STsung

The 21st of October the long awaited Beatmania IIDX 17 Sirius was released in Japan.

KONAMI is organizing a DDR Championship in the USA. There are seven Qualifier tournaments all over the states to which you can register. Up to 160 players are allowed to enter a qualifier tournament but only top 16 players will make it to Round 2. The players can choose their own speed mod, difficulty on a song that is chosen randomly (there is a set songlist for each round though).

If you win you are then allowed to participate in the US Championships taking place the 5th of December in Las Vegas, Nevada. 8 players will compete in the finals (one of the players will be a wildcard - randomly chosen from the second place winners). Only four players will make it to Round 2.

So well this is the US Championship…how will European Championship look like?

At Gamescom there were many music games you could play and so I tried to play them all. I went first to KONAMI stand where Naoki Maeda was supposed to be running around^^. He wasn’t there at the moment so I tried some of the games…(only music games’ listed)

KONAMI stand
Rock Revolution
RR for Nintendo Wii is looking nice in terms of Nintendo Wii graphics. The game is played with nunchuk and wiimote which already tells something about the accuracy of the game. As a player you can choose to play either drums or guitar. Drums use two columns on the screen and when the colored notes reach the target line you have to move down with wiimote (right column) or nunchuk (left column). Guitar uses 3 columns. Wiimote is used for strumming (rightmost column) and buttons Z and C are fret buttons which you have to press and hold down + strum. The note evaluation is hit and miss as it seems which won’t make any BEMANI player happy. The game is easy to play (getting 99s?). The songs are few minutes lasting which did not really make me happy.

Pop’n Rhythm
This is a really bad attempt at Pop’n Music on Wii. The game play is the same as normal pop’n music but instead of using your hands to hit the buttons on the controller you move wiimote and nunchuk in several directions. The directions are R, L, D and “clapping”. The game is forced 5 button game.
There is an animated character on the screen that follows your moves but as it seems swooshing down also triggers in most of the cases the left or right note (and vice versa). So I understand why KONAMI did not bother using keysounds for this game. Hitting the imaginary buttons though triggers some kind of “wii” instrument sounds that are pretty annoying after a while as you hear the same thing over and over again no matter what song you play. .
The poor PNM character on the screen is moving her hands in a really terrible manner and it’s rather confusing and distracting (especially when you play on hyper).
There were three difficulties available and on the highest I got 98% (I totally sucked). It wasn’t even fun but rather frustrating as you can clearly see that the game does not follow your instructions correctly and it lags. It also seemed that you play for a very long time but in this case it might be because you won’t be confirming 700 notes as I’m used to but rather 170.

Karaoke Revolution
There’s new Karaoke Revolution coming for next-gen consoles. The game feels completely the same as previous Karaoke Revolutions. It wasn’t working properly though at Gamescon (most of the ’singing’ games weren’t at the event)

Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 2
Blue and gold theme. The game in some ways reminds me of DDRHP1 mixed with Supernova 2 and Masterpiece Gold. I actually like the interface even though it’s horrid for DDR players to navigate through and you will be swearing pretty much of the most time trying to figure out how to play in versus mode for 2 players. Forget about things like single, double and versus. Now we have Friendship, Sync and Normal dance mode o_O.
The game actually has a “song options” menu but it’s outside of the actual game (you have to set it before you enter the songwheel). You can set the speed mod. and some other mods (like left, right etc…)
Songlist seemed rather poor (I couldn’t find a single song I would want to listen to).
The game was actually onsync. Or at least my scores looked like 98 percent of perfects and the rest misses (as I was obviously missing Down arrow for some reason).

Dance Dance Revolution for PS3
Ok, this is atrocious. This game LOOKS like being build on an older Stepmania 4.0 build (if you don’t know what that is check stepmania.com). You can say goodbye to DDR noteskin. The game probably has solo mode and technomotion mode (this was promoted as a novelty - it’s called “octomode”). We also saw edit mode, possibility to change theme of the game, it has downloadable stuff (hopefully songpacks also). It is supposed to have the best tracks from all the mixes ranging from DDR 1st mix to DDRX.
And Naoki said that it hopefully will be released next summer.

Activision
Guitar Hero 5
I don’t know if there’s anything new except the setlist.

DJ Hero
DJ Hero is a dj simulation game. It uses three buttons on the turntable and a .. little thing you move either to right or left according to the lines you see on the screen.
You either scratch while holding a button, press a button/buttons or move that thingy. It’s not really that easy. It’s something new and different for me. The mixing actually sounds good if you don’t mess it up too much. It reminds me of Harmonix’s Amplitude (and the previous game). The tracks are pretty long. I’m not fan of that but I suppose that everyone kind of is. Because even KONAMI now has longer version tracks in their games.

