Bemuse: Online, web-based rhythm game

If you feel this game is hard, yes it is. This is yet another game based on the Be-Music Source (BMS) format [1], which started out as a Beatmania (and later IIDX) simulator and still continues to coevolve with its commercial cousin. Beatmania IIDX is known for its notorious difficulty and BMS, with its non-commercial nature, is no better.

In serious music video games my input should feel sufficiently synchronized to audiovisual elements; smaller latency is better, but consistent latency is much better. In this regard Bemuse is not yet very serious, although I should note many music video games are not serious in my opinion anyway. But I once played Bemuse years ago and it was entirely unplayable; today it feels much better and would be already playable if the judgement were more lenient. There is a hope.

(Pro tip: Make sure to calibrate the latency in the options first. The default is 0ms, which is almost always incorrect, so this can make a huge difference.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be-Music_Source

Really slick! But the tutorial is way too hard. Give me some basic quarter notes so I can catch the rhythm

"OK! Now you know how to play! AAaaaaand, GO!"

<Max 300 starts rolling down the screen>

I've played a lot of arcade Beatmania(mostly BMIII/BM the Final) and I can say that while this does play BMS files, it's not an ideal experience - web browsers have not prioritized audio latency historically, which is crucial to music games with keysound feedback, and on a touchscreen, there's no tactility so you're going to lose your finger placement a lot.

I do play and enjoy Taiko-web from time to time, though. It is possible to get it good enough for casual play, especially with lenient judgment.

This reminds me of Frets on Fire, a one-man free, open-source videogame built with Python. I used to play hours on this, handling my keyboard like a guitar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frets_on_Fire

Edit: apparently, there was a fork in 2008 called FoFix, that looks maintained https://github.com/fofix/fofix