STsung’s Blog

Today is the official day of the Dance Dance Revolution CS USA release. The game will hit the shelves of your local game scores tomorrow so get ready and go get your copy!

KONAMI stands are usually white with nothing special and nothing that would catch the
eye. This year at GC nothing has changed. On the first day of GC there was a preview of
Rock Revolution (imagine Guitar Hero stage and people from KONAMI on the stage showing
their new cool game). Rock Revolution is a KONAMI US game similar to Rock Band. How the
game will look like/feel like is yet up to see.

DS Supernova 2
At KONAMI stand we could play Dancing Stage Supernova 2 which was supposed to be
already released in August but was delayed. They say that the game is still not
finished. But I don’t see anything unfinished about the game except for example the
fact that after an extra stage all the modifiers you set are reset. (at least you don’t
end up with Beginner difficulty). Well, DS SN2 is same as DDR US. It is easier in game
play with more licensed songs with nothing special to offer. Should be released in September this year.

DS Supernova 2 box art is more red/pink than anything. It has a red female dancer (which is not even attractive) in the middle of the box art. Also this color can be seen on all the Dancing Stage t-shirts you could get at KONAMI stand. (pink….why pink???)

DS Hottest Party
The second dance game at the stand was DS Hottest Party 1. Yeah, you see it correctly
1. Not 2 as promised. I better not comment on this game. This game is played on a dance
pad, but you are also forced to use nunchuk for left nunchuk notes and wiimote for
right wiimote notes. There are also other items like step/hand mines which are moving
objects that scroll up to the targets and if you DON’T step on them it will take some
of your life from the life bar. Thus “oh, this is a mine I should avoid it will make
you fail.” The game is targeted at beginners and people who will hardly play any other
DDR game….

DS Universe 2
The last game at their “enlarged” dancing stage stand was DS Universe 2. I’ve never
played the previous games on this console but I have to say I was disgusted with it.
The songlist is bad for a CS version. The game was far more offsync than Hottest Party
and Supernova so I suppose that even on lag free TV it would be offsync. The
animations are quite nice. But who needs big and “nice” note judgements? Who needs
different colored target arrows? Seems like bright pink is now popular at KONAMI.
Empress and now DS Universe? I just can’t write anything objective about this game. The
whole feel of the game is like “KONAMI US just made another bad DDR game…”.

Starting yesterday and ending on 23rd of July Japanese people have the chance to try the new DDR arcade game out. As you may know this mix is celebrating the 10 years of DDR’s existence and thus should be innovative or revolutionary.

The cabinet itself looks different. It has bigger and wider screen and more lights next to the speakers. Also the banner is bigger etc^_~. Anyway the platform has changed quite a lot. At least the looks of it (no pink/blue panels, red bar). KONAMI asks the player what they think of the panels (playing-wise) so I guess they changed more than just the look^_~ (hope it is better than the SN platform). In overall the cabinet is more western urban styled and I’m quite afraid of how the game will look like.

All songs have been rerated to 1-20 scale. So most boss songs have different difficulties now. (So max300 or TLOM are rated 15 and FELM and FAXX are 18s)

KONAMI also introduced a new type of note. It’s called a shock arrow. When you step on the arrow you will get a combo breaker, you will loose a bit energy from the lifebar and the scrolling arrows will vanish for a while.

Today KONAMI announced 2 big and long awaited news. ….

1. DDR X is going to be an arcade release! (as well as the CS one, but everyone knows that already).

2. Jubeat is going to be finally out! Site is opening on 24th July so it’s going to be soon!

edit: Jubeat is out.

In two weeks time KDE will release the European version of DDR Supernova.

The game missions are even easier than in the American version (which actually had quite equivalent missions to the Japanese ones).

The songs are different as well. DS SN songs are for example Baile! Baile!, La Bamba (slow version), some songs from SySF (quite a lot), Goldfrapp and some other random songs.

The thing which surprised me was that I could buy FELM from the shop after clearing it on light, reverse in maybe area E? Not to mention that the song cost me just 10 000 points.

KONAMI hired several people from the French DDR players to show the newest DDR games (DDR Hottest Party for Nintendo Wii and DDR Universe for MS Xbox) in game stores in Paris last weekend.

We went shopping with my boyfriend and as usual we started with local game store. And you know what? I just stood in front of the PS2 section and I was just looking at Rogue Galaxy as this is my favorite game but Xsoft saw something else which caught his interest.

So I looked at it and I couldn’t believe my eyes, I saw a black haired girl on a blue background with DDR arrows. I told myself “I know this game, it’s Supernova”. After this I was like…’I want this, even though I won’t play this’.

On the 26th of September DDR Supernova 2 CS was released.

It has marvelouses always on, it has a different scoring system (you can get AAA by even getting some perfects^_~). It shows the name of the song when you play the song. SN2 has smoother graphics. Really the difference can be really be seen this time. It’s more gradient and shaded. It has also more visual effects in the background animations and song selection (but I guess we don’t care much about it).

Here you can switch Extra Stages on/off if you like. (you no longer get Extra Stage by AAing anything on heavy-_-). The red songs are NGO, Unreal and well known FELM.

The first songlist you will see is quite “American” there is almost no Japanese song but later on when you unlock other songs you will discover new crossovers (ehm actually new KONAMI originals). You know songs like Arrabiata, Stars, Raspberry Heart. Ofcourse there are returning songs.

Someone on youtube replied to a video of Kyle Ward and Chris Foy freestyling with another freestyle. I didn’t like the vid, but I realized that I haven’t seen any freestyle videos from other countries than France in quite a long time.

So I just would like to put here this video (pretty old one actually). This is my first time seeing an arcade, playing this song and actually having fun by doing whatever I felt looked ok. Nothing prepared or anything, just what came to my mind.

STsung - Don’t Try To Stop It