Wow, the errors are flying thick and fast in here...
Yes, this is from Konami Digital Entertainment, previous Konami America, which is run fairly separately from Konami Japan, the parent of the Bemani division which makes DrumMania, GuitarFreaks, DDR and so on. Engadget should have made this clear in the article, and realized that Konami basically invented this entire subgenre.
There are no 'hidden notes' in GuitarFreaks.
GuitarFreaks' default setting does not allow you to 'improvise': playing a note which is not on the chart is counted as a 'miss', breaking your combo and depleting your life meter. All Bemani games allow the rules (and display, scroll speed etc) to be modified in some ways (for GF / DM, through a menu system accessed by holding down the Start button when selecting a song). One of the mods available in GuitarFreaks is Light mode, which changes this rule: with Light mode enabled, you are not penalised for playing a note that's not on the chart. It still won't sound very good, though. The use of Light mode is basically considered a 'cheat' in serious play: high scores in Light mode aren't recognized in score tracking systems and it can't be used in competition.
In DrumMania the situation is exactly reversed. DrumMania's default setup allows you to hit notes not on the chart without being penalized (leading to the fairly-common tactic of spamming, or playing lots of extra notes on commonly used pads during hard sections, when trying to clear a song you're not very confident on). One of the modifications available in DM, named Tight mode, changes this to the GF default behaviour: playing non-existent notes is penalized. But the use of Tight mode isn't very common and isn't required for score tracking or tournament play (although the best players rarely actually do any extra hits).
Konami has several patents on the basic concepts involved in GF / DM. If you check the legal information for GH (1 through 3) and RB, you'll see they acknowledge (read: they licensed) Konami's patents.
FWIW, the music in GF/DM is not entirely - or even mostly - j-pop. True j-pop makes up, oh, about 20-30% of the total. It contains songs from all genres - much more varied than RB, including quite a lot of jazz and ska stuff and at least a token representation of just about all types of drumming you can vaguely reproduce on the DM kit. However, most of the music is not licensed from external bands (even external *Japanese* bands), but produced in-house at Bemani, which has extensive music production facilities and a roster of its own recording artists who work more or less full time producing music for the various Bemani games. There are a reasonable amount of licensed tracks by popular Japanese artists, and several (increasing in recent releases, and also very prevalent in the first couple of releases) by Western bands, though these are almost all covers, not originals. I think Panasonic Youth, by the Dillinger Escape Plan, is the original, though.
The X-Fi3 keeps with the company's commitment to audio fidelity, thanks to the apt-X codec, which supposedly offers audio quality similar to a wired connection when streaming. On that front, the device also handles FLAC files.
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Wow, the errors are flying thick and fast in here...
Yes, this is from Konami Digital Entertainment, previous Konami America, which is run fairly separately from Konami Japan, the parent of the Bemani division which makes DrumMania, GuitarFreaks, DDR and so on. Engadget should have made this clear in the article, and realized that Konami basically invented this entire subgenre.
There are no 'hidden notes' in GuitarFreaks.
GuitarFreaks' default setting does not allow you to 'improvise': playing a note which is not on the chart is counted as a 'miss', breaking your combo and depleting your life meter. All Bemani games allow the rules (and display, scroll speed etc) to be modified in some ways (for GF / DM, through a menu system accessed by holding down the Start button when selecting a song). One of the mods available in GuitarFreaks is Light mode, which changes this rule: with Light mode enabled, you are not penalised for playing a note that's not on the chart. It still won't sound very good, though. The use of Light mode is basically considered a 'cheat' in serious play: high scores in Light mode aren't recognized in score tracking systems and it can't be used in competition.
In DrumMania the situation is exactly reversed. DrumMania's default setup allows you to hit notes not on the chart without being penalized (leading to the fairly-common tactic of spamming, or playing lots of extra notes on commonly used pads during hard sections, when trying to clear a song you're not very confident on). One of the modifications available in DM, named Tight mode, changes this to the GF default behaviour: playing non-existent notes is penalized. But the use of Tight mode isn't very common and isn't required for score tracking or tournament play (although the best players rarely actually do any extra hits).
Konami has several patents on the basic concepts involved in GF / DM. If you check the legal information for GH (1 through 3) and RB, you'll see they acknowledge (read: they licensed) Konami's patents.
FWIW, the music in GF/DM is not entirely - or even mostly - j-pop. True j-pop makes up, oh, about 20-30% of the total. It contains songs from all genres - much more varied than RB, including quite a lot of jazz and ska stuff and at least a token representation of just about all types of drumming you can vaguely reproduce on the DM kit. However, most of the music is not licensed from external bands (even external *Japanese* bands), but produced in-house at Bemani, which has extensive music production facilities and a roster of its own recording artists who work more or less full time producing music for the various Bemani games. There are a reasonable amount of licensed tracks by popular Japanese artists, and several (increasing in recent releases, and also very prevalent in the first couple of releases) by Western bands, though these are almost all covers, not originals. I think Panasonic Youth, by the Dillinger Escape Plan, is the original, though.
There are hidden notes at least in 2-player mode of GF for home systems up until GF 5.