STsung’s Blog

At “Anime and Dance weekend” convention I found that someone forgot his PS2 games in PS2 room. I looked through the DVDs and I found that the person got Drummania and Guitar Freaks V2. So I took the DVD and tried it on my PS2. I found out that it works so I copied the disc.

At home we burned the DVD and put it into my PS2. I have no Guitar Freaks nor Drummania controller so we started thinking what controller should we use - Dance pad, gamepad, Pop’n Music controller, beatmania iidx controller etc. After some time we decided to use the BeatMania IIDX controller.

After some failed attemps we managed to map the controller for Guitar Freaks. So we took the controller - fingers on the black keys, right hand “picking” on a white key… - and played. I have to say that the first songs were easy but later we found out that the hand holding the KOC as it would be a guitar starts to hurt a lot.

So we switched to Drummania but it’s not that fun playing it on a KOC.

here’s the video => GuitarFreaks with IIDX KOC

At the same convention as the ParaPara performance was done, there was a Czech National Tournament in Dance Dance Revolution and In The Groove.

It was played on a Cobalt Flux, PS2 and a TV.

People weren’t happy about playing a DDR tournament but some people signed in and we could play. We were supposed to play 2 songs from DDR SN and 2 songs from DDR EXT2. It was the dance points which counted not percents or the actual score.

Most of us played DoLL and Shivers from SN and Sweet Sweet Magic and As the rush comes from DDR EXT2.

The ITG tournament was played on the same configuration. Only the game changed to ITG PS2.
One player from Slovakia didn’t manage to tip toe o a CF and other people complained about getting pad misses (way offs) on the pad. Especially a pad builder who wants to start selling his pads abroad.

Well, anyway I won the ITG tournament with 97% overall, the rest of the people with big difference behind. The same was for the DDR tournament but as the evaluation was based on dance points the difference wasn’t that big (400 pts from me and the person who got second place).

At “Anime and Dance weekend” convention there was a Night Of Fire performance based on HINOI Team’s Night of Fire.

The moves weren’t done very well but they were synced which was quite surprising. Their level of ParaPara was pretty low but as the level was almost the same for everyone it wasn’t that bad looking (otherwise it would be a real chaos). People in the Czech Republic don’t know ParaPara much so they can’t really judge but they appreciated what this group of people did.

I also appreciate this and I hope that they will continue.They can eventually get better and start a real ParaPara team but that’s for the future. People also need to get used to ParaPara.

I had a presentation about ParaPara that earlier that day and I have to say that people were interested in it and liked me doing ParaPara. So maybe in the future PP will live in this country too^_^. I can just hope so.

Today I decided that I need to move my body a bit. So I played Dance Dance Revolution Party Collection AAing everything I played except the Extra Stage which I failed badly.

After that I said that my legs are tired already and switched to Para Para. And my boyfriend chose this routine…Tsunami Comes. It’s short but really nice!

Have a look at it.

download => Tsunami Comes
bemanitube => Tsunami Comes

MG-Impact a new BEMANI community in France prepared us a new version of their BEMANI riddles.
There are four types - DDR related, BEMANI related, Mixes and Special.

The first two ones are riddles about DDR or other BEMANI games. In Mixes you have to download a mp3 file and recognize all of DDR, BeatMania or Pop’n Music songs. And finally there is special where you have to use some other programs to actually finish the riddle.

Sometimes the questions are easy. For example there is a picture of KONAMI log and underneath is written “the code”. You only have to enter the KONAMI code. Or you have 21 [japanese character] FAST. You are supposed to rewrite the FAST to the right BPM and I guess everyone knows that^_^. This was really fun.

There was one really difficult one^_^. There is writen AROHI and a slowed and maybe reversed audio can be heard. When you finally find the name of the song you find out that the song name is not supposed to be written in English but in Japanese. So you can continue looking for the name in Japanese …it was fun to find this one out. I really ran the game to find both the song and its Japanese name.

There are even more hardcore tasks. Recognizing songs from a mixture of mp3 is quite fine, but recognizing a song from one key sound is HARDCORE for me. (speaking about BeatMania IIDX key sounds) or there is a crossword which is pretty difficult…and you have to fill in all the letters in there!

And finally the address for those who speak at least a little bit of French.

http://www.mg-impact.fr/bemanifacile/

And RESPECT for those who created BEMANIfacile.

I got the idea that I would play some songs on DDR SN CS. So I actually did. Playing the game for the second time at home…I AAed songs which seemed to be good songs and I AAed 4 out of 9 ninefooters there.

After that I tried some songs on standard and easy and I got my first AAA on DDR SN. I also found out that the game is little bit early but I didn’t play with the audio settings yet.

