Sound Voltex Is Bemani's Most Mind Blowing Musical Game Yet

If you're familiar with musical games, you're probably familiar with the Bemani brand, a subsidiary of Konami focused on musical games. Their most notable franchises include the massively successful DDR series, Pop 'N Music and Beatmania, as well as creating instrument-centric titles like Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania, which ultimately inspired Guitar Hero and even Rock Band. Sound Voltex (Now in it's second installment) represents the next step for the company, playing like a completely cracked out version of Beatmania with even more complexity in the form of four white buttons, two green buttons and two knobs that need to be pressed and turned to the beat of the music.



Witnessing the high level play in this game is like witnessing a full kaleidoscope in effect, as I nearly can't tell how on earth you'd be able to master a game with this many elements to it. A very cool feature about Sound Voltex has to do with Bemani's embracing of their community's UGC (User generated content), with an initiative called Sound Voltex Floor allowing users to submit their custom tracks and key layouts for a chance to get their tracks incorporated into the game. Considering the communities that have popped out from the tail end of Bemani product cycles like the open source StepMania project, I couldn't be happier to see them incorporate their community into their products like this. Let's just hope this project makes the jump overseas at some point, that is assuming that we can even handle this level of complexity.