DDR X2 (AC) (International)

You could get ES on BEGINNER on X2 but certainly not EES.

You must AAA KIMONO PRINCESS on EXPERT to get EES.

Still waiting for somewhere in NYC to get one of these machines.

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The difference between DDR and Street Fighter is that for one guy to be constantly winning, and getting "free games", another person has to keep putting credits into the machine. The machine actually makes more "money per hour" from this, than it does from the normal gameplay of "One player pays one credit and plays until he either beats the game in 8 minutes or loses". SF is specifically designed to gobble up credits that way.

If an arcade owner is going to buy a new SF cabinet, he has to calculate how much "money per hour" it can generate, and then decide whether it's worth the investment.

In single player, the average game lasts about 8 minutes, so it'll make 7 credits per hour, if it's played constantly in single-player mode.

If it's being played in 2-player mode and both sides of the machine are constantly in use, then it generates insurmountably more - about 20 credits per hour. During evenings and weekends, you would expect this to be the case..

Now, for DDR Fusion, the average game of 3 songs lasts 7 minutes, so if it's constantly in use, it can generate 16 credits per hour in 2-player mode (2 minutes per song plus a minute of dicking around with menus). If a good player is hogging the machine, then those 4 extra minutes per credit, plus the lack of a 2nd player, means that the machine can only generate 5 credits per hour.

Of course, in reality, this never, ever happens.. But on the accounting books, the new Extra Stage feature simply means that Fusion can potentially only generates 1/3 as much income as a EuroMIX or a EuroMIX 2, in certain locations.


In places like Barry Island and Margate? Every player could get the OMES. A couple of places in the UK were essentialy "Japan" in terms of progress. They'd been playing 3rd / 5th / Max / Max2 and Extreme for several years, before Fusion came along.

The conventional thinking was "If you can pass Paranoia Survivor on Extreme, you will AA it on Fusion.". I don't know how true it was, but this was at the height of DDR's popularity in the UK, and while AAing Paranoia Survivor on an Extreme was unheard of, AAing it on Fusion wasn't considered any sort of feat.


Yeah, that's completely insane. I don't think arcade owners buy DDR these days, still expecting the machine to have constant queues for it.

Basically, I think the dipswitch is just there to avoid a lot of fuss, and to stop arcade owners panicing, once they realised what was happening, and treated it as if players were able to get "free games" on the machine.

To be fair, I almost never see anyone get ES/EES on beginner or basic, most people who play on those levels do not even know the requirements to get to ES.

You cannot get beginner EES on X2, by the way. The EES is only accessible by AAing KIMONO PRINCESS on EXPERT, which requires players to not only AA every song they play in that round, but also have their difficulties add up to 40 or above (provided the machine is set for three songs).

why... is it a physical switch and not an option in the operator menu? A hardware controller just for the Extra Stage seems a bit extreme.

It also strikes me as odd that arcade owners would be sore if someone played so well they got an extra stage. Because none of the fighting games there let the victor continue, and none of the racing games give a free race to those who finish first... right?

It's all about revenue, they don't generally give a crap about the players in the UK.

Everywhere it's all about revenue. It's just more bastardly here than anywhere else (except for maybe Australia/New Zealand).

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You have no idea.
Actually no, I think you might.

But yes it's terrible unless you go to say, timezone on a day that they offer double topup, half price games or super sessions.
And even then, you get to play on some pretty average or worse cabinets.

They've been so bloody annoying via their FB page too, they say 'come like our new page' and then put bollocks all on it and don't reply to questions and comments from their gamers.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Timezone-New-Zealand/173727805989356

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so much Rinon...

So does that mean that the Dark Rinon was made up of a whole bunch of Rinons and that the Rinon we know is one who escaped/resisted programming/a reject/a rogue unit who simply didn't follow orders?

How did they get the video and the song? The OST isn't out yet, I think.

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Ripped straight from the HDD.

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I had that suspicion too, but decided not to post it.

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may I ask what HDD stands for?

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hard disk drive

Hard Disk Drive. Yes DDR X2 and other machines running Bemani PC are actually Dell PCs running a version of Windows XP embedded.

You may say that they are official PC ports, but they have esoteric requirements and preparations to get setup and working on your computer (like having an F: drive). And judging from the words of persons who had hands-on experiences with the DDR X hard disk, it works nothing like Stepmania.

EDIT: To get the full experience, good luck looking for an e-Amuse simulator or an actual e-Amuse server built by someone not from Konami.

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So that means that Stepmania cannot perfectly replicate the real DDR?

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No, at least not without extensive source code editing. A lot has happened in the time DDR Extreme as well as the release of Beware's Stepmania Extreme and this.

We can't even implement the word-evolved style of randomness or the "multiple songs available on ES/EES".

On-topic: I guess that means no more unlocks now that Ropponggi(sp?) and Kimono Princess are unlocked. But that also means that unlock codes are just around the corner.

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Actually we're still waiting for things like PTF and all the songs from Replicant DACTION to be fully unlocked and anything else thats currently time unlocked only.

And everything else that's locked via ENJOY LEVELS.

Just in case anyone wants the AC version of A Brighter Day cd jacket graphic rather than the CS version. Here it is... Though not a direct HDD rip but a YT rip... It should do for now until al got the hdd himself