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So Konami is now asking us directly what we want for difficulties in our DDR games. Nice! Of course, the debate is polarized between “more 13s” and “NO ITG!”, with everyone agreeing that more fun 7-9s are definitely good. Personally, I don’t care too much about the obscenely hard stuff. I do care, but I don’t care. However, the “moar 13s” side of the argument is basically one sentence which I strongly disagree with: why not. They don’t see the ‘cost’ of 13s or 14s at all. After all, if you’re not that good, you can ignore them. They don’t hurt anyone by being a extra choice, and it’s obviously not budget-breaking or too difficult to add arbitrarily difficult songs. And it’s not as if they’d be sacrificing even one fun seven footer to do it. So why are obscenely hard songs an obviously good idea?

The reason for not having 14s in DDR is because 14s are a turn off. I’ve been asked by more than a few non-DDR players to “Play the hardest song!” And then when I’m done, I offer to let them try. But no amount of cajoling them will get them on the pad after that. And they won’t listen to you if you tell them that a 1 footer on beginner is a HUNDRED times easier than that 12 you just did. They won’t have it. They’ve “seen” DDR, and you’ve ruined it for them. I have the same problem with IIDX once in awhile. Some random Street Fighter or Wangan fan will accidentally wander too close to IIDX and become paralyzed by the aura of awesomeness. After watching me for a minute they’ll be shaking with awe (haha, kidding) but only 50% of the time will those hardcore gamers be interested in trying. All they see is a berserk spamming of inputs, and that’s not appealing to any kind of a gamer, hardcore or casual.

If you put a level 14 song in your game then you’re telling the player “This is your goal. All those 3s and 5s are there so that someday you’ll be good enough to tackle this 14, if you try.” You can say that the 14 is an extra, and that 7s-9s are where it’s at, but that’s not what will happen. Video games are built on rules and goals. Even players who have been playing DDR at the 4 foot level for years will look at a 14 footer and say to themselves “The goal of this game is to learn how to move that fast. I do this by playing increasingly harder songs until I get there.” And if they don’t like that goal, they won’t play the game. Players will be alienated and it won’t be because of feelings of insecurity due to not being able to play every song on heavy. It will be because the fun looks like a grind. Again, Endgame DDR == spamming of inputs? Does you like that?

Look at other Bemani games as a guide. Drummania’s hardest songs are mostly its oldest, and each game has only a few songs that are at least 80/99, with an average of 1 level 90 per game. The entirety of Drummania is 50s-60s. So the hardcore players are under-served, right? Model FT2 (MV) was like getting Max 300 in 2001 and MaxX Unlimited in 2008. IIDX spiked once with Innocent Walls in 10th style, but Mei has remained the hardest song to score on for a long time. Nageki no Ki is harder to clear, but even that’s 2 years old now. IIDX has also definitely stopped getting harder. But yet, both games have hardcore players and are known for their hardest songs! How can that be? They’re all stale songs, right? That’s because people are still chasing these songs. And those achievements are still being chased because they are reachable and worthwile. Pushing the endgame further back does more than scare away the uninitiated - it also discourages the players who are part way through their journey. For example, imagine that you can clear level 8 songs in DDR. Someday, you’d like to clear the hardest level 13 song - Fascination Maxx. When the next DDR game comes out, you’re now clearing 9s and some easy 10s, but Paranoia Rediculous has appeared! And it’s a level 14. So you keep plugging along. And by the time you can clear 12s, Paranoia Redonkulous Max comes out and is level 15! Doesn’t that cheat you out of your first goal? Doesn’t that frustrate you that now you’ll basically never be good at DDR, despite being a frequent and serious player, because the horizon kept moving further and further away from you? Even if you answered no, the truth is yes. Although some hardcore players will quit out of boredom without Paranoia Redonkulous Max, there is the chance that other hardcore players might discover that the game is a grind and quit in disappointment over having never reached their long term goal.

Personally, I think that “spamming inputs” games have very limited appeal, and that’s why I said that I mostly don’t care about the hard stuff. Spamming inputs certainly isn’t bad, and I’ve played 12s for fun. But when spamming inputs is boring/unfun, it dies fast. Spamming inputs can be fun, but only if it’s well managed. What I prefer most days instead is MA on a fun/easy 7-8. Instead of achieving maximum spamosity (my word), you attempt to achieve the most consistent timing. This plays well into DDR’s strengths of solid 7-9s. So instead of spamming a 14 and announcing that you’ve beat DDR, the real endgame is getting your favorite 8-footer under 20 perfects. It’s telling that at the 2008 Top Ranker Tournament, they played Flowers, Paranoia, and Max 300. Yes, Flowers, one of the easiest heavy AAAs ever, and Max 300 was the limit to how hard it got. Of course, everybody hit every arrow and the winner was decided by MA and PA. The message was clear: in this tournament of champions, with the national title on the line, we play eights!