Later on I tried Max300SMM on Challenge which is pretty difficult song for me as there is A LOT of jumps in there. I lowered the speed a bit, but even with that it was pretty difficult and I had hard time clearing the song. You can see that at the end I started getting everything from marvelous to miss. But I cleared it with A. (at normal speed I got B so far).

My boyfriend also tried the Battle Mode found in Advanced ?play?. It looks quite nice and sometimes it gives pretty difficult modes. You can also set the CPU difficulty and I have to say that LVL 5 is damn difficult to beat. It sends you the worst mods and it’s pretty accurate.

You can watch video of the battle mode here =>
DDR SN Battle Mode

Today I went to work. I arrived late. When I arrived I was told that the server is down, the databases don’t work and data is not prepared for today. This situation lasted till 3 pm so they sent me home.

At home I decided to shot one routine. I guess I’m too tired to be able to concentrate so I have nice pack of bloopers if I won’t delete them.

Anyway here’s the routine.

Download => Horror Fantasy

BemaniTube => Horror Fantasy

DDR Hottest Party was announced some time ago for Nintendo Wii console and everyone wonders how the game will look like and what Wii mote and Nunchuk can bring into the game.

Few days ago we had the chance to get more information about the game.
Well, everyone already knows that the game has similar look of Extreme 2 (in gameplay).

KONAMI build a dance pad especially for Nintend Wii console. Though it’s just the “paper” pad for the time being.

In DDR HP gameplay you have normal arrows as everyone is used to. But then you have there some kind of wierd notes which represent wiimote (Wii remote controller) or Nunchuk notes. When you see a wiimote note you have to move the wiimote in that direction. If it appears in the Up column you have to move the wiimote forward. They said that there would be Nunchuk notes that you have to confirm by shaking the nunchuk. But who knows if it will be in the final release.

DDR HP has three normal modes - Free Play (the normal mode everyone usually plays in), Groove Gauge Mode (something like Dance Master Mode or Stellar Mode) and Diet Mode.

There are also other three modes - Friendship mode, which is kind of some wierd couple mode but both (up to four) players play one stepchart, Multiplayer mode (up to four players can play) and the last is Battle Mode where you bother your opponent with mods.

There is also change in the dance characters look. They look more chibi or wii-like and personally I don’t like the look at all. It looks pretty wierd and it’s not cute or anything.

KONAMI said there would be like 50 new stepcharts and 25 KONAMI original songs (wonder what kind of songs it will be). I hope there won’t be too many returning songs from Strike …(no oldies in DDR please!!!)

Today I read on someone’s blog that he/she can’t play DistorteD because his/her TV broke down so I wondered if I can manage to run DistorteD on my own TV.

After several problems with mapping my controller we ran DistorteD but unfortunately it was off.

We tried several times with adjusting the resolution but it was always off. So I tried to play and synchronize with the game and I managed it. You have to confirm the notes like 1,5 cm above the target line.

I managed to clear Absolute on hyper and you know why? Because DistorteD was kinda slow…

It’s been a while from April to now. The location tests in Japan were ok and also people were asked what songs they would like to see in the new SuperNova. Now it’s time for people in America to have the chance to test the game now. SuperNova 2 is soon to be released in Japan. Wondering what new stuff it will bring?

The first thing you will find out is that there is a Marvelous timing all the time (not just courses). Seems like KONAMI found out that Perfects is not enough. That’s why they first changed the grading to 95000k to get AA I guess. Well, you still need this score to get AA. So you need more marvelouses this time. Also you can triple A a song if you get over 99…. points. Everyone now wonders if there is something like a AAAA.

The also came up with some other slight changes. When getting a certain combo you will see a picture of a dance character on the screen. Well, it’s something more annoying then listening to the announcer announcing you a perfect combo^_^. Actually it’s pretty nice to see on the screen when you don’t play and just watch others play (if two players play then there are two images of dance characters in the middle of the screen - in between the scrolling arrows area).

Also you will be able to see both the name of the song and its artist in gameplay (why this?).

They also removed roulette which became pretty annoying on DDR Supernova arcade. It was really a pain in the a** during some tournaments.

The sorting got better so you can again sort the same way as in Extreme (BPM, Title, Artist, Difficulty etc.) But for there is one problem, older songs from previous mixes or games are now in Extreme or SuperNova folder so it’s little bit confusing and more difficult to find the song.

I also wonder if there will be some new Max songs? But anyway I hope there will be some good and well playable songs. Supernova CS made me almost cry, I know KONAMI does not want to revive old songs (and thus pay the licence)

Also it seems that the SuperNova “bug” that the difficulty you choose changed to beginner difficulty when entering the menu is fixed. ^_~

There is a new character. She’s quite cute^_^.