NOTE: I originally entered this file anonymously in 2006 to DDRExtreme.co.uk's World Tour competition. Below is the original readme that was included at that time.

I actually like DAI somewhat more than I let on here :) This file was in fact file #1 in the "DAI Series", a series of pad stepfiles for Do As Infinity songs that I am slowly adding to. Watch for more!

--Xythar (gmmazz@hotmail.com)

==================================

#TITLE:Snail;
#ARTIST:Do As Infinity;
#FILE:Snail.mp3;

Do As Infinity were a popular J-pop band over the six years from the release of their first single 'Tangerine Dream' on September 29th 1999, to the release of their final album 'Do the A-Side' on September 29th 2005, after which they disbanded. A shame, I guess...

Their name originally came from the band's founder and composer, Dai Nagao. (Dai = D.A.I. = Do As Infinity) When he formed the band in 1999, Dai chose Tomiko Van as the lead singer, and Ryo Owatari as the guitarist, and the three of them formed Do As Infinity.

I slightly rephrased this information from the Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_As_Infinity because if there is one thing I am not it is a Do As Infinity expert. I originally heard of them through Bemani, and picked up a couple of their albums since that I got for cheap, but I'm not some kind of huge fan on the whole, although the albums weren't too bad.

'Snail' is the fifth track on 'New World', Do As Infinity's second album. I didn't think most of the music on the albums I had was all that memorable (not particularly bad, but not memorably good), but a few really stood out to me, such as this one. 'Snail' to me manages to avoid being generic j-pop with its alternating pace between a slow, almost hip-hop beat and sudden heavy bursts of rockin' guitar and drums, and that I feel is what makes it stand out. Hopefully you'll like it too.

The vocals are J-pop all the way, but they fit.

Anyway, enough of that.

The original song length was 5:02 - the cut-down version used for this clip is 2:11. The cut was a pretty complicated effort to keep the song a manageable length while leaving the guitar solo in, and after I didn't quite manage to do it properly the first time, PlatinumHawke stepped in to assist me and re-cut the song himself using CoolEdit. His cut is the one supplied here, because it actually stays completely on-sync all the way through (as it turns out, this is particularly important at slow BPMs).

#BPM:87.927;
#GAP:1292;

PlatinumHawke worked these exact values out for me too, because he's such a great guy.

Well, the song's quite slow. We don't see nearly enough slow songs these days, so I think this is a good thing. I was originally considering whether I should double the BPM for the intense guitar/drum segments, since it almost sounds like the song doubles in BPM itself, but in the end I decided against it because I don't think that it would add anything other than annoyance. Plenty of songs have an 8th beat going anyway.

Anyway, slow songs rule. This gave me the opportunity to hopefully stand out a bit and make the steps nice and laid back on most of the difficulties. No sweat. You shouldn't even need a speed mod really, except maybe on challenge, and that's challenge.

#BANNER:Snail.png;
#BACKGROUND:Snail-bg.png;

These were both made by me using various images that I found using Google Image Search. Both the banner and the background were based on Do As Infinity wallpapers, although I don't now remember where I found them. They were standard promotional images released by the band, however, so they're all over the place - there's no one site that they can be attributed to anyway. Tomiko Van is pictured in the banner, and both Tomiko Van and Ryo Owatari are pictured in the background.

The 'Snail' title was written in the font 'Alpha Snail' (fitting, no?) and the snail image which you can see through the text (a nice effect using image layers) was also found on Google. I think it was at http://www.law.mq.edu.au/Units/law103/assets/images/snail.jpg if you really enjoy looking at snails or something.

That's basically it for the graphics. No CDtitle was required for this competition, and unfortunately I couldn't provide a video this time - the song has no PV because it isn't a single.

