Gitaroo Man

"How Well Strung Are You Gitaroo Man?"

Gitaroo Man is one of the most unique and enchanting games on the PlayStation 2 and one of the most complex and noteworthy bemani games to enter the UK ever. A bold statement I know, but for once, you will not breeze through a bemani game within an hour, and you will definitely not find yourself thinking, “God this song is awful!” I will explain…
Gitaroo Man puts you as U1, a young boy with no self-esteem or confidence. One day, his dog Puma, tells him of his powers and destiny and reluctantly poor U1 is dragged kicking and screaming through 10 levels of pure mayhem.
To play Gitaroo Man is a simple enough affair. In the centre of the screen is a circle with a radar cone passing out, which through a song, a wave passes through the circle. Your job, well half of it anyway, is it keep the radar in the circle using the analogue stick. Even more adventurous is the fact that you must press the circle button when the lines blobs hit the centre circle. Confused? Well once it’s on screen, you’ll understand what I mean. Correctly doing this gives the opponent damage. But they aren’t prepared to take it lying down. Your opponents, ranging from aliens to your potential girlfriend, decide that they’ll unleash a horrible attack of quick fire button pressing fits. Keeping up is a challenging task… and that’s just the normal mode.
Once completed, you’ll then get the even more horrifying expert mode, which gives you a very small life span! If you can complete this, and get all the extra tokens you can collect, you can honestly say you are a bemani king.
The great thing about this wonderful game is the pure diversity of its songs. Yes, a guitar is used in them all, but whether it’s a pure rock fest, boogie on down 70’s style, or shockingly a love song done acoustically, you’ll fine the tunes are infectious and the melodies are stronger than many of the strictly dance only bemani games offer.
If you’ve always sneered at this genre of games, I suggest you give this a quick go before you sneer again, for this isn’t your run of the mill game at all, there’s something lurking underneath that will draw you in and keep you hooked for hours. All that praise and I haven’t even mentioned the fact it has a 4 player mode…pure addiction!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/03, Updated 06/30/03