Games That Time Forgot: Mad Maestro! (2002)

11/4/2009 9:04 AM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 1

Looking back from the end of the decade, the rhythm-game market of 2002 is practically unrecognizable. This was a time before Rock Band, before Guitar Hero, before even Karaoke Revolution pushed the genre toward the actual performance of recent, popular music. In 2002, rhythm games were dominated by follow-along gameplay and quirky Japanese musical influences. The J-pop-heavy Dance Dance Revolution series was at the top of its popularity, and occasional press-the-button-in-time-with-the-music Japanese imports like Parappa the Rapper, Space Channel 5 and Gitaroo Man dotted the landscape. In each case, following along to the beat of unfamiliar Japanese-inspired music served to limit the genre's appeal to a small niche.

Eidos' Mad Maestro!, a budget $20 release under the company's short-lived "Fresh Games" label, wasn't destined to explode this niche. How could it, with a focus on classical music, one of the only musical genres even less accessible to an American audience than J-pop? But for those paying attention, it was a unique and exciting take on a young genre that has had some subtle but profound influences on its future direction.

Years before Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents would make the concept popular, Mad Maestro! focused on a small group of young musicians devoted to helping the helpless (an unlucky-in-love lothario, an audience-free circus ringmaster, etc ) through the power of music. And this was powerful music ... when performed well, it could literally bring the world to life, making trees sprout and buildings bounce up and down on their foundations. When performed badly, it could be disastrous, infusing the environment with a gloomy black haze that seemed destined to engulf the entire world in sadness.

How to prevent such a fate? Simply follow the rhythm. As the fresh-faced conductor of the group, you were in charge of leading the orchestra by tapping out a consistent beat with the controller. To aid in this, the game provided nothing but a few small white circles arranged in a diamond or triangle pattern (depending on the time signature), and a glowing blue ball that danced between them to indicate the beat. These circles danced around the stage as the music changed tempo, separating and contracting in a beautiful, almost hypnotic dance.

What made Mad Maestro!'s gameplay relatively unique for the time was the fact that you were actually performing the music, rather than just following along to a pre-recorded music track. If you failed to hit a note circle at the right time, the symphony performance would play out of sync. If you put the controller down and stopped tapping along, the orchestra would stop completely, waiting for you to pick up your conducting duties again. This kind of direct response loop would become common in games like Guitar Hero, but at the time in America, it was limited to niche games like Harmonix's much-ignored Frequency.

Another unique and somewhat maddening facet of the gameplay focused on the PlayStation 2's analog face buttons. Most PS2 owners could easily go through their whole time with the system without ever realizing that the X, O, square and triangle buttons on the DualShock 2 could actually register different levels of thumb pressure. Mad Maestro! players learned this fact rather quickly, though, as each button press not only had to fit the rhythm but also the volume of the song being played. The interface gave color-coded prompts to help indicate which notes needed a full-on hard press and which just needed a soft, slow tap, but this didn't help much with the actual physical difficulty of modulating thumb force. The difference between a "soft" and a "medium" button-press was so small that it required some maddeningly fine motor control. The difficulty wasn't helped by the fact that the game could be incredibly unforgiving -- just a few missed notes were enough to send you to the verge of failure.

But this difficulty did serve one purpose: It forced you to learn the music. By the time you'd struggled your way through to that elusive "Bravo" at the end of a song, that song was ingrained in your soul. You knew every tempo change, every horn entrance, every quiet pianissimo and rolling crescendo, because you had to in order to succeed. Much like drumming on Rock Band makes it impossible not to pick out the drum part in any song on the radio, Mad Maestro! makes it impossible to listen to any well known classical tune without imagining the conductor keeping the beat and bringing in each new instrument as it comes. In terms of its ability to foster musical appreciation, and in term of sheer uniqueness, Mad Maestro! is still unparalleled in the music-game genre.

Check out more Games That Time Forgot.