STsung’s Blog

We did not need to wait for long till Jubeat’s test location. The first test location started today at Round 1 - Sanomiya . This one will end tomorrow at midnight.

Next test locations will be held at Round 1 - Yokohama Station West Exit and Entertainment Square Pasuka. At both locations Jubeat will be present from 17th of March till 22nd of March.

Jubeat Ripples theme looks like “Soappy Bubbles everywhere”. Different blue colors are the main color + orange. There is a new Touch marker. It’s not the Green/Purple one from the previous game. This one shows the perfect timing with a “cloud” turning from white to orange color. The super high-tech feel is gone…

Most of the songs on Jubeat Ripples are licenses. Few are covers and KONAMI Originals.

Songlist

AREA 51 by 96 (KONAMI original)
Russian Snowy Dance by Mutsuhiko Izumi (KONAMI original)
愛 NEED by キマグレン
今 by ET-KING
にんげんっていいな by ガガガDX
バカサバイバー by ウルフルズ
Musical Messenger by 九州男
労働 CALLING by 怒髪天
ロボットハニー by Aira Mitsuki
情熱大陸 (cover)

At ATEI, I had the chance to try out Jubeat for the first time myself. I have to say I started to like the game since the first song and I thought that Jubeat won’t be appealing to me at all.

The first song I played was Sandstorm on Advanced - thus level 8 - and I nearly cleared it. Second song was Captain Jack on Advanced which I cleared. Then I tried some other songs like Polaris Adv, Happy Happy Adv and Take on me Adv. On the last song I managed to get almost a full combo. I missed few notes at the end. But still I was rewarded with a score around 810k. I was like WTF? Something is wrong. I realized then that the game is actually a music game and that I should really press the buttons with the music.

I decided to try out the tutorial for the first time. I managed not to hit the skip button and tried it…I found out that I have to actually WAIT till the panel becomes fully lit with the word TOUCH all over it. After realizing this I went to try the song once again and it was a yellow/gold bliss. If you get a high combo or you are doing good and getting perfects you will be rewarded by a really awesome animations that are golden kind of. It felt good^_^.

After this I tried the rest of the song on Advanced and tried a few on Extreme. I enjoyed the game and would play it again, but probably am not that big fun of it that I would actually pay a lot for it.

What concerns my technique…I used my fingers at first, later with more difficult songs I even started using my palms and other parts of my hands. And it worked…it just felt like playing Pop’n Music - on 4×4 grid though^_^. I just needed to realize that I have to wait a bit till I can hit the panels.

This weekend was probably joyous for many Japanese BEMANI players. They could come to AOU to try out DDRX (and new edits), PNM 17 THE MOVIE, GFDM V6 BLAZING and JUBEAT US. Of course they could play Beatmania IIDX Empress as well…but that game was already released^_^.

Players could listen to artists performances. Among the artist there were あさき , L.E.D. , ショッチョー, TAG, dj TAKA, DJ Yoshitaka, Des-ROW,TЁЯRA, wac and others. When it was DJ Yoshitaka’s time to play he as well announced that Jubeat 2 (name still not given) will be tested soon. After this Top Rankers of each BEMANI games showed their superplays.

What concerns GFDM. At the loc.test there were these new songs…

1/n - iri
humming rabbit - mighty puppet
Juicy - Des-Row
My Favorite Things - Atsuki
Let Me Go - Brad Holmes
S.T.A.R.S - reach up to the universe
イジワルなあなた - 達見恵 featured by 佐野宏晃
ブルーバード - いきものがかり（版権）
君影草 - AIRI
罠 - THE BACK HORN
Under The Nest - Rotten Blotch
Red - Kozo Nakamura
A.DOGMA - あさき
20th Century Boy - T.Rex
キセキ - GReeeeN

and now the WTF moment… =>

Through The Fire And Flames by DragonForce

Just for your information TTFAF is a 92 level song on drums, level 94 song on guitar (level 70 on bass, and 95 on open)! I just can’t imagine 400BPM song of such level on GFDM. GH version was fine, but hm…let’s see^_~.

Two days ago I discovered on Mieya’s Blog that Handsome JET died. But I was surprised to find out that it was already 8 months ago thus in May 2008. He died in a traffic accident.

He is known for doing music for Guitar Freaks and Drummania (wasuremono, futari no rabu, kimi no tonari ni, dare? etc). But for IIDX players he might be known more because of his song - Little Little Princess.

Two days ago Jubeat staff posted on their blog that a jubeat online update will take place during mid-december. Four new songs will be added to the game. Each song comes from a different “living” bemani game.

From IIDX - SigSig by kors k.
From DDR - TRUE♥LOVE by jun feat. Schanita
From PNM - 凛として咲く花の如く by 紅色リトマス
From GFDM - Slang by Kozo Nakamura

Some more info about the game

The songlist consists of 101 songs.
The difficulty range is 1 to 25.
Operator is choosing the difficulties (and their number 1 to 3), speed mods are chosen automatically based on the difficulty
After setting the difficulties you can enter options menu
Speed modifiers’ range is from 0.5x to 8x
Perspective - you can change the angle of the perspective. the angles’ range is from -60dgrs to 60dgrs
Reverse - you can also play on reverse a la Guitar Hero ^_^
Size of arrows - if the notes are too big for you, you can scale them down
Spin - you can make spin the arrows in all three axes….(looks nice with some nice angle perspective)
Mine Areas - watch out….seems like “mine roll”

Starting today Japanese people can try out the new Guitar Freaks and Drummania game. The test ends on 16th of November.

KONAMI released Rock Revolution for Nintendo DS. It reminds me of beat’n'groovy… why is everything so pro-western? It does not look good.

Three days have passed since the test location of Jubeat started in Tenpin Bowl located in Acton, UK.
One credit costs 2 pounds and that gives you two songs to play.
The machine has 20 songs on it.
e-Amuse is off.

I think that (e-amuse off) might be one of big disadvantages of the game. Because jubeat seemed to be quite targeted at online play and internet ranking. If we get this game in Europe without e-Amuse it won’t be as motivating as it could have been with e-Amuse.

The American game similar to Pop’n Music is now available for download for those who own Xbox360. You can buy the game for 800 points (worth about 10USD) or you can just download the demo which contains three playable songs and see how the game look likes.