After a long drought of few interesting games for the DS, I find myself with copies of Contact, Phoenix Wright 2, and Elite Beat Agents—and I never even got that far in Megaman ZX yet. While I put off starting Contact until I finished a book, and haven't cracked the law books with Contact in play, I couldn't help but try out Elite Beat Agents as soon as I got it.

If you liked Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, it's definitely worth playing. The music selections, while not what I would have chosen, are good: pop-punk like "Sk8er Boi," "Makes No Difference," and "The Anthem" are definitely the right mood. While I wouldn't actively listen to "YMCA," I admit it's great for rhythm gaming.
The Game|Life article teases at the ending, and having played through it on ☆☆ Cruisin' (the "Normal" difficulty, though I feel Ouendan and EBA on "Hard" are the real Ouendan and EBA), I can say it's a great ending for this game. There are interesting narrative differences in how the last challenges are presented in EBA compared to Ouendan; I don't want to spoil the ending, though, so I hope it suffices to say EBA doesn't play quite as strongly to my argument about the role of personal responsibility as in Ouendan's story, though the very end serves up just as much kandou.
My biggest disappointment so far has nothing to do with the game itself. Recently I swore off the iTunes Music Store, due to boring technorighteous reasons I won't bother explaining here, and switched to Emusic. Playing on the train this morning, I decided I wanted to build a playlist of the EBA songs, since listening to the Ouendan soundtrack helped improve my game so much. Unfortunately, not even the first song I searched for—Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat"—is in Emusic. In fact, searching for all of the tracks, I find Emusic only has live versions of Highway Star; tons of covers and/or karaoke versions of YMCA, Material Girl, and You're The Inspiration; and Rock This Town (which is also in the awesome Guitar Hero 2). I guess I should stick to the indie podcasts to find things to buy on Emusic.
Disappointment aside, there are a couple interesting changes in the mechanics of EBA. The most superficial is that, instead of a flat map, you select levels by spinning a section of 3D world with the stylus. More usefully, one friend who played Ouendan a bit was annoyed that you can't skip the introductory part of the song, only the comic book intro; in EBA, you can skip right to the "Are you READY?" prompt. Also, similar to the full screen picture when you finish all difficulties of Ouendan, you get a full screen picture when you succeed in all portions of a song—and a star marker, encouraging you to completely "O" all the songs to collect all the stars. Lastly, as the Game|Life article notes, there are 19 songs in EBA. There are still only 15 levels in the regular game, however. The extra songs are unlocked, and I'm not sure if it's by points or what, as I've only unlocked Cher's "Believe."
Altogether, Elite Beat Agents is everything one could have reasonably hoped for in a US adaptation of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. It's great fun and you should get it!
