DrumMania XG

DrumMania XG (ドラムマニア) (abbreviated DMXG) is a music video game 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. Seven pads are arrayed from left to right for the hi-hat, snare drum, high tom, low tom, floor tom, left and right cymbals. There is also two foot pedals for the bass drum or ride cymbal near the snare and the left cymbal. During play, the player hits the pads and steps on the pedals.

The pads are actually a modified version of the DTXPRESS electronic drum kit 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 note scroll in DrumMania is in essence a drum tablature timed with the music and placed vertically.

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).

Drummania simulators


A handful of DrumMania simulators have been created for use on PCs, the most popular of which is called DTXMania (automated English translation), which also supports GuitarFreaks. It can be controlled using the computer keyboard, any USB device that can act as a joystick, or any MIDI instrument such as a MIDI keyboard or professional quality electronic drum kit. While DTXMania is compatible with Rock Band and Guitar Hero series drum sets, they do not have enough drum pads to play many of the DrumMania songs correctly unless more sets are added. DTXMania supports up to 8 drum pads and makes a distinction between open and closed Hi-Hat. Using DTXCreator from the web page it is possible to create playable songs from any mp3/ogg files if the drum tablature is available.

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.

Community

 * GDAmania, a Drummania/Guitarfreaks community website.

Hardware information

 * Windows XP Embedded

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