#LYRICSPATH:Snail.lrc;

The lyrics file is available in three flavors this time.
The default is Snail.lrc which contains the original Japanese lyrics in romanised form. The timings are as close as I was able to make them, and they should match well enough. The lines had to be split up more than I'd have liked because Stepmania really does not like showing lyrics onscreen for anywhere close to long enough for each line, especially on a song where the lyrics are sung this slowly. Sorry about that, especially the one line where one word takes about 10 beats to be sung and therefore disappears from the screen halfway. It wasn't possible to split that line any further.

Snail (original script).lrc contains the original Japanese lyrics in their original Japanese (kana and kanji), as written in the album booklet. Stepmania won't be able to display most of those kanji unless you manually add them yourself to its font graphics, and DWI doesn't support any of it at all, so this file is mostly for reference purposes. I could have included a file with just kana, but that's pretty pointless as it doesn't contain any more information than the romanised version.

Snail (english translation).lrc is a rough translation of the lyrics into English. If you want to use this one instead in Stepmania or DWI, rename the original Snail.lrc to something else, and then rename this file to Snail.lrc.

I made an attempt at doing as much of the translation as I could by myself, but that's only so much. You can really just give http://www.globemoon.net/dai/index2.html the credit for the translation, since they more or less did most of it. Some things were rephrased to fit the LRC file better, some things were rephrased just for the fun of it, etc etc etc. They're probably more correct, but it's no fun if you just copy and paste.

#SINGLE:BEGINNER:1:
#SINGLE:BASIC:2:
#SINGLE:ANOTHER:4:
#SINGLE:MANIAC:6:
#SINGLE:SMANIAC:8:

Right, the steps.

-----------------------------------------------------
| Chart      |   Rating  | Steps  | Combo | Freezes |
-----------------------------------------------------
| Beginner   |     1     |   77   |   84  |    0    |
| Light      |     2     |  122   |  127  |    9    |
| Standard   |     4     |  214   |  248  |    9    |
| Heavy      |     6     |  268   |  300  |   12    |
| Challenge  |     8     |  380   |  418  |    7    |
-----------------------------------------------------

Beginner: An 88 BPM song that conforms to the beginner restrictions is easy indeed. There are a few consecutive steps on the same arrow, but there's absolutely no reason that this could be rated higher than 1 foot.

Light: All red arrows at 88 BPM is again not difficult. Some long streams make this a 2, but certainly nothing higher.

Standard: Unlike the previous two difficulties this is probably hard for its rating, but I think it still fits well enough to use. Since heavy is mostly 8ths, that meant I had to think of something different for standard. In the end, I came up with a sort of hybrid of light and heavy - predominantly 4ths, some 8ths, and lots of jumping. I hope this has managed to make standard distinct enough to be worth playing, and not just 'heavy with less'.

Heavy: This was the first chart I made and the one I spent the most time on; I did my best to make steps which fit the song. Since the song is so slow, this called for what ended up being 6 foot steps. It isn't a common thing to do for heavy, and I wouldn't be surprised if many people skipped straight to challenge or ignored the file completely because of it, but this is my decision and I'm sticking by it. I think these steps work best with the song and I'm pleased with how they turned out, so please play them.

Challenge: These steps undermine the Heavy steps a bit, but I would like to have something for everyone. Heavy is based on 4ths with a good number of 8ths and some 16ths, whereas this is based on 8ths with a generous helping of 16ths. However, 16ths at 88 BPM are the same as 8ths at 176 BPM, so this isn't any harder than your average Dancemania Speed Mix song, hence the 8 foot rating.

#CREDIT:;

No credit for me. Nope :(

#THANKS:

- PlatinumHawke for flawlessly rescuing my entry's sync.

- Tovus for running the WORLD TOUR competition. Thanks for organizing it all! Actually - Tovus, Sivus... are you two long lost brothers separated at birth? :)

- All of you who take your time to make quality simfiles for these competitions and enter them. Without the entrants, there would be no competitions.

- The creators of DWI and StepMania. Thanks for being indirectly responsible for my complete lack of free time at the moment ;)

- The usual people who I can't name because it would probably give too much away. You know who you are anyway.

- You, for actually reading all the way to the end of this ridiculously long readme. What are you, crazy?

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