron Chu. If you’ve played Rhythm Heaven, why don’t you let Cameron know whether you agree or disagree with his thoughts.

Rhythm Heaven (DS)

Don’t be fooled by its cutesy presentation; Nintendo have made one devilishly difficult game for the Nintendo DS. Sequel to Rhythm Tengoku, Rhythm Heaven takes its rhythm inspired game-play on to the touch screen where you flick and tap your way through a multitude of mini-games.

Loved
Mini-games: Despite only using two controls of tapping and flicking and the whole game revolved around mini-games, they are varied and creative enough such that the game does not feel repetitive and are immensely fun to play. Music complements this variety with styles ranging from jazz to j-pop, preventing the game from becoming dull. The mini-games are also well paced, with remixes combining several mini-games together that will keep you on your toes.

Presentation: The graphics, while minimalistic work well with the game as it doesn’t detract attention from players as they play through mini-games that require almost complete attention to pass. Comprising of crisp, colourful animations, the presentation of the visuals in fact immerses a player deeper in to the game as it helps capture the feel of the beat and rhythm as it moves in sync with the music.

Hated

Lack of support: As with all music games, Rhythm Heaven inherently relies on players to have a musical understanding to be able to play varying rhythms at changing speeds and complexities in order to enjoy the game to its fullest. Those who are unable to will find this game overly difficult as the marking criteria is ridiculously harsh, where just a few mistakes will lead to a fail. What makes it frustrating though is that the game provides little support, such as oh so useful in-game hints which appear when you fail like “You were as good as… a plate of nothing but garnish”… not very funny if you fail the same mini-game over and over, is it?

Enjoyment from Rhythm Heaven largely depends on how quick you are able to understand its rhythmic intricacies, as those who can will be able to seamlessly flow from one mini-game to another filled with addictive goodness. Those who can’t however will struggle to pass, and with the lack of any useful advice, will instead be in for one frustrating experience.

Reviewed by: Cameron Chu

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get.

At a panel in Los Angeles, Tsunku talked about his music career and rhythm. “Rhythm is something that hasn’t really been valued in Japanese culture or in Japanese music,” he said. “I really wanted to educate musically oriented people as well as the Japanese public on that.”

While Japan isn’t as clued into rhythm Tsunku pointed out, he did say that Americans know how to get down. And boogie. “I respect the American public as people who are very oriented towards music, but they do that thing with their whole body.”

Tsunku then proceeded to do an “awkward dance”, reports game blog Destructoid.

Painting with broad brush strokes here — there are obviously Japanese people who have fantastic rhythm and there are obviously American people like me who don’t. However, there are few who have marvelous ascots like Tsunku.

Destructoid – Rhythm Heaven producer Tsunku says that America has rhythm [Dtoid]

There are many ways that star game reviewer and Giant Bomb honcho Jeff Gerstmann and star model Heidi Klum are unalike. One of those, may be their ability to impact the sales of games.

Klum may have the edge there.

Celebrities, EEDAR games research analyst Jesse Divnich wrote in a report issued this morning, are trumping reviewers.

“Using celebrities in a mass-market media campaign is certainly one of the most effective ways to create the perception of being a must-own title,” he said. “In fact, the Guitar Hero/Rock Band war is a perfect example of how Guitar Hero was ultimately able to gain mass-market acceptance through celebrity endorsements and advertisement even though editorial reviews indicated that Rock Band was a better product.”

Rock Band has had the better reviews. But it is Guitar Hero that has had Heidi Klum, Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez and other celebrities dancing in their underwear on TV in order to convince the world how good Activision’s rhythm game is. They mattered more, in EEDAR’s analysis, than did the game’s reviews.

Take that, Jeff Gerstman, Kotaku and every other person or institution reviewing games.

“In this new gaming market,” Divnich wrote, “when targeting a mass-audience, it is not always the best products that succeed, but often what the consumers believe is the best product. ”

Divnich’s analysis was part of his preview for this Thursday’s release of NPD game sales for the month of April. That month saw the release of Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS, a game that was promoted with a commercial featuring Beyonce Knowles. The EEDAR analyst believes that the game’s sales will be shown later this week to be “nothing short of amazing” due to Nintendo’s use of a celebrity to support it, moreso than because the game is exceptionally good.

For as long as video games have been around, celebrities have been enlisted infrequently to hawk them. Games have been treated like movies, allowing the content to hype itself.

