Beatmania 3rdMix is a rhythm game developed by Konami. It is the third game in the beatmania series and is part of the BEMANI franchise ( which it was named after: BEatMANIa ). It is the only beatmania arcade to have an official European release. The game is played with a controller with one turn table and 5 keys, three white and two black. On the screen you will see bars moving from the top to bottom in columns representing each of the keys and the turntable. When the bars reach the judgement line it is time to scratch. Beatmania 3rdMix is the first game in the series to introduce combo count, meaning that your current combo is shown while playing and a good or less break your combo. If you get more than 10 combo your great verdicts will start flashing, but it does not award you with any bonuses. Normal and Easy mode has been added to the game, which differs in what songs can be chosen and when. Battle, Mirror and Random modifiers were added. The game features 11 songs from beatmania and beatmania 2ndMIX along with 16 new songs for a total of 27 songs.
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Imagine DanceDanceRevolution, but with your fingers pressing rectangular plastic keys and spinning a turntable to make music! beatmania is a classic rhythm game that basically gave birth to DDR itself!
beatmania 3rdMIX was my very first experience of playing beatmania on an arcade machine. I originally played beatmania GB on Gameboy when I was young, so imagine my excitement when young me discovered this arcade game at the mall with its loud sound system and lively music (hearing the actual original soundtrack compared to its chiptune renditions was MM-MMM good!)
The song selections were fine and they're all original music for the game, just that it displays the song's music genre instead of their titles at the music select screen. Also, you don't start with all the music; You start with a few easy songs for your first stage, and as you get to the next stages more songs are added in the list and they get more difficult. It forces you to play the harder songs as the easy songs get removed each stages.
The sound quality was, at the time, somewhat good. The keysounds were louder than the background music, which I think it was by design since you need to hear the actual sounds you're pressing. Still, the mixing could be better. As for the music themselves, it's a bag of mixed nuts: Some are electronic dance music that were popular at the time, some are slow music like reggae or ballad, and some are fun and upbeat songs like ska and funky jazz groove!
Looking back, this game was kinda janky in some places; Some song's charts had weird tight timing (you'll mostly get Good judgments no matter what), and some older songs had softer background music (which is hard to hear). Still, I spent so many coins on this game because of its addicting gameplay! The songs "tribe groove", "LUV TO ME THIRD-MIX" or "super highway" were so memorable to me — not because they sound good, it's because the charts were too technical and I failed a lot (lol).
Even though I liked this game, I'd still prefer beatmania ClubMIX which came out a few sequels later. Ah well... "Attack the music" is the only thing I love about beatmania 3rdMIX.