DrumMania XG - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Music video game

A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, is a video game where the gameplay is meaningfully and often almost entirely oriented around the player's interactions with a musical score or individual songs...

series produced by Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc., where colored notes travel down the screen which correspond with color coded parts of an electronic drum set. The player must hit the drum parts when the notes reach the bottom of the screen in order to fill in missing drum parts from a song.

Controller

DrumMania XG is played using a controller designed to imitate a drum set. Upgraded from the old set -which consists of hi-hat

Hi-hat

A hi-hat, or hihat, is a type of cymbal and stand used as a typical part of a drum kit by percussionists in R&B, hip-hop, disco, jazz, rock and roll, house, reggae and other forms of contemporary popular music.- Operation :...

, snare drum

Snare drum

The snare drum or side drum is a melodic percussion instrument with strands of snares made of curled metal wire, metal cable, plastic cable, or gut cords stretched across the drumhead, typically the bottom. Pipe and tabor and some military snare drums often have a second set of snares on the bottom...

, bass drum

Bass drum

Bass drums are percussion instruments that can vary in size and are used in several musical genres. Three major types of bass drums can be distinguished. The type usually seen or heard in orchestral, ensemble or concert band music is the orchestral, or concert bass drum . It is the largest drum of...

, high tom

Tom-tom drum

A tom-tom drum is a cylindrical drum with no snare.Although "tom-tom" is the British term for a child's toy drum, the name came originally from the Anglo-Indian and Sinhala; the tom-tom itself comes from Asian or Native American cultures...

, low tom and cymbal, a second bass pedal, a floor tom and a left cymbal are added, resembling a professional drum set.

The pads are actually a modified version of the DTXPRESS electronic drum kit

Drum kit

A drum kit is a collection of drums, cymbals and often other percussion instruments, such as cowbells, wood blocks, triangles, chimes, or tambourines, arranged for convenient playing by a single person ....

made by Yamaha Corporation which is available in almost any musical chain store.

To the right of these pads, there are six buttons, Up, Down, Left, Right, Start and Help which are used to select, decide or request for help in the selection screens. In those cases, the Left button is assigned to the snare drum pad, Right to the floor tom, and Start to the left cymbal.

Gameplay

The screen setup is simple. On the left side, notes scroll vertically downwards and a short video clip for each song is displayed in the right side of the screen/the back of the note chart. Individual notes are represented by small colored bars that scroll downward in the columns. To play the correct note, the player must hit one or two of these pads and/or step the pedals when the note bars reach the yellow line.

The player's accuracy is judged for each note played, and while the individual note judgments have changed throughout the series, the current system uses Perfect, Great, Good, Poor, and Miss to evaluate performance of each note. Ratings of Poor or Miss will deplete the player's "Excite Gauge", while accurate play will replenish it.

If the Excite Gauge is emptied completely, the game ends. Players will be able to play anywhere from three to five songs depending on the game's configuration, with the potential to earn one or two additional stages in certain versions of the game if performance is good enough.

At the completion of a song, players are given a letter rank for their performance which can range anywhere from E to A, as well as S and SS depending on how well the song was played, and how the particular release of the game being played computes ranks.

Session Linking

One of the major selling points of DrumMania is its ability to be linked to another of Konami's Bemani games, GuitarFreaksXG. This allows up to 3 players to play together, the music will play from both games, and the players' guitar and drum sounds will be relayed between the two games as well.

Hardware

DrumMania XG runs on Windows XP Embedded based hardware (which has also been adopted by other Konami arcade games).

External links

Simulators

DTXMania, a popular simulator for DM/GF.
DigiBand, another simulator for DM/GF, currently the only one available for Linux.
Drum Trainer, a simulator that works with MIDI files.

Hardware information

Windows XP Embedded

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