STsung’s Blog

We always thought that there are no PIU machines in Japan and that never a pump machine would be placed in any Japanese arcades. But beware! In Tokyo Japanese people have the chance to try out the NX2 machines.

Will Japanese people get to the top level in this game?

Do you know the difference between Guitar Hero and Guitar Freaks?

I prepared one short video showing the most important difference between those two games and that would be the keysounds. Listen well when watching the video.

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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 in the US have filed a patent lawsuit against Harmonix (and thus also MTV and Viacom) in the federal court in Tyler, Texas.
They started the lawsuit because they think that Rock Band (Harmonix) violates KONAMI patents which relate to “simulated musical instruments, a music-game system and a musical-rhythm matching game”.

Well, the lawsuit has been around for a while but I wanted to find out more information about KONAMI vs. Harmonix.
Why did not KONAMI sue Harmonix for Guitar Hero? Even though that Harmonix itself claimed that the game is based on GFDM? (as well the idea of FreQuence/Amplitude came from BEMANI games). Well, I don’t know why didn’t this happen. But with Guitar Hero III being released we could find out that Activision and KONAMI have some kind of agreement on several ““simulated musical instruments, a music-game system and a musical-rhythm matching game” patents. In my eyes this can mean that Activision pays KONAMI for the use of these patents in their games. Also Activision bought Devecka patents “Methods and apparatus for providing an interactive musical game” so it seems that Activision plans something bigger in the future with music games.

Anyway it seems that KONAMI is not looking for competition nor killing the game(s) itself but for settlement. (I would personally say that cash settlement is not the only thing KONAMI wants, but after finding out about Activision using KONAMI’s patents….). Harmonix in the time being fully localized Rock Band (with Japanese songs as well) for Japan. This game might become a rival to GFDM….What do you think? I seriously find this outrageous.

Well, the game’s being around for few days and people are really having fun to play this game. I wonder how popular this game will get.

Anyway more to the game play mechanics. You already know that you have to confirm the panels that light up with music but I guess everyone wondered when exactly the panels were supposed to be confirmed. People could think that it needs to be confirmed as fast as possible, but those playing BEMANI games were like “there has to be something like ‘just great’ window”. And there is actually one. The just perfect window is at the time when the panel is full lit.

Songlist:

KONAMI original

ki☆ki - Happy Happy
Mutsuhiko Izumi - Polaris
Mutsuhiko Izumi - Snow Goose
Mutsuhiko Izumi - 天国と地獄

License

AAA - BLOOD on FIRE
鈴木亜美 joins �*田ヤスタカ - FREE FREE
Mi - Good bye little girl
Chris Brown featuring T-Pain - Kiss Kiss
川嶋あい - My love
�*ードオブメジャー - PLAY THE GAME
ANNA inspi’ NANA(BLACK STONES) - rose
Scatman John - Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)
VILLAGE PEOPLE - Y.M.C.A.
THE BOOM - 風になりたい
mihimaru GT - 気分上々↑↑
RIKI - �*�！ミッドナイト
MINMI - シャナナ☆
FUNKY MONKEY BABYS - ちっぽけな勇気
Do As Infinity - 冒険者たち

Cover

BONNIE PINK - A Perfect Sky
Ai + BAND - BELIEVE IN LOVE
浜崎あゆみ - BLUE BIRD
UVERworld - endscape
POLYSICS - I My Me Mine
Nolans - I’M IN THE MOOD FOR DANCING
嵐 - love so sweet
大塚愛 - PEACH
平井�*� - POP STAR
絢香 - Real voice
Rip Slyme - SPEED KING
コブク�* - YELL ～エール～
THE BLUE HEARTS - �*スしてほしい
倖田來未 - �*ューティーハニー
レミオ�*メン - 粉雪
Crystal Kay - こんなに近くで…
ス�*マスイッチ - 全力少年
山下智久 - 抱いてセニョリータ
MISIA - 太陽の地図
BUMP OF CHICKEN - 天体観測
サンボマスター - 光の�*ック
NANA starring MIKA NAKASHIMA - 一色
YUKI - ふがいないや
ZARD - �*けないで

Hidden

Kozo Nakamura - Jumping Boogie
kors k - Special One
Jimmy Weckl - Icicles

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.

KONAMI annouced that they would officially release Drummania in Europe. The game concerned is Drummania V4. DMV4 is supposed to be released in September 2008 for Europe.

The game features 450 songs and some awesome licenses as KONAMI says, just hope it won’t be anything like European licenses for Supernova.

The thing I don’t understand is…..where the hell is Guitar Freaks? You know session linking is kinda of no use without GF machines.

Starting yesterday a Pop’n Music mouse is available at KONAMI store. The mouse is green and white and it looks more like ladybug (mechanically). Under the transparent wings you can see 9 Pop’n music buttons on the mouse. Wonder why they are there? It’s not just a Pop’n Music related mouse, it is also a controller for Pop’n Music game.

This game can run on PentiumIII 800Mhz, 512MB RAM. It has 500MB and needs DirectX 8 or higher. There are 12 songs by default but you can also download more songs for this PNM game from KONAMI official website.

Game modes available are - 3 button, 5 button, 9 button normal mode, 9 button hyper mode.

You can get the set (mouse and the game) for about 5000 Yen VAT excluded at konamistyle.

Lately Maya Takamura’s video DVD was released. Maya Takamura is the only female in the IIDX staff. She works along other members of the graphics team on 2d and now 3d movies for IIDX games (Movie Designer). Her 2d drawings easy to recognize. Her lineart is not so strong and her coloring style reminds of water color use (no cel shading as most other artist do).

She brings a bit of lightness to IIDX graphic. She is most known for the illustration of Killer from Genocide. (from IIDX Red)

She has done videos for Xepher, Zenius-I-Vanisher, Blind Justice, Twelfth Style, Little Little Princess etc.