Howdy howdy y'all, it's your bestest and most favoritest star in all of Steamywood, DA NOISE! Can you smell what the Noise ain't cookin'?! Cause I can sure smell what Peppino was cookin', yowie wowie what a stench. This game blew so much hot ass before I showed up didn't it?! Could ya believe it?! They left me as just the third boss. THE THIRD BOSS. Me?! The Noise?! Boise, Idaho's favorite boi with the most poise?! There's a new director in town baby, and the academy's gonna be unprepared for this greatness. They're gonna give me a gajillion Oscars, and the Dorito Pope will be giving me every game of the year award for every year going forward and every past year too, because everything else is gonna be trash in comparison. Why bother making anything else? The Noise is here.

Woag. lights giant cigar with fancy zippo lighter with his own face on it

You see, The Noise don't play by anyone's rules, no sir/ma'am/mx. When The Noise plays golf, golf is actually played by The Noise. Numbers are made up and points don't matter, so who cares? Every burg is a primo burg when The Noise cooks. If you're not trying, you're not cheating. What if The Noise doesn't feel like racing? What about that ya stupid rocking horse? How about I give you a nuclear wedgie instead and beat the prize out of ya?! I ain't deliverin' no pizza, ya damn gnomes can get it yourself. That shit is positively abhorrent I must say! (sips tea) I'll destroy every house that actively orders that garbage. Don't cry to me when you see your fancy gnome cottage go flying to the third moon of Jupiter. YOU DID THIS! Take it from me kid, you'll go a lot further in this business when you see it the noisy way.

Ya see, I ain't like that lousy pastry chef, I'm a handsome and incredibly tall man with a college degree and a very beautiful girlfriend. I taught that Tony Bird guy how to do the 900 McNuttly Twist so he could become a Pro Skater, and I always know to shoot first and ask questions later. The personification of chaos, a chaos that Jack Garland wants none of. However you gotta know kid, that since you're no longer playing a shit chef with shit expectations, there comes much bigger demands from someone as POWERFUL and GOOD LOOKING as I am. You see, The Noise ALWAYS S-Ranks at minimum, I don't care what my producers say about being nicer about the lower ranks. I took a massive paycut to say what I fuckin' said if you ever D-rank in my general vicinity. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE IN FOR IF THAT SCENARIO HAPPENS, CAPEESH?!? A-rank may be acceptable to you, but if it were up to me it'd stand for ASS! I take nothing else, ya hear?! Now if you excuse me, the GF is a-waitin' for me. Don't be having any skillet issues on me, or there's gonna be a bit of a crockpot conundrum.

HIT MY MUSIC.

With Love to his adoring fans,
Your boi the Noise
XOXOXOXOXOXO

P.S. Woag.

We
Oughta
Assbeat
Gnomes

In the running for one of the greatest console rhythm games ever made, with most of its major competition coming from other Bemani ports or other games in the series. DJMax Portable and the rest of the PSP series holds up so well that when people ask "how do I get into rhythm games", I'll send them here.

There's a misinterpretation of what rhythm games mean to me, and what other people might think of when the genre is approached, and that's mostly due to a lack of clarity within the genre definition itself. You have Parappa-esque rhythm games with more of a focus on narrative. While I adore these games in their own right, they're a different beast than the Beatmania format of "here's a collection of a bunch of unrelated songs, see how good you can do". The Beatmania format emphasizes developing a skill over a long period of time and self improvement while getting to listen to a variety of good music. It's not the sort of game you play through in one sitting. Harder songs will ask the player to replay them, or play other songs to improve their skill until they can hope to clear the song fully. It's similar to the appeal that shmup players get trying to 1cc a game like DoDonPachi, but in shorter bursts and with less focus on memorization and strategy.

DJMax fits into that later category. There are three different playstyles (4 button, 6 button and 8 button) and a variety of difficulties within those playstyles. The onboarding process isn't a nightmare in the same way that Pop'n Music would be, but the high end of the game is still brutal and progress through the tracklist still feels like an achievement. The 55 songs that the game comes with aren't licensed tracks. This sounds like a negative, but it's actually a series selling point. The "original" (many songs were taken from previous rhythm games like DJMax Online) songs are fully keynoted (when you press a button, it corresponds with a noise that would play in the song), cover a variety of genres, all have unique, animated music videos to accompany them and are great tracks in their own right. If I started talking about the songs individually, it would just devolve into me going through all 55 songs and saying "Yeah, this is a classic rhythm game banger". They're fun to play. The songs have a distinct personality to them, and playing them multiple times creates an attachment to the music that wouldn't work as well if the game was more of a disposable product. Blythe is my favorite rhythm game song ever, and I say this after a years long trek across the entire Bemani catalogue. Once you get behind the wheel and let this game claw itself into you, even if you're not familiar with the genre or see videos of people playing a difficult song in a rhythm game and think to yourself "I could never do this", it'll change how you approach video games fundamentally. It did for me.

The rest of the game's package holds up to the same level of quality as the setlist. There's different modifiers for how you want to play the song. There's tons of unlockables. There's customization elements to the UI years before we'd see that meaningfully in the IIDX series. If you had this game back in 2006, when getting your hands on rhythm games stateside was much harder than it is today (outside of Guitar Hero and a few compromised Bemani PS1/PS2 ports), this game could have lasted a years worth of bus trips, waiting rooms and lunch breaks. If Mother 3 didn't come out this same year, this would be my GOTY of 2006. If you have a PSP laying around, grab this game and try out a few songs. It might break your hands.