The future of DDR in NA/EU?

That's not a bad idea but knowing what I'm like with ticket games, I'll play to my grave.

Although, it would be epic to see like 1,000,000 tickets spew out of a machine because someone AAA'd ValkDim

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noodles_husky, I love your idea!!! They should export the Japan machines and put the NA/EU software in it!!! That would be SWEEEET!!

It wasn't his idea...

Thing is if they ever did such an idea theyd have to make it clear it spat out tickets and put the ticket earning in AFTER playing songs, i.e. the better you do on the songs the more chances you get to win tickets, like have some sort of pick 3 out of 5 boxes and get their total tickets if you clear 3 songs, all 5 if you get ES and OMES for example but tied only to happy mode. If they ever did that and enabled saving user data via a keypad locally then you've essentially got a cross between DDR, Fast and the furious and Deal or no deal, the 2 most popular arcade "Games" out and DDR.

Its irrelevant because konami would never do that anyway, andamiro did but they didnt make it clear they did so it never took off

Ticket redemption DDR sounds pretty cool, besides expanding on what Dancefreak said: you don't get tickets until after you clear songs. Considering the ridiculous amount of n00bs who walk off mid-first song... I'd be all for it if it had a ticker n00b mode and maybe no-ticket pro mode, because arcade owners wouldn't be too hyped about a machine where someone could easily score 100 tickets per round. Or maybe a tiny ticket cap. Alas, it'll prolly never happen.

I live in Nebraska and I demand to know where the closest X2 is. Heard a rumor from DDR Freak that there was one in Iowa...

baaaaack on topic

DDR is effed until the machines actually work long enough to pay off the price tag. Also, in American machines, it'd be nice if they could do something about the lack of e-amuse features. But I know an arcade owner or two who would've jumped on the lease deal for X2 if the machine wasn't junk.

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It's really sad to think Konami has basically ruined DDR AC for NA/EU and could have been avoided if more quality assurance was in place...

I really doubt DDR X3 is coming to our regions, pointers would be there are no new English licenses on DDR X3, all six new licenses are Japanese.

This. In attempting to make the game appeal more broadly to cash-strapped arcades by cutting corners, they effectively crippled the game by making it virtually unplayable, two releases in a row. I doubt there are many arcade operators who are willing to take a gamble on DDR, even if X3 came out with the utmost quality.

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Well, Happy Mode could be a nice fit for that

I'm thinking of a one-stage solo machine that only has Happy Mode and distributes tickets and looks like a short, squat X cabinet...


^The Sims Social >_>

It could work if they struck up a deal with Chuck E. Cheese or something.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a surge of exports from the Extreme days once the X style cabinets saturate the Japanese markets.

Quite a few of them have PIUs already. But I'd love to play me some X3 for ONLY ONE TOKEN.

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Yeah, they're using those Pump Jump games. But that's exactly the reason Konami should go there and push them out. It would amke their presence stronger and bring some healthy competition to the American market. And that's a win-win for comsumers.

btw, whatever happen to the gimped pop'n music machines that gave tickets?

Actually, not all of them have Pump Jump. There are some Zero's and NX2s and such.

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Do you mean something like this?

http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/viewpicture.php?pictureid=17639

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More like http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/viewpicture.php?pictureid=17641

It's a good idea, and yet The Bishi Bashi is currently in no arcades in the country, because it was so exploitable that players who understood how it works were able to take money from Trocadero by playing it. There was one point where the machine was in almost constant use by Bemani players, who were taking turns to rape it dry of tickets.

.. And that was a game that was actually slightly rigged, and could control it's ticket output.

If DDR were to give out tickets based on performance, then the game would either blatantly expose the nature of the ticket payout in the same way The Bishi Bashi did (by quickly telling us exactly how many tickets an arcade is willing to dispense for £1), or would have to be rigged in a way that would be blatantly obvious and frustrating to players.

Imagine the machine has recently paid out a large ammount of tickets, and needs to put a temporary limit on the ammount it can now give out, until it adjusts it's earnings to be closer to the 70% payout margin. The game would have to fuck with you by narrowing the perfect window, playing the song at the wrong speed, or intentionally playing songs off-sync. The law regarding SWP machines doesn't allow them to "cheat", by refusing to register arrows you step on, but they can manipulate the rules of the game in any way they see fit. If DDR were to be a proditable SWP machine, then it would have to stick to that formula.

ROFL. It would be awesome if the machine rewarded players with additional credits.

