Taiko Drum Master Hands-On

The Taiko no Tatsujin (Drum Master) series first appeared in Japanese arcades in 2001, and since the series' PlayStation 2 debut in 2002, more than 2 million copies of the Taiko games have found homes in Japan. To date there have been six Taiko arcade games and five home versions released in Japan, but Taiko Drum Master will be the first in the series to get a North American release when it arrives in stores toward the end of this year. We recently had an opportunity to get hands-on with the game (and its miniature Japanese drum controller) and had a lot of fun with both its regular arcade mode and minigames.

In the arcade mode, Taiko Drum Master will require you to bang on the taiko controller in time with whichever of the game's 30 music tracks you've opted for. The setup will be pretty familiar to you if you've ever played a rhythm action game before, although the gameplay is quite different, at least when using the taiko controller. Colored circles telling you what to do move from right to left across the screen--red circles mean you need to hit the center of the drum, blue circles mean you need to hit the rim, and yellow ovals mean you need to execute a drum roll for a certain duration. You'll also notice larger versions of the red and blue circles occasionally, which require you to use both sticks (to hit the left and right sensors) simultaneously.

In the single-player game, you'll notice that you really play only in the top half of the screen, while the lower portion displays all manner of brightly colored characters dancing along to the beat. The animations at the bottom of the screen will change depending on how well you're doing, but what that half of the screen is really intended for is a second player--preferably armed with another taiko controller. The two-player mode is definitely competitive in nature, but nothing that you do will hinder your opponent's progress or anything like that--it's really more a case of just having two people play the single-player game simultaneously. With that said, you'll effectively be playing a duet, since the different sequences you're required to bang out complement each other perfectly, in tracks like "Killer Queen," "Tubthumping," Rossini's "William Tell Overture," and the "Brave Sword, Braver Soul" theme from Soul Calibur II.

In addition to the arcade mode, Taiko Drum Master will feature three different minigames: watermelon eating contest, fireworks festival, and reach the helicopter. Like the arcade mode, all the minigames are best played competitively rather than solo, but, unlike the arcade mode, the accompanying music has no impact on the gameplay whatsoever. The minigames are just as varied as their names suggest (as varied as they could be, given that they're all played by banging a drum, in any case) and they seem destined to prove popular at late-night parties for the rhythm-impaired. The goal in watermelon eating contest, predictably, will be to have your taiko (they're named Don and Katsu, incidentally) eat a number of watermelons within a time limit--to take bites and spit out seeds you'll just have to hit the drum repeatedly, but to avoid the blindfolded boy who's swinging at you with a baseball bat, you'll also need to hit the left and right sides of the rim occasionally. Fireworks festival requires you to ignite fireworks by banging on the drum while avoiding bombs that are posing as fireworks by hitting the rims. Reach the helicopter, which was our favorite of the three, requires you to build a tower of dogs that's tall enough to reach a helicopter in the skies above--the catch is that there are strong, unpredictable gusts of wind blowing in from the left and right of the screen, so you'll need to have your dog tower lean and run into the wind (by banging the taiko rim on the left or right) so it doesn't topple over.

No exact release date has been announced for Taiko Drum Master at this time, but Namco has assured us that the game (bundled with a taiko controller for $59.99) will arrive in stores in plenty of time for Christmas. We look forward to bringing you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available.