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 Shake It Down / good-cool
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  Stepped by Xythar for DDROSC5 (DDR division)

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 Quick Details
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   Song Title: Shake It Down
  Song Artist: good-cool
  Song Length: 1:29
   Song Genre: J-Pop (according to Beatmania III anyway)
        Album: Beatmania III New Songs Collection

     Steps By: Xythar
  Graphics By: Xythar (BG source image by James Braddock)
    Videos By: Konami

 Author Email: gmmazz@hotmail.com
Other Entries: Gotta Get My Groove On (TM5)
               Collision Chaos (OSC3)
               Born To Be Bone (TM6)
               Taratta Dance (Cheesemix 2)
               Mei (OSC4)
               Snail (World Tour)

Readme Format: Now I'm no longer centering headings in consideration of people who don't necessarily open Notepad in a maximised window. That being said, in order for this to display properly, you'll need to have word wrap on, considering I can't put in line breaks myself since I have no idea what size your window is.

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 Introduction
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Shake It Down is the first created and highest priority component of my multi-pronged attack towards OSC5 ;) and also happens to be my 20th stepfile since I made a ton of them for VJAMix Happy Sky and whatnot (SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT http://vjamix.sblorgh.org SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT). If you happened to like this file, I've got 10 more right there :)

Anyway. Shake It Down may be referred to as J-Pop by Beatmania III, and that's probably true on a general level, but what it really is, is some good old fashioned good-cool disco pop, much like a significant other number of songs by him - and, just like most of the other songs that I'm thinking of (for instance, Flash of Love or Honey, Do It Tonight!) the vocals are by Mickin'. Due to Beatmania III being rather unpopular at best, this song tends to go overlooked, which is a shame as it's not bad.

My two favourite songs to warm up with when I was still playing DDR Extreme at the arcade were A and Spin the Disc. You may or may not remember Mei from OSC4 which got 3rd place in its bracket due to some miracle and advanced to the finals where one person voted for it (thanks, whoever you are :) ) - that was my attempt in making a 'sequel' to A. Can you guess then what my intention was with this file? :)

Like a certain other song's steps, I have tried to use some fun crossovers and even a couple of easy spins in the heavy steps, as well as a decent number of freeze arrows and the occasional jump (not very often, tho). It's probably not *quite* as fun, but I think it's still pretty good. I also took the time to put in a lyric file, DDR style background video script and doubles steps, just to add that extra touch of authenticity (well, maybe not with the lyrics, but I like having a lyric file anyway) that should hopefully make it feel as much like an official file as I can make it. I hope you enjoy the steps!

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 Steps
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Made in Stepmania's editor, as per usual. Without further ado...

 BEGINNER: 1 foot, 79 steps,  86 combo
    LIGHT: 3 feet, 124 steps, 134 combo
 STANDARD: 5 feet, 191 steps, 193 combo
    HEAVY: 7 feet, 240 steps, 245 combo

Not really much to say about beginner. There's one triple-stomp thing and a few jumps but it's still definitely not more than a 1 by any means.

Light is pretty self explanatory too, it's basically what you get when you try to follow the music to some extent with quarter notes (without just putting one on every beat). It has a few jumps in one part because I felt like putting them there (jumping on light is fun) but overall, it's really quite easy. A fairly standard 3 I think, if that.

Standard was tough to make, since Heavy is already almost entirely 8ths and light is all 4ths. Like with Mei, I had difficulty establishing the middle ground there. In the end, I've settled for much shorter and easier 8th streams, and much less crossovers than heavy, which I feel make Standard a lot easier (enough to warrant the 5 foot rating). It's mostly 4ths with the occasional 'stream' of 8ths (never more than about 3-4 long), and includes fairly liberal freeze arrow usage (liberal for me anyway). It is a bit similar to Heavy in a few parts, but I didn't really want to ruin those bits by replacing them with something worse if they were already easy enough for Standard. Give it a shot and see what you think, anyway.

Heavy was the main stepchart I focused on (it was made first before the others) and incorporates most of my original ideas. It's mostly 8th stream and quarter notes that involve freezes, with one part with a few 16ths that follow the music and another part later on that also follows the music with 

slower notes. The rest mostly uses 8th streams where it feels like they fit and the occasional yellow offbeat note to follow vocals better. Lots of crossovers throughout, but they're mostly just fun and not difficult at this speed, I think. At the "Shake it down!" part, there are some spins - you can either do them, or you can just do the 8th crossover then double step the following two 4th notes that make up the spin, or you could just double step the crossover to start with. I worked to make it manageable whatever you choose to do, anyway - but try the spins if you can, they're pretty easy at that speed and also pretty fun. :)

No Challenge, I don't feel like the song warrants one.

As an extra bonus, I decided for the first time ever to have a shot at making doubles steps for this file. They use the same step timing and number of steps as the singles steps since I didn't see any reason to change that, so you can refer to the same statistics above. I also left the foot ratings alone, since although doubles is by nature harder than singles play, I figured that the foot ratings would already take this into account. In any case, I did work out new steps by hand (ie, they're not autogenned) based on simulating doubles play on my imaginary setup (I don't have two mats), so I hope I came up with reasonable steps that can actually be done. I tried to retain some of the more characteristic moments in the adaption from singles to doubles, such as the spins in heavy.

That's it for the steps. As I said, I hope you enjoy them!

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 Graphics
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All graphics were made in Paint Shop Pro 8 (we don't need no stinkin' Photoshop >_>)

For the background, I used an image by James Braddock (available at http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/4752564/) and added text to it in italicised 'SF Laundromat' font. For the final version of the background, I added a bevel effect to the text - if you prefer the original flat text, I have provided an alternate version of the background without the bevel in the 'extras' folder.

The banner uses flat text since bevel doesn't work too well for me on smaller images. The good-cool logo was provided by Team Ragnarok, I recoloured it. Banner background is a standard rainbow gradient (it's a preset in PSP8). CD title is the standard DDRUK title for Beatmania III - if you'd rather the CD title showed the author's name, I've provided an alternate one in the extras folder.

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 Other Extras
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I provided a DDR style video for Stepmania users which uses Konami's official DDR generic video clips. I think it turned out decently enough as far as DDR style videos go and it didn't increase the size by too much, so I think it adds to the file overall. Not too much else to say about it, however.

I looked all over for lyrics to this song and couldn't find them anywhere until eventually Miz (who is awesome) found them at this site:

http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/3224854901/A2/game/omake/beatmania3/j-pop.html

The lyrics file is my romanised version of those lyrics. The split timings were calculated with Audacity and THE AWESOME POWER OF MY CALCULATOR. Ahem.

The extras folder also includes a lyric file containing the lyrics in their original Japanese as written on the site linked to above, as well as an English translation by Miz (did I mention Miz is awesome?) Stepmania probably won't be able to display the original Japanese properly, so that one's mostly just for reference, but you can use the English translation one in Stepmania if you'd rather have that (or you can just read it :P).

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 End
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Anyway, again I hope I have at least come close to my goal of making a file which feels like an official DDR file. I worked pretty hard on this one, so I hope you like it!

See you next OSC!

Xythar