The thing is this is why i said tie it to HAPPY MODE only and dependent on how many stages are cleared you get the chance to win tickets in an extra side game at the end thats like deal or no deal (picking from boxes) So the gameplay would go as thus:

Pick Happy mode <- Make it clear it pays out tickets VERY clear.
Pick Song
Finish song (Clear or fail it doesnt matter)
Pick a box out of 3 for tickets (say a maximum of 10 with a 1 in 3 chance)
play another song
Clear song (failing at this point fails as normal)
Pick another box out of 3 for tickets (same maximum as above)
Play final stage
Clear song
Pick a final box out of 3 for tickets
MAYBE as a bonus have a multiplier slot machine type thing, which can easily be rigged so it only gives out multipliers when it wants to, maybe a wheel with x1 x2 x3 on it all the way around and a jackpot symbol that would have no chance of ever landing.

Obviously it would have to spit out tickets after each song but when the multiplier is picked it'll just spit out the remaining tickets meaning the maximum you could get in this scenario is 90 for £1 IF the machine wanted to give them out.

And RE Bishi Bashi, all konami had to do was raise the requirements for that many tickets, that way even when you SSS every level on the game the most tickets you'd see would be 150 which would never happen unless you'd put MONTHS of practice in it first.

Doesnt matter anyway because Konami would never do it, despite the fact it would work especially if Happy mode had nothing but cheesy pop licenses like the sort of music that gets played at wedding receptions nowadays and make a miniaturised version of the game with one pad for kids that ONLY has this happy ticket mode enabled.

Its honestly so ridiculously simple im shocked they havent done it so far just to keep their foothold in arcades!

It may just simply be screwed for awhile. Hard to swallow as that is, maybe it's time for a total regroup. Face it, X had hardware fail, no more Universe/KDEA productions since Stillwind's passing, X2 (PS2) and DDR 2010 were both rather subpar in overall production quality, and now II is half badassery (albeit two years overdue, but then so was Extreme 2) but only available on one system, chock full of modern pop vomit, and released in the middle of the FPS and fighter game equivalent of World War 3. Quite tragic/ironic for a game scored primarily via timing.

Maybe people here need to miss DDR a year or two before it springs back up on the map. Maybe the actual production quality (like license-song stepcharts) has been drizzling out and dying slowly, and it's really time to go back to the drawing board; or at least turn to another "greatest hits" phase. Preferably with the full song options that DDR II give it, some add-on charts that take some boss songs to new heights of challenging, and a choice between Arcadey gameplay with Game Over/Continue cycles and a Homey mode with chains and groove triggers, or something.

Maybe it's just about time.

Either that, or it's time to go bigger yet, revisit past and present to make games at least 120-140 songs big, worthy of full-price launches, and then release one of those every 2-3 years or so with streaming content.

Who's to say?

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With X3 not appearing in the US, i would like to see a DDR game that is similar to how they did DDR II on all three "next gen" system, which include PS3, 360, and Wii U.

Wii's are what the PS2 used to be back 3 or 4 years ago, hell you can buy Wii's for the same price as a brand new PS2 now ($99 Black Friday last i checked), so it will only seem that DDR might continue this road in America until there just isn't either a market for it anymore or it REALLY dies off. Since they probably might have cancelled the US arcade version of X3, they may just solely be focusing on the US CS portion of DDR now more than ever, it could be a good thing since we may finally get a good DDR game for consoles that have good quality sound, picture, video, online connectivity, and so much more. One thing i fear from Konami is that if they make an incredible DDR game that FAR surpasses Extreme 2 and DDR II combined, the fans WILL want more of that stuff with added content and be "spoiled" in a way...now that you have this ALMIGHTY game in our hands, what else can we do to make it much more innovative to please an audience for years to come?

I actually appreciate the little things Konami does in terms of the US CS part of DDR, as well as finally giving us songs that we've been wanting to play since the release of X2. As i said before, if Konami gives us too much, there won't be much of anything for YEARS to come, especially with the current dance competition of Dance Central and Just Dance, but if they give us too little, then it's a shitstorm all over again.

In some cases, i don't even expect DDR to appear at all next year in the US and EU, only getting information about Japan and X4 at around this time frame. Which....is also sad to see that many BEMANI sites that have withstood for such a long time are starting to fall slowly but surely ever since the DDR scene in America has really died down. You can blame the lack of arcades in the US, you can blame the manufacturer's of the cabinets, you can blame FPS's for taking over the gaming world, you can blame other music rhythm games that are simplistic and fun to do, i mean so many factors now have really hit the franchise hard, but it was expected to say the least, as new technology comes in, the old gets left behind to rot. Japan is handling X3 like magic, having so many features embedded in it that it actually pays for you to have both e-amuse and PASELI to play this game, sadly America and Europe just can't get this nectar of DDR goodness...

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