STsung

The test location for Pop’n Music 18 subtitled Sengoku Retsuden is starting on 20th of August and ends the 30th.

Few days ago new GFDM game was at test location in Japan and we have news about the game. Unlike last time were it was more about new songs and difficulties this time there’s something “revolutionary”.

So here it goes:

Guitar Freaks XG and Drummania XG are the new titles for the upcoming series (not V something thus)

The arcade machines use a wide LCD monitor (looks the same as the DDRX one)

Radar Chart is removed (I don’t get it why because that’s how I was picking songs to play *sniff*)

Difficulties aren’t 1 to 99 anymore but rather one digit followed by two decimals. Thus 1.00 is the easiest and 9.99 should be the most difficult one.

It also seems that in order to clear a song your bar needs to be above a certain percentage like in IIDX, PNM etc

There are 5 buttons instead of 3 on the neck of the guitar

BSC and ADV use only 4 buttons, EXT uses all of them

Long notes have been added

When wailing (that can be done either up and down horizontally) there’s a vibration (can be turned off)

There are huge speakers next to each cabinet side!

Left cymbal, hi-hat pedal and floor tom have been added so the line looks like => left cymbal, hi-hat, hi-hat pedal, snare, high tom, bass, low tom, floor tom and right cymbal.

Machine now features a stage platform with support frames around the machine which means that you are kind of “inside” and not in the open.

In game you’ve got most of the screen showing the column in which the notes scroll. Under the target line you can see all the drums and cymbals depicted. It takes quite a lot of space and is actually quite needed as there are new things for you to catch up. (left cymbal, 2 hi-hats, 2 toms)
In the back you’ve got some real drums showing (animated). On the left side you’ve got stuff like difficulty and such. On the right side you see your combo in HUGE digits.
All this is done in 3d “high tech” version.
The songwheel reminds me of PIU NX style. You scroll to left or right and it shows the song/album cover
The judgements are WAY TOO flashy.

Jubeat does not have its own top ranker yet but is getting close to one.

Starting this month people could try their luck in the Jubeat Asian Championships. It has three phases. In the first one each player plays 2 songs + one random Extreme song (8). In the second phase those who qualified for the semi-finals will play few songs on extreme (8-9) two weeks later. There are three regions that take part in this tournament - Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The finalists of each region will meet in August, 14th in Hong Kong to decide the Asian JUBEAT Champion.

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

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

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.