This happened about a month ago, and as usual I’m late to write about it on my private blog. Konami has opened an official forum for DDR fans! And their big draw is - seriously - that they read their own forum. And people are actually excited that they feel like Konami is listening. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s a great thing! And I love it too. The thing is, Konami had always been reading DDRFreak and probably every other Bemani fansite, too. Ferrari (Kevin M) posted actively on VJA when BM US was in production. I dunno, maybe I’m the only person who knew that Konami was always listening? So yeah, the discussion is pretty lively there, and people are surprisingly nice considering that there is only one community manager (Agora Perry) moderating the whole thing. Like I said, Konami is listening, but they still haven’t said anything yet, not even through their community manager. So it’s basically a forum like any other. But you feel closer to the developers.

The new forum does have one very cool new feature that surprised me - you can link your XBox Live profile and have your scores linked to your forum profile like an automatic score tracker. That’s very cool! I didn’t know Microsoft allowed 3rd parties to access the Live service like that.

Another website, http://www.arcadefuture.com/, has also opened within the last month. Their goal is to gather feedback from arcade fans and relay it to developers. Although at the moment they only have 4 surveys and they’re all Konami/Bemani related. Not that I’m complaining! The site is all surveys and headlines, no forums. And that’s good because I don’t need any more of those. Their first survey was “Where should e-amuse be installed next?”, which I believe TGA won. The results were available to the public for awhile before the survey closed and TGA was winning. Of course, that doesn’t say anything about where e-amuse will be installed next. But it is nice! People from all over voted for TGA. Thanks guys!

It’s been awhile since my last post. It’s been such a long time since my last post that IIDX 15 has gone from location testing to shipped and will arrive at TGA any week now! It’s going to arrive about the same time as Supernova 2!

IIDX 15: DJ Troopers follows the recent IIDX formula: a new graphical theme (in this case, camouflage) and about 60 new songs that have almost nothing to do with each other. There are 5 or so songs that could be considered to be ‘on theme’ with the military, but only loosely. IIDX is better that way. IIDX is all about the music so it would suck if each game had to be devoted to a genre or something like that. And as always the original contributions of no less than 40 different artists are all top-tier. IIDX music has a tendency to be really complicated, in a two-songs-going-on-at-once kind of way, because that’s how you make a keyboard game difficult, but it’s all fantastic. The line-outs that I’ve heard are awesome but it’s too early for me to start picking favorites. I’m so lucky I’ll get to play it!

Supernova 2 is finalllllllllllly shipping this week or next week. The songlist is the same as ever: some licenses (Why Not), some all new original songs (Saturn), some songs from the console release that beat the arcade release by about 3 months (Music inthe Rhythm), and some songs borrowed from other Bemani games (Bloody Tears (Yoshitaka’s IIDX Edition)). But Supernova 2 breaks the old formula with one change - standard marvellous timing. Now players have to be more accurate than ever to get a good score. As a result of this change the traditional 100% required for a AAA has been dropped to 99%. (Simplified math.) Naturally, DDR players the world over freaked out. I bet that’s why Konami made the change. Of course, DDR fans always freak out. They’re not stupid or anything, it’s just part of the culture to treat every change as the end of the series. (See also: Magic: the Gathering, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, or any other popular game where the fans have a set of rules for what the game ’should’ be.)

In the last week of December, Konami announced a new Bemani game called Jubeat and did a short location test. First, it’s pronounced ‘YOU BEAT’. From what I can tell of the website and the flyer it’s a rhythm game without a television screen. The controller is a 4 by 4 grid of square buttons, possibly medium-large buttons, and I guess it plays like IIDX or PNM on crack. I mean, 16 inputs in a two-dimensional space! Holy crap! IIDX has 7 buttons in a line. But the fact that you don’t need to move your hands up and down very much makes the experience manageable. Likewise, Pop’N Music has 9 large buttons but that game requires mostly left and right movement and much less movement towards or away from the screen. Jubeat apparently has your hands dancing all over the place. I don’t know how the game is played, or if the buttons light up or something, or really anything about it at all. I’m pretty much just staring at the picture in a confused state right now. Although I’m already thinking about all the novel chart patterns that can be played on a truly two dimensional controller! If you’re reading this and you know something about Jubeat then please leave a comment! I’d love to know more.

