Rock'n Tread series....never heard of it. Opinions?

[Pakwan Kenobi]

Can anyone here describe the gameplay mechanics and/or music for the Rock'n series of arcade games? I have never heard of this music game series, and I wanted to know if it was worth downloading the games or the music. As a baseline, I actually played Technic Beat and Paca Paca Passion, and enjoyed them, so I'm pretty generous when considering music in a rhythm-based video game.

Thanks in advance.
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[Agent J]

It's funny you should mention Paca Paca Passion, because the Rock'n series is somewhat similar. Oddly enough, the two games weren't made by the same company. Anyway, the Rock'n series has the same "frame scrolling down over stationary notes" as opposed to Bemani and other music games where the notes themselves are what's moving. In Rock'n Tread, you choose whether you want to play Keyboard, Lead Guitar, or Bass Guitar, and then select a song. The song list is somewhat more impressive than I expected, consisting mostly of J-Pop. The songs I've recognized in there include Be Together (also showed up in DDR covered by Bambee), Hide's Pink Spider, Love Phantom from B'z, Judy and Mary's Sobakasu, and a couple other J-Pop songs that I didn't actually know but had seen on Beatmania GB games.

At any rate, the game play is pretty boring, IMHO. I'm not personally a fan of the way the notes are displayed. All too often I would miss notes at the very bottom or top of the screen because my eyes moved around too much. From what I can gather, as the frame scrolls over the notes, you have a guitar-esque pick lever and a foot pedal to manipulate. The pick controls the guitar/bass/keyboard, the foot pedal the drums. However, I was playing the game on an emulator and thus these mechanics simply ended up as button presses. I'm not totally sure on this, however, since I can't find any good pics of the cabinet for verification. I discovered this reading some of the Japanese in-game instructions. Another thing I must mention regarding playing it on an emulator: no sound. The sound ROMs are either incorrectly dumped or nonexistent, and when I try to play the game, I get nothing but a constant static hiss in my speakers. Anyway, there was a home port of the game, Rock'n Megastage for PS2, which had enhanced graphics and I believe a bigger song list and came with a special foot pedal controller. I've seen it floating around on eBay if you're really interested. But overall, it's not worth much more a few minutes of play or spending much money on IMHO.