There’s plenty of content and plenty to unlock, but Megamix is just such a lovely game. These stages aren’t brilliant, but they’re different, and ultimately, holding them up against the remixed, remastered stages that I’m familiar with, they never stood a chance.

Initially it sounds easy, but once the timer and/or audio is removed, it makes it harder. The first you encounter requires you to flip a coin and catch it after three seconds. The easiest of the three difficulties costs the most coins, so the game actively encourages you to play the harder version which is, well… it’s hard. Here, you get to play a genuinely tricky coin toss challenge, if you fancy it. Much of Megamix is about collecting high scores and coins, which are not only for unlocking collectibles in the game’s cafe, but also to help choose the difficulty of each area’s final stage. After the third or fourth area, it just becomes frustrating to have your playtime elongated by the story, a tale that is something to do with a weird creature trying to get back to Heaven World, and the aforementioned characters needing help to get their flow back… honestly, I don’t know why they actually bothered. Each character appears and gives the same spiel about how he or she needs help doing something, which unlocks the four minigames you need to complete to pass the area. It’s actually challenging, too, to get the timing spot on, which is welcome, because elsewhere the initial playthrough offers a low difficulty barrier as you play through the daft story, which sadly offers itself and more of a barrier to getting on with the actual fun of playing, than anything meaningful. It doesn’t stop it being fun, of course, and there are new games as part of the package – as you’d expect.įruit Basket has a catchy, jaunty tune playing as you punch various fruits from the ground into basketball hoops. But here it feels ever so slightly draining at times, because it’s just the same minigame from years gone by with better quality visuals.

Now look, that may be a harsh criticism, because that’s a music game, really, isn’t it? Whether it’s Guitar Hero, Rhythm Paradise Megamix, or Amplitude, you’re doing the same thing over and over, only to a different song. There’s little variation in how you actually play each challenge, and the difference only comes from the music and the visuals. I’ve played that too, and in a sense, we’ve all kind of played all of them, because they are all very similar. Or there’s Rhythm Tweezers, where you have to pull the whiskers out of an onion man’s face in time with the music. The second I played it, I knew what I was doing – I’ve played it before. The better you do, the greater your score. This is a minigame that has you hold the button down to fill a robot with fuel, some large, some medium, in time with the music. Take Fillbots, for example, Rhythm Heaven on DS. Unfortunately, being a greatest hits means that even if you’ve played any of the games in passing, you’re going to have your memory synapses firing as you play the minigames that make up Megamix. Nintendo are excellent at doing what The Simpsons did in its best years: taking something that is very child-friendly, and somehow making it appeal to all ages, far beyond what it should, and Rhythm Paradise Megamix does exactly this, only with slightly diminishing returns.īeing, as it is, a best of collection of the three previous Rhythm Tengoku games, if you’re a fan of the series, you’re going to know exactly what is going on here. I have a serious soft spot for 3DS rhythm games, right back to importing Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan for the DS back in 2005, and I tell you that because, in part, I want to show off my import credentials, but also because it’s important you know that these kind of games aren’t for everyone.

Rhythm heaven megamix ds