I was just introduced to Mutsuhiko Izumi’s album Heaven Inside a week or two ago. Apparently it’s old, but it’s new to me. I wholeheartedly recommend this album to anyone. It’s pretty much a rock and roll album featuring a few of his songs from Drummania and a few new songs. Every single track is solid. Some of my favorites from Drummania, specifically Heaven Inside, Let Me Believe, and Wish are on there. I didn’t know those songs were of his because he isn’t directly credited in the game like he is on some other songs. But you don’t have to like Drummania or even rock music to like this album. It’s just that good!

Again better late than never. By now we’ve seen 11 IIDX games for the PS2 in 7 years. Normally I wouldn’t even mention that a new game has come out. (Supernova 2 next week! Sweeeeeet!) Okay, so maybe I would. But I wouldn’t say much about it. For the most part home versions are just new songs + new features annually. And that’s not a bad thing! We get a lot of good games that way. This is what the hardcore fans want, including me. It’s kind of a weird contradiction to say that I don’t normally get excited for these games but yet I still play them for hundreds of hours each. I just enjoy them without trying to assign a 10/10 five-star magazine review score to them. But I was honestly impressed by DistorteD for the PS2. I would give this game five stars. You might think that this means nothing coming from a hardcore fan. But in fact, it means more. I could give a Zelda game 5 stars no problem. I’m not desensitized to Zelda. But a rhythm game, especially a beatmania game, first has to wake me up and then impress me.

There is serious new content in this game. In the past these games have been 50-odd arcade songs + 5 other songs, in a combination of songs that will be in the next game and new original music that is exclusive to the home version. This game has 8 new exclusive songs, a preview song, 6 songs from the original 5-key series that have never been in IIDX before, and 4 songs that have been “redone”. Wow! And, the preview song has a new music video. And of those 8 completely new songs, 4 of them are by the core group of original composers. And they are all really good too. It’s not just quantity. The new content in this game is about 25% of what could have been a completely new game!

Naturally all video games get prettier and easier to play as a series progresses. IIDX adds more score keeping, score tracking, and display options with every release. When I say that they add new features to every new game that’s pretty much what I mean. They did all that for this game too but DistorteD also actually has serious new features. My favorite is the ability to alter the tempo of songs in Training Mode. I’ve seen this in other rhythm games but the feature was always crippled in some way. In some games you can only change the tempo down. In some games you can go either way but the song will be muted entirely if you’re not playing it at normal speed. (Which is cheating the feature in my opinion.) But in DistorteD you can go down and up and the song will always be audible and the pitch will not change! When you play a song faster it is really faster, not just chipmunk-ized. This is a pretty awesome technical achievement for the PS2. They allow 13 speeds and I’m pretty sure they don’t have the space to re-record each song 13 times.

The planning of the game is clever. When you first start the game you’ll only have access to 4 of the songs from the original 5-key series. (Attack the Music, 321 Stars, Light Motion, and Super Highway.) But if you play a set of any three of those songs in row then you’ll get Drunk Monky, another 5-key song, as a bonus stage as your reward for knowing your beatmania history. But you’re not done yet! If you then play the course with all 5 of those songs then you’ll unlock a 6th by Slake: Caldera. Nice, but not totally impressive. Lots of games have unlockable songs. This is the secret: if you highlight any of the old 5-key songs, open the options screen, select the “5-key” option, and hold the button, then you’ll get the original version of the song! That means no 6s or 7s and you play the song exactly as it was back in 1998-2001 or whenever. You do have to be a bit of a beatmania buff to appreciate it but this kind of planning is basically absent from the whole rhythm genre. It’s a ridiculous cliché in the rhythm genre to have your only point of suspense be “OMG secret boss song! Can you beat it?” IIDX and DDR co-invented that, and it’s still present in this game with a slight twist, but it’s great that there is another experience to be had besides conquering bosses. (7th did have Masters Mode and 11th did have the famous Gambol another. Surprises aren’t totally new to the series.)

This isn’t a normal review or anything. Normally a reviewer would talk about the quality and size of the songlist and/or how polished the game is or whatever. There are 89 songs in this game including revivals, after all. And yeah, this game is pretty awesome objectively too. But since you hardcore types are the people who are going to be reading this blog anyway I wanted to specifically point out why this game is not just 13th in a long running series. They went above and beyond what even their hardcore fans were expecting. I think there is a lesson in sequels in this game. (Now recorded for posterity so I can be inspired later.)

YES! I got the original blog title to work! That’s worth two posts in one day!

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By the way, no one knows that this blog exists yet. I want it to actually have posts and give visitors the impression that I update it often (because I do!) when they make their first visit. That way they want to come back. No one wants to visit an empty blog. Of course, some of these posts will be boring by the time anyone ever reads them, but oh well.

