Hands-On: Rhythm Heaven for Nintendo DSi

If you like Guitar Hero and Rock Band then Rhythm Heaven for the recently-released Nintendo DSi is going to blow your damn mind. Known in Japan as Rhythm Tengoku Gold and in Europe as Rhythm Paradise, Rhythm Heaven is a musically inclined gamer’s dream, using taps, flicks, holds and slides with the stylus (or your finger) to perform a wide variety of mini-game “tasks,” such as filling up robots with fuel or playing ping pong, all done in-sync with the music. If you get too much off the beat or miss beats entirely, you lose.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. The various mechanics of the gameplay are easy to grasp, and there is a tutorial at the beginning of each separate mini-game to teach you the controls. But once the beat starts jumping, things can get hectic in no time. Which is precisely why you need the tutorials, because this game is hard as hell.

As someone who’s played the drums in everything from orchestras to rock bands for more than 10 years, I thought this game would be a synch. Boy, was I wrong.

While most of the music is beat-heavy and easy to keep time with, I found the rhythms that dictate how you perform the various task a quite challenging, but not impossible to master after a few (sometimes many) tries.

Because the whole thing revolves around the music and doing things in time with the music, it was often easier to simply close my eyes and listen to the song, rather than pay attention to whatever basically unimportant animations were happening on-screen.

The game has been altered little from its Japanese original, so some of the song lyrics sound a little lame in English. But all-in-all, this is a fantastic and ridiculously fun, addicting game. So if you like music, video games and quirky Janpanese stuff, you’re going to love Rhythm Heaven.

Price: $29.99; Buy Here!