Konami Testing New Bemani Game Museca

Konami Testing New Bemani Game Museca

Although there has been much speculation about Konami’s stance toward to the arcade side of their company recently, Konami has recently shown their continued interest in the industry (at least in the Japanese market) with their latest music and rhythm game on location testing in Akihabara.

Museca is part of the Bemani series and incorporates many features that players like about vaious music machines. It launched on 19th June at the game center and Konami has launched a teaser site for the machine as well.
The cabinet uses a white, dynamic design which lots of diamond shapes, etc., features a large vertical LCD panel, and houses a big five button interface (similar to other games such as Neon FM) however these buttons also rotate or spin which adds an extra game play dynamic for players.

The game uses characters that give players gifts or ‘perks’ to do things like recover HP, which players can lose if they play poorly. Apparently, the game play also incorporates a foot-operated pedal, which will be interesting to see how that is used in the game. All in all, there are three distinguished types of actions: press the buttons, spin the buttons/turntables, and hit the foot pedal.

The game play follows suit in that players must try to hit the notes at the right time in order to win points and pass the song. Museca has added game play features such as Grafica and gifts though, which makes gameplay a little more interesting. In the game players can choose up to three Grafica assist characters and each character has a special effect gift, which I assume can be used once the “Grafica Gift Gage” is full or full enough, as this builds up during play – once the gage is full players step on the foot pedal to activate the gift.

There is some more information about how these gifts work, such as having positive and negative effects and being able to cancel gifts once activated, but the details are thin at the moment. Hopefully more information will become available following the testing or during the second half of the year as we gear up for another monster round of trade shows in a few months time.

You can check out the Museca website here.

Images and news via: 4gamer.net