The new stages are mostly OK - the straightforward but briskly-paced Animal Acrobat stands out as a solid entry - but a lot of them don’t hold much of a candle to the old stuff.

If you’ve played those games before, there’s not a lot of new stuff to dig into. Many of the stages are entertaining…but that’s mostly because they were entertaining in their respective GBA, DS or Wii releases. Or how about the original Karateman stage, including that song with the friendly lady singing? Hole-in-One has a monkey and mandrill pitching you golf balls, and it’s a great example of how this series can take a few simple cues and stretch them into something tricky and satisfying - particularly its tougher second variant. That includes Spaceball, wherein a baseball player stands in a three-walled room in outer space and socks dingers into the void to a salsa rhythm. Tengoku was the very first game I imported, and it’s great to see some of its best and most memorable moments remastered here. That includes several from Rhythm Tengoku, the GBA original that never released outside of Japan. Megamix has 20 new stages all its own, but it’s got 50 or so more from past games in the series. The fun is mastering each hook quickly and seeing all the colourful backdrops and quirky characters along the way. There’s a bunch of short songs in every game, each with its own set of graphics and unique hook on a simple core premise: pressing (mostly) the A button in time with certain rhythmic cues. Rhythm Heaven is like the Warioware of rhythm games - it’s developed by the same Nintendo internal team that made that series, actually.

Rhythm heaven megamix perfect