A few people have started adding custom songs (and old songs) to a copy of IIDX 12th style hacked to run on a PC. So now it’s basically the uber-simulator, or will be shortly once the tools get out. For several years people have been able to grab the datafiles and decompress the assets. What they used to do was take the assets and make simfiles out them. Only recently have hackers been successful at recompressing modified datafiles and having them work.

They put the A remix from DJ Taka’s Milestone album on IIDX 15th. ^_^ That was one of my favorite tracks. Of course, it’s ridiculously hard, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What’s up with all the spam blogs on this site recently? Don’t they filter these things?

This is a little late, but E-Amuse is now working on the Supernova 2 location test! Yes, in the United States! The cards are selling for $4 and so far the service works just like it did for previous DDRs. That means score tracking, new songs, and automatic name entry at least. I’ve been wanting this service for years, no exaggeration! I would’ve posted this sooner but I since I haven’t made this blog public yet I knew that no one would read it. (Except a few people who check all the blogs in the blogroll.)

What is recent news is the Japanese location test of beatmania IIDX 15: DJ Troopers. Rather than name the game after a color (cliché) they seem to have gone with a real theme this time. But then what would they do without an official color? Does ‘camouflage’ count as a color? Because that’s what they picked. I’m not a news site or anything like that so I won’t post the known songlist or the details. If you’ve never heard of beatmania before and you don’t know why I’m excited for sequel number 15 then check this site out. They’ve got a wiki that do the game more justice than I can in this little post. They’ve also got a forum if you become really interested.

Someone on VJA just posted a hack for the PS2 version of IIDX Happy Sky. This hack adds the Scripted Connection (long mix) as a “new another” for L’amour et la liberté. If you play L’amour on singles it will show up as a 5/8/12. The normal and the hyper are not changed, but the another is now the SC (long mix)! And the keysounds and the video for the another are correct, too! This hack lets you play SC (long mix) and save your score while also not replacing any other song on the songlist! You’ll need to be able to patch (and play) an ISO of the game in order to do this.

Konami is making more IIDX figurines! The new ones are Sakura and Erika! Very nice!

Some random DDR news that I just found:

Digital life (a digital entertainment convention in New York) is having their third annual DDR tournament. And just like last year they’re offering a $3000 sponsored prize for 1st place in the Expert PA division! Of course, the pro gamers who play all the FPS and RTS games get literally 10 times that amount. But it’s all about the DDR! To me at least.

Konami just showed DDR Hottest Party and Universe 2 at E3. The big thing that I got out of it was that Hottest Party has hands that use the Wiimote. The hands share the same four columns as the arrows. To hit one I think you just point the Wiimote in that direction - left, behind you, in front of you, or to your right. So you swing your arms around. I think it’s got potential and it won’t make me lose my balance. (If they do it right.)

A few weeks ago some winners of a contest that was unknown to me were declared on Broadjam’s website. Broadjam was also the website that hosted the first DDR Musicianship Trial. I didn’t know there was a second one. The winners are Arctures (of the Bemani community - I met him at BMF and he didn’t mention this at all), Victora Pope, C-14, and David Broderick. Nothing else is said except that their unidentified winning entries will be used in a 2007 DDR game.

Supernova 2, which is out in Japan next month and elsewhere in August, is finally location testing just outside of Betson’s HQ in Illinois. It’s the same place in Naperville that I went to for the first IIDX Gold location test. New songs, new songs, yeah yeah yeah. But they’ve also added marvelous timing to the normal game play, not just courses anymore. This could either be really good, or really bad. It could be good if it doesn’t mess up my PA or ruin the grading. And it would be bad if… it does. Thanks to the new marvs, a full combo with all perfects is now 9,999,990 points. And because of that it is possible for any SDG to be a AAA as long as you have enough Marvs.

DJ Taka’s album is finnnnnalllllllly out! I originally wasn’t going to download it because I bought it and I was just going to wait for it to arrive. (By the time the torrents finish it would be here, etc.) But now it’s Sunday and I still don’t have it. So now I’m debating downloading it, but I think it’ll arrive tomorrow…. gah! I still haven’t heard it yet!! It’s supposed to be really good, too. I haven’t heard anyone say anything bad about it and I’ve heard lots of praise. Everyone seems to have one track or another between the two CDs that they rate as a 10/10 *flashing*.

At Bowlmanifest 2007 there was a great DDR tournament. The perfect details are here and here. A lot of interesting things happened! You might have to be a hardcore DDR fan to appreciate most of them, but I think it’s really cool!