But the prospect that Divnich raises is that maybe games should be hyped as products, like soda or cars. Instead of the occasional celebrity endorsement based on the celebrity’s inclusion in the game — see Mike Tyson’s commercial for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out — perhaps gaming is entering an era of celebrity pitch-people telling the masses what to play. If so, Nintendo and Activision, which have enlisted stars from Nicole Kidman and Mr. T to Ozzy Osbourne and Liv Tyler, appear to be leading that revolution.

OK. So which celebrities should have been pushing Prince of Persia and Chinatown Wars to help those games out?

Prolific Japanese music producer Mitsuo Terada (aka “Tsunku”) is best known for producing idol J poppppp group Morning Musume and helping to launch the career of singers like Aya Matsuura. He also created Rhythm Heaven.

How did candy pop wizard Tsunku add smash-hit game designer to his already impressive resume? Terada tells Wired that it all started with an unsolicited game submission to Nintendo. “In Japan, with games that use rhythm and sound, it’s long been the case that the placement of accents and the timing of button-presses has had nothing to do with music,” the producer says. “For someone like myself, whose work revolves around music, this has never seemed right, and I wrote up my proposal in hopes of doing away with this.” For Tsunku, he needed Nintendo’s help to bring his game to life: “I also felt that without Nintendo’s expertise, realising my idea for a rhythm game would be impossible.”

But his submission was out of the blue! “It wasn’t like I really knew anyone with Nintendo, either,” he continues. “It was a bit risky, but my staff just took our proposal and approached them directly.” After meetings (and several dance classes), he was able to get his idea across to Nintendo, and the game got green-lit. And now it’s making loads of money. Funny how that works.

J-Pop Producer Tsunku Perfects Music Games With Rhythm Heaven [Wired]

Yesterday, Nintendo held a Rhythm Heaven Scratch DJ Academy event in New York to promote the release of the DS title.

Gamers who showed up were able to check out the rhythm game and then received free DJ lessons from professional DJs. Did anyone here go? Looking at the photos it looks like attendance may have been light.

Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven is the beat-matching Nintendo DS sequel to a Game Boy Advance title that never made it out of Japan—but did somehow manage to get an arcade port.

The collection of more than 50 music mini-games is surprisingly deep for a title that relies on two touchscreen mechanics: tapping and flicking. (Okay, there is a tiny bit of rubbing too.) While the word “mini-games” may have become a dirty word to core gamers feeling pushed aside by the tide of short session compilations flooding Nintendo platforms, Rhythm Heaven is a quirky, feel-good medley of gameplay that’s simple enough for more casual fans, but challenging enough to appeal to a core sensibility.

Rhythm Heaven is already a monster hit in its native Japan. Do we think that you should “tap into the rhythm” and add to the game’s multimillion sales? Or does Rhythm Heaven miss a beat?

Loved
Style: Visually, Rhythm Heaven is loaded with unquantifiable charm. The game’s design plays up the strengths of the Nintendo DS hardware, keeping 3D visuals to a minimum, packing the game with cute characters and environments rendered in a simple 2D style. The game’s visual variety is not unlike that of the WarioWare series, but feels more homogenized, less intentionally bizarre.

Surprising Variety: The Rhythm Heaven developers utilise the Nintendo DS touchscreen controls to a consistently refreshing degree. Despite there being little in the way of complexity to the tap and flick scheme, rarely do two games feel alike. Later games still remain novel in their design, but the rhythmic skills you’ll learn throughout make previously completed games much easier. Playing through the medley remixes is a blast.

Some Really Catchy Tunes: With the exception of a handful of tracks (see below), the Rhythm Heaven soundtrack rarely offends. In fact, there are a couple of tunes that are infectious, that not only complement mini-games well, but also make previously completed game easy to return to for an attempt at improvement (or perfection).

A Lovely Addition To The DS Library: There are few games like Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS. Fans of both iNiS’s Osu! Tatakae!! Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents and Nintendo’s WarioWare Touch will probably enjoy the smart musical gameplay most, as Rhythm Heaven has a great sense of humor and an off-kilter, but carefully crafted aesthetic.

Hated
No Restart Option: Rhythm Heaven can be surprisingly difficult, even for music game veterans. Part of that is due to occasionally vague instructions and the fact that the game doesn’t do a very good job of explaining what it is you’re doing wrong when you fail. The other part is that flicks sometimes don’t register as the player intended. Most annoying though, especially when trying to score a “Perfect” rating, is that the game doesn’t have a restart option to speed up the action. You’ll have to quit the game if you screw up, then wait for the autosave, the loading screen and the practice menu to load.

