Hardware: Konami System 573 Digital
MAMBO A GO GO is a one-off arcade rhythm game by Konami, as part of their BEMANI rhythm game franchise. This game is pretty notable for its visual style, as well as TOMOSUKE (of Orange Lounge fame) being the sound director.
Similarly to many BEMANI series being played with some sort of instrument, MAMBO A GO GO utilizes 3 conga drums. Each has a large main area, as well as two smaller areas that can be hit. The main part is used as a button across all difficulties, while as you go up difficulties, the smaller sections will be used as well.
When the game starts, you're given a menu to select a difficulty. This changes the amount of note lanes that will be in play (Easy only uses the main 'button' for each drum, Normal uses all 3 but only for the left drum, and Hard uses all 3 for each drum, making for 9 'buttons'.)
After this, the game proceeds as any typical arcade rhythm game, where you have a song select, you play a song, and you move on to the next one out of 3. However, something interesting this game does is that it has a system to access a hidden song.
To get to the hidden song, you have to collect 5 Lucky Coins. The game always displays the amount of Lucky Coins collected, even during the attract mode when no one is playing. If you finish a song with enough HOT or DELICIOUS judgements, a song on the next song select will have a Lucky Coin icon on its jacket. Play it, and a specific note will give you a Lucky Coin when hit. The amount of Lucky Coins collected isn't reset between sessions, and it's impossible to collect enough on a single play, as you can only play 3 songs per play. Once 5 Lucky Coins have been collected, you'll be able to play the Extra Stage after the main 3 songs finish. This song only has 1 difficulty (utilizing all 9 'buttons', though you can't fail out mid-song), and it replaces the song select with a character select. Depending on the character you select, a different background animation will play out.
This extra song, "One Minutes Kitchen Battle!" is the game's main theme, which can also be heard on the attract mode's title FMV. This song was later extended and arranged into "100sec. Kitchen Battle!!", which was used in many of Konami's more popular BEMANI series. Another Orange Lounge song, "La brise d'été" originates from this game as well.
This game, similarly to other BEMANI games at the time, also has several things accessed by hitting the drums to form a certain code.
On the difficulty select, you can hover over the Hard difficulty and mash the right drum a bit to switch it into Very Hard, which contains an exclusive song named "Krank heit" that's only found in this mode, and has never been seen in any other BEMANI game.
A bunch of other codes can be entered on the song select to activate different modifiers, such as Left-Center-Right-Left-Center-Right activating random notes.
The game was planned to be localized outside of Japan with the name of Mambo King, but this never came to fruition.
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
