There’s a huge difference between arcade and home music gaming, in that home needs to comply with either the controller or mouse/keyboard while the arcade controls can just go nuts. Tap the screen with rubber-tipped drumsticks, twist a giant ring around a circular monitor, have more buttons and dials than a 50s sci-fi control panel, or forgo the use of display almost entirely and have little screens on the buttons themselves. It’s the wild west in the musical arcade, and it will not be constrained by anything as pedestrian as a unified control scheme. Spin Rhythm XD was created for home use first and foremost but has always felt like an arcade refugee, with a control system that adapts perfectly to a standard gamepad despite being completely at home on (and fully compatible with) a midi controller.
Spinning and Tapping Into the Musical Night
Like any good music game, the notes come down the lane and the object is to knock them away to the beat, but Spin Rhythm’s quirk is that the red and blue notes need to be lined up to a giant dial at the bottom of the screen. The color-blocks on the dial fill up half a lane apiece, and left and right on the controller rotates the dial to keep them in line with the notes. Little notes just need to fall into the matching color, nothing fancy needed, while big notes are cleared with a well-timed tap of the A button. Hold-notes are a colored stripe stretching away from a large note, frequently arcing across the entire lane and back again. Finally for Normal difficulty the entire lane can light up, with arrows at the start indicating it’s time to give the controller a flick to spin the wheel in the indicated direction, and when it lights up gold that’s the cue to scratch the spin back and forth. Hard adds a couple of new elements in the form of green lines running across the lane to tap away with the right bumper, plus timing the release of the hold notes, but the gist of it is to tag the red notes with the dial’s red blocks and the blue notes with the the blue blocks.
Spin Rhythm Twirls Into Early Access
Spin Rhythm XD initially launched in Early Access back in 2019 and got a full release just last year, which was the cue to start the move to the consoles. The Switch version came out last year, and today it’s finally getting dropped on PS4 and PS5 not only in the standard format but also with VR support, and that’s added to the PC version as well. The game plays perfectly into two of VR’s strengths, which are unique control schemes and zero-lag input, both of which Spin Rhythm takes full advantage of. One hand controls the dial and the other times the hits, with the large notes needing a tap inside the lane and the green bars cleared by an outside strike. It takes practice and coordination to clear anything on Hard with better than a D rank (or not bomb out entirely), especially while figuring out which hand needs to do what, but a little familiarity with the song goes a long way towards untangling a crowded note map.
It’s been a long road for Spin Rhythm XD and doesn’t seem likely to be over yet. Today also sees the release of the Chillhop DLC, which is the second major song collection to be released separately from the base game’s sixty tracks, and it seems fairly likely there’s going to be more on the way. So long as the notes keep streaming and the dial keeps spinning there’s always room for more songs, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to see what’s coming next.