Grating Vocals: There are a couple of tracks in Rhythm Heaven—Fan Club, The Dazzles and Frog Hop— that I never want to hear again. The common thread is that they all have vocal parts that are tough on the ears. The localisation on the voiced parts is hilariously bad and will likely offend anyone who has played the import version.

Rhythm Heaven is easy to recommend, no matter how you classify yourself as a gamer. While the game has few design and localisation quirks, the game features a level of polish that Nintendo is known for, offering a valuable package filled with enjoyable mini-games and post-completion challenges. It’s delightful, addictive and can offer a serious challenge.

Embrace the mini-game!

Rhythm Heaven was developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS, released on April 5th in North America. Retails for $29.99. Completed all mini-games, unlocked about half of the medal games.

Kotaku AU Note: Rhythm Heaven currently does not have a release date for Australia.

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Nintendo top man Satoru Iwata subjects the creative team behind Rhythm Heaven/Rhythm Tengoku to a five part, comprehensive deconstruction of all of the development processes put into this franchise.

It is a whopper of a read. But I plucked this from the kicker. It’s real fun when the company’s top boss asks three guys all on the same team what they think of one another, in their presence.

Iwata:Oh, that’s right. I’ve got a question for Osawa-san. What do you think of Takeuchi-san?
Kazuoshi Osawa: Hm?
Kou Takeuchi: Uh-oh… (laughs)
Masami Yone: Uh-oh… (laughs)
Osawa: Umm…
Takeuchi: I’m s-scared to hear. (laughs)

Iwata: What kind of person is he?
Osawa: I’d be…lost without him.
Everyone: (laughs uproariously)
Osawa: Spiritually…professionally…I’d be…lost. (laughs)
Iwata: I truly understand. (laughs)
Osawa: Is that answer…all right? (laughs)
Iwata: It’s fine. What about Yone-san?

Osawa: He’s very…kind. He knows how to read me…and cheers me up. When I’m feeling down, he e-mails me pictures of kittens.
Everyone:(roaring laughter)
Iwata: And th-that cheers you up. (laughs)
Osawa: Photos of cute kittens are a big help. (laughs)
Yone: In the morning, when he looks down-and-out, I send him pictures of kittens to help him relax.
Takeuchi: You do?! (laughs)
Yone: Sometimes.
Osawa: Sometimes.
Iwata: You shouldn’t use company e-mail for that! (laughs)

Ha ha! That Iwata he’s such a joker. He was joking right? And then everyone flees to go delete their email.

Iwata Asks – Rhythm Heaven [Rhythm Heaven]

Beyonce is rich, she’s famous, she’s hot. But that doesn’t mean she gets out of working. Here’s what she had to do for a day on the set of a Nintendo DS commercial.

Playing, watching, listening to Nintendo PR handlers, look at the camera, Beyonce, look at the camera, now look at the DS, sign some DSi handhelds, tell us about your first Nintendo game, can you sing the Mario theme song, can you shill the Wii please Beyonce… it’s a full days work.

Reminds me of a dream I once had, where I was famous and doing the exact same thing. Except it was for Valkyria Chronicles, and I was paid in cupcakes…

Nintendo’s latest spokesceleb? Beyonce! She’s hopefully going to sell millions of copies of the extremely bootylicious Rhythm Heaven when it comes stateside by kicking back with her Nintendo DSi and having fun on-screen.

Beyonce’s celebrity endorsement of the Nintendo DS certainly isn’t the first. She joins other professional famous people like Nicole Kidman and Patrick Stewart in convincing non-gamers that they too should upgrade to the camera-equipped DSi.

Ms. Knowles tells Entertainment Weekly that she’s an old-school Nintendo fan, raised on Super Mario Bros. and the NES. Beyonce even claims to have a non-contractual interest in video games, with tastes ranging from Guitar Hero on the Wii to Brickbreaker on the Blackberry to the Shin Megami Tensei series. Yes, I did make that last one up.

Learn more handy Beyonce facts at EW, then impress your friends with useless trivia about celebrities!

Beyonce talks ‘Rhythm Heaven,’ ‘Guitar Hero,’ and more: An exclusive Q&A about music and videogames [EW - thanks, Jason!]