STsung

Today I had the chance to play the new Roxor/Andamiro game called PIU Pro. The machine I played on was an FX machine.

The game does not have any attract screen or anything which could attract you to the game. You just press START and you can start playing. In Normal/All Skill Levels there’s single player (easy, normal, hard, crazy, freestyle, double) and versus. You can also choose to play an equivalent of marathons from ITG in PIU pro. (it’s under Progressive/Advanced Song Courses). Blue courses are from the previous PIU games, red courses are new ones and has mods in them.

In song selection screen you may press the Options button to enter the option where you chose what modifiers you want to use (similar to PIU home versions). To exit the menu you press the options button again.

Also the machine supports USB flash cards so you can store your scores and screenshots and then upload it to groovestats (coming soon). Mainly I use the flash card so it remembers the modifiers I use. The good thing in Pro is that you can insert the card anytime you want and you still get the data saved on your card.

After setting up the modifiers you can select the song and choose the difficulty (or you may hold options button and choose the difficulty with the arrows).

The arrows are evaluated as follows: Superb is the best then there is Perfect, Great, Good, Miss.

There are quite some noteskins. The primary ones are the PIU Pro original ones and classical PIU noteskins. PIU Pro noteskins use the same colors as ITG notes. Each note has a color corresponding to its length (blue note = 4th note, red note = 8th note, yellow note = 16th note etc). PIU classic noteskin uses orange/red for Up-Right and Up-Left arrows, blue for Down-Right and Down-Left arrows, yellow for the center. There are also Xuxa or Smiley noteskins but they are rather annoying but in courses it can be fun.

The background animations in PIU Pro are really beautiful and they did not disappoint me with Energizer flowers at the slow down^_~ Seriously the BGAs are really worth it. But for the rest of the graphics I have to say I was totally disappointed. There are no nice animations (even small details would do the job), it’s mostly static all the time and well just without life. The whole game is more like “Play and get high scores nothing more”. But I have to admit that the noteskins are nicely done and the confirmation of an arrow has a really nice animation. But roll arrows are terrible, they just don’t fit in at all. Mines are nice, but are hard to register, at least my brain went like “WTF? Mines?”.

The good thing about the graphics/gameplay is that it does not show the percentage while you play. At least that’s what I think is better for me. Also the game shows a song progress bar and it counts down the stages. So you know which stage you are playing while playing it.

The hardest song is rated 15. All the PIU songs are thus rerated. It seems that songs rated 10-12 are 9s in Pro, 13-14-15 are 10s or 11s etc. But for example Pump me up Amadeus is
an 8 on Hard in both games.

Concerning the stepcharts. You can really see who made the stepcharts Roxor people have their own style and you can clearly feel it in it. Also they added new step patters which is really nice and stepping to the tunes of Kyle’s music is great. It really feels like playing In The Groove 1,2,3. As PIU Pro is mix of PIU songs and ITG songs you may notice the difference between stepcharts and difficulties. I personally prefer playing original PIU charts then “ITG” ones. But still I have to admit that the charts are actually good and they are worth it. For a person not liking PIU and liking ITG it’s a good change. Because the idea is still there and 5 panels may be more challenging (and Nightmare even more).

So I have to say Good Job on this. Even though it won’t change my opinion that PIU NX is far better than PIU Pro.