I bought this game the other day for a trip I was taking to Texas for work. Elite Beat Agents is a rhythm game for Nintendo's handheld and it's very, very good. In 2005, Japan released a game called Osu! Tatake! Ouenden! which was also a rhythm game, however it wasn't imported to the states. Elite Beats Agents is pretty much the US version of Osu! Tatake! Quenden!, featuring the same type of gameplay and stylus mechanics. There are a lot of popular songs that you'll recognize as you go through the career, including tracks from: Queen, Avril Lavigne, Madonna, Jackson Five, David Bowie, and many others. The songs are accompanied by cute little comic book style stories that aren't deep or anything, but provide a nice addition to keep the stylus tapping interesting. Your job as the Elite Beat Agents is to help all the characters in the stories, making sure that their stories end happily.

The way the game works is by tapping circles on the screen as a ring shrinks around them. You need to tap the screen when the ring reaches the exact border of the circle. The circles are labeled by numbers from one to nine, so that you know which circle to hit next. Accuracy is gauged by 50, 100, or 300 point bonuses. There are also other types of circles which will have paths extending from them. Once tapped, you'll have to use your stylus and follow a rolling ball around the path. This all sounds easy, but on the second and third difficulties of the game, it can get ridiculously hard.

For every beat you hit, you have a combo meter that increases and will award you a hefty amount of points when you hit the high numbers. However, the meter is also pretty unforgiving for misses beats, as your score will take a dive for only missing a few beats. For the second and third career difficulties, it becomes quite hard to recover from a consecutive number of beats missed. There's a horizontal meter at the top of the play area which will always be decreasing. Once its depleted, it's game over. Your statistics are logged and displayed after each level, along with a line graph to show where you did well and where you totally screwed up. You're given a letter rank for each song, which doesn't really mean anything special except that you're good at the song. However, the points that you accumulate throughout the career modes will raise your overall rank as agents. Besides the normal career songs, there are bonus songs to unlock as well.

Lastly, they have included multiplayer options. If you and a friend both have the game you'll have a nice selection of songs to choose from and play. If only one person has the game, you can still play through the Download Play option, however the song selection is limited. You can get more songs for the multiplayer options by beating more songs in Career Mode. Max and I played together through Download Play and it's a lot of fun.

Elite Beat Agents is awesome, one of the best games on the DS. I'm currently tapping my way through the Sweatin' career difficulty and it's kicking my ass. The game's fun though. I really don't have any complaints about it except that I wish it had more songs to play. And hey, I can never get enough of this guy. :-D