The rest what we could see and can think of right now…
Rock Band Beatles
A new Rock Band is coming out and its theme is Beatles. It sounds well, plays good and looks good. If you are a fun of Beatles you probably want to get this. I did not notice anything new you wouldn’t already know.

Guitar Hero Metallica
The game’s out for some time probably but I haven’t played it yet. I had the chance to try it out at Gamescom. It’s another GH game and plays well (unlike Aerosmith which is really bad).

Lips
I thought that a karaoke simulator cannot be messed up. But after I played this “game” I realized that timing issues are a BIG issue. The lag on the screen was maybe 12 cm long and I did not know if I should be singing along with the video or audio. I played online with someone else and heard her voice offsync too. But she was getting getting it right unlike me. There was no real feedback for me as I had no idea where I am in the song. Well in other words it was completely unplayable.

The test location for Pop’n Music 18 subtitled Sengoku Retsuden is starting on 20th of August and ends the 30th.

Few days ago new GFDM game was at test location in Japan and we have news about the game. Unlike last time were it was more about new songs and difficulties this time there’s something “revolutionary”.

So here it goes:

Guitar Freaks XG and Drummania XG are the new titles for the upcoming series (not V something thus)

The arcade machines use a wide LCD monitor (looks the same as the DDRX one)

Radar Chart is removed (I don’t get it why because that’s how I was picking songs to play *sniff*)

Difficulties aren’t 1 to 99 anymore but rather one digit followed by two decimals. Thus 1.00 is the easiest and 9.99 should be the most difficult one.

It also seems that in order to clear a song your bar needs to be above a certain percentage like in IIDX, PNM etc

There are 5 buttons instead of 3 on the neck of the guitar

BSC and ADV use only 4 buttons, EXT uses all of them

Long notes have been added

When wailing (that can be done either up and down horizontally) there’s a vibration (can be turned off)

There are huge speakers next to each cabinet side!

Left cymbal, hi-hat pedal and floor tom have been added so the line looks like => left cymbal, hi-hat, hi-hat pedal, snare, high tom, bass, low tom, floor tom and right cymbal.

Machine now features a stage platform with support frames around the machine which means that you are kind of “inside” and not in the open.

In game you’ve got most of the screen showing the column in which the notes scroll. Under the target line you can see all the drums and cymbals depicted. It takes quite a lot of space and is actually quite needed as there are new things for you to catch up. (left cymbal, 2 hi-hats, 2 toms)
In the back you’ve got some real drums showing (animated). On the left side you’ve got stuff like difficulty and such. On the right side you see your combo in HUGE digits.
All this is done in 3d “high tech” version.
The songwheel reminds me of PIU NX style. You scroll to left or right and it shows the song/album cover
The judgements are WAY TOO flashy.

Hardcore playing? Somewhere in the mountains (in the middle of nowhere) with snow all around you…who would not want to play ITG on an ITG2 dedicab.

Jubeat does not have its own top ranker yet but is getting close to one.

Starting this month people could try their luck in the Jubeat Asian Championships. It has three phases. In the first one each player plays 2 songs + one random Extreme song (8). In the second phase those who qualified for the semi-finals will play few songs on extreme (8-9) two weeks later. There are three regions that take part in this tournament - Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The finalists of each region will meet in August, 14th in Hong Kong to decide the Asian JUBEAT Champion.

At Japan Expo that took place in Paris KONAMI officially released the European arcade version of Dance Dance Revolution X.

At the same event the French DDR League finals were held under the supervision of KONAMI JP. I hope that KONAMI will now more favor Europe and DDR products in Europe. It would be nice to have European League and KONAMI support here as well.

Well, my friend Squop quite often starts to sing this crazy song and then I can’t get this song out of my head. So I decided to do the routine and take a video of it. Quality is crappy, sound is few ms off and I did not care about my vicinity nor my clothes, look etc…

I’m quite depressed lately….

VJArmy/Pop’n Navy score tracker is closing down after its 5 year long existence that made many of us happy. The site will cease to exist on 6th of June which is almost there. Those who don’t know about this, should log in to both sites and download the their exported scores if they want to keep them.

During the past five years there were 800k scores entered, over 3500 users registered, over a thousand items sold on play-asia and 200k forum posts posted on vjarmy.

With this entry, I would like to thank everyone who has worked on VJ Army and was keeping the site alive. Thank you for such a hard work.