STOP(s)! I. want. yo-ur.o-p-i-n-i-o-ns.

Ok, I'm trying to be funny with the thread title.

So, while playing ITG the other day I played a game with this guy called Zarz. Nice enough fellow, but he played these charts that I hated.
I forget the name of them but there's one that sounds like 'ali blah blah blah" or something, I believe it's named similarly. The stops are similar to CHAOS but there's millions more of them and they're more 'oh crap i missed everything and fell over' because they stop so suddenly and unexpectedly.
Then there was this other one, involving a chart that had the skip steps where there's a screen of mines, a gap in them, then a massive bpm jump, then the step appears where the gap was. And then one really obscene one that had the steps 'implied' so you had mines then a staircase pattern that repeated twice, then a bpm jump (like in robotix but instant).

I said 'far out I HATE gimmicky charts"

Now, I then played smooooch and Valkyrie Dimension (beta) off my usb with him, and he said to me "I thought you hated gimmicky charts".

While it's taken me about 2 or 3 days of reflection, I'm now interested to know. What do you guys think constitutes something to purposely trip you during a song, and what constitutes pure gimmick?

I'm of the belief that a few stops are fine, but as long as you don't have to remember where every stop is to pass a song, it's fine. As for the walls of mines and insane BPM jumps, I think they can fuck off.
Songs like chaos are pretty much the limit of what i'd call 'sensible', in that if you tripped up badly enough on those charts you'd die. As for valkyrie dimension.... it seems quite close to the original vertex and clockwork genesis. Some annoying stops but not enough to actually kill you, if you play the song a few times.

(And there doesn't seem to be a general dance game forum here.... if anyone feels it belongs in gaming general, so be it)

---

inb4hellrazorhasnoideawhatthefuckheistalkingabout

---

Stops, like most gimmicks are fine when they're done properly. One of the first sims I downloaded ever was for Fell In Love With A Girl, and they used tiny 0.02sec ones to aid sync (which was still off). That's not how you do it.

I like them when they're used in places where they're actually warranted, in things like beat drops in songs like un deux trois. That's why I don't shy away from using them in my sims.

---

Yeah, I don't mind if it doesn't trip you up to the point that you lose half your life bar before you can recover. Maybe drop a few steps, but dropping every step and then getting hit by another stop? GO AWAY.

That said, chaos is designed to trip you BUT you still can keep going (outside of EES) and it at least has rhythmically based stops. That blah blah blah or wahtever song had stops to the nth degree, playing it for the first time you were like ' oh shit is it now is it now is it OH FAILED'.
Thankfully zarz knew the chart so didn't fail.

---

To me gimmicks are any unnecessary BPM change or STOP. A necessary BPM change would be when a song has a physical BPM change, such as going from 140 to 70, a necessary STOP is a stop where the music calls for one (music stops) and there is enough time to recover without having to have played the chart before, or a small stop that is unnoticed that was used to fix a song-cut error.

But most people like gimmicks (myself included), so it becomes a matter of what you as a player enjoy.

I personally can't stand any negative BPM gimmick, glitchy steps (high BPM + STOPS to make the chart skip around), and excessive use of STOPS just to throw you off. Double BPM's / half BPM's I don't mind. I think Chaos is way over the top, Stop and Go is actually my threshold I think the gimmicks are done tastefully although it requires practice to play the chart, I like Dancingbox from R2112 because the gimmicks go so perfectly with the music and you know a freeze arrow = STOP, so it's all a matter of preference, and I don't mind Robotix either although the gimmick in the official ITG2 is poorly done because the BPM's are incorrect, so the steps are off-beat and that annoys me.

I even have a gimmicky simfile myself, http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/viewsimfile.php?simfileid=7135
The gimmicks are very intentional because of my goal with the song.

In conclusion, it comes down to personal likes / dislikes.

As far as the noob wanting to bring up my rant on play-styles in a thread about step gimmicks,

---

Overdoing gimmicks is stupid.
Sight-reading shit like VD or Chaos will obviously suck.

its related though. i linked to a thread about step gimmicks in which you ranted (and had no idea what the fuck you were talking about) about play styles.

---

Kids, clam the fuck down.

image macros should be a bannable offense

---

re speed gimmicks for a handful of songs in simple terms:

Chaos = GOOD
Music In The Rhythm = GOOD
Delta Max = HELL YEAH
Maxx Unlimited = makes it annoying as fuck to PA
Pluto = MAYBE (though the novelty wore off as soon as it became playable outside OMES, though Risky fills that void )
Valkyrie Dimension = MAYBE (though the random speedup around 600 combo is like wtf)
Ecstacy and Electro Tuned = whyyyyyyy?
Trigger = FUCKING ANNOYING AND POINTLESS
Pluto Relinquish = Pointless but the speed changes are predictable and fit the song very well

yeah...

(also: macrofags can gtfo to 4chan)

---

Also I'd add that I don't like stops that start too late, so you don't step the first beat of the bar. I'm looking at you Uranus.

---

its just a 2 measure stop. just keep stepping to the tempo

max300 on the other hand...
to adjust for the weird time signature. i will admit its pretty stupid though

---

I'm fine with stops as long as they make sense with the music and you can see them coming after playing the song a few times.
Chaos is annoying, as it's stops aren't even consistent, and the only way I had them memorized was in accordance with the Light chart.
Pluto's stops and gimmicks in the first half are perfectly fine, but the ones in the end are just stupid (and it doesn't help that they put it in IIDX, where gimmicks are less tolerable).

The gimmicks in other 250+ BPM songs (excluding Flow (true style)) and songs like Healing Vision (Angelic Mix) are fine in my opinion.

---

You forgot the SMM Specials. In SP-Trip Machine, the stops are annoying, but at least they go with the music for the most part. As for PARANOiA Max, the speed changes (or at least the 380 parts) can be confusing to one going in and expecting something like ParaMax.

RE: Ecstasy and Trigger: I don't get it either.

What the hell are you guys on about? The stops in ECSTASY make perfect sense to the music.

I lol'd. So true.

But yeah, stops are fine if they can go with the song, but songs like Chaos take too much advantage of it when it makes you paranoid.

Dead End Groove Radar Special should be a bannable offense to any step-rhtyhm game.

The rest are ok in my opinion.

EDIT: Oops, forgot PTF. That chart has horrible gimmicks in them at the wrong time :/

---

There are no stops in Ddead End GRS, aren't there?

And if there aren't that's the one good thing we can take from that.

---

Right at the beginning, right at the end, in the middle... there's at least three.

---

There are 4.