Long, long ago when Arcade Heroes first started, Matt (the owner of the site) used to post regular updates about cool arcade related stuff he would find on eBay. I have been terrible in keeping that initial tradition alive as I don’t use/check eBay very often anymore. I too often come across things I want to buy and I then end up spending more than I originally planned I as I keep finding those cool “things”.
But as I was looking around today I came across something unique enough that it’s worth a post here. I am sure that music game fans are already familiar with this game but I have never seen nor heard of these before today, a device called Flash Beats by Sega. I am not exactly sure when these were made but they look like they are a recent game. According to the auction: “[Flash beat is] a musical game requiring fast reflexes, the tubes inside the machine light up as the music plays, players need to hit the corresponding yellow buttons at the right time to send the lights back and forth to each other – get light past other player to score.”
It actually sounds like a fun two player game and the cabinet looks nothing short of awesome in my humble opinion. I would pick it up (I love weird/unique stuff like this) as it’s actually not terribly far from where I live but there is always that little nagging issue of having enough money to drop on it. 😉
Here is a video I found of the game in demo mode.
See the auction here: “Very Rare – Sega FLASH BEATS Arcade Game”
That looks rather excellent, I’d love to play it. I’m guessing that it might not be so easy to find, though.
My local Sega Park had this game back in ’99 – about a year before the DDR craze kicked off in the UK. Used to enjoy a few plays in VS mode. With rhythm games still going strong, Sega should consider a re-release or an update!
Here’s some flyers with instructions….
http://www.arcadeflyers.com/?page=thumbs&db=arcadedb&id=1628
Pong crossed with ‘Simon’?
Very cool.
Put the thing in pubs/nightclubs and it might work well.
You cant get a experience like that on a console at home!
Ah, yes. This was a very cool game I discovered my first year of college. The title has five different music genres with three songs in each genre. If you played single player, you could go through three different songs if you were decent at the game, but for the price of one game, you could do a two-player battle.
It is pretty much a musical version of Pong. A song will play loudly through the speakers and red lights will flow through the tubes (there are three difficulty levels to choose where easy starts players with one lane and gradually builds to all five; normal starts at three and builds up; and hard just begins the game with all five lanes active). Players press the yellow buttons to send a green pulse out from their side that pushes the red bar in the other direction – the green pulse slides back slowly and doesn’t allow the player to push the button again until it returns, though, so players can’t just hammer on the buttons wildly and expect to win. Obviously, your object is to keep the red bars away and make them flow past your opponent.
To go with the musical aspect of the game, if the player strikes a red bar on beat 2 of a song’s phrase, the bar will stop very briefly, begin flashing and then rocket at your opponent at a very high speed. This also adds a bonus to that specific bar – if players can rally a bar on beat 2 back and forth, it will then be worth a far larger number of points instead of the basic one point per missed bar. When playing solo, the object is to smash away the green bars that fill the opposite playfield; if you do a smash hit on beat 2, the player depletes a far larger amount of the bar from the playfield.
I’ve seen this game at a fair number of locations in my area, so I don’t know if I would agree with the “very rare” in the eBay listing. I don’t think it is necessarily common, but Flash Beats is a very fun game that I think is extremely underrated.
this game is at Arcade Infinity
I remember my local Intencity had one of these. It was a piece they moved between locations fairly regularly.
My friend Steve bought one of these.
Gemini Arcade Palace here in Las Vegas has one too. It’s a uniquely eye catching and fun playing game!