[AC] StepManiaX produced by Kyle Ward

Me when I out myself in the first post I make

tell me you haven't played this game in literal years without telling me you haven't played this game in years.

also dimo hasn't played smx in like 3 years so yeah your entire ass is showing.


>Reg. 2022-12-31

lmao great job there bud. also your double spacing like a boomer after every period gives you away. post on your main if you're going to do this loooooool

I hope everyone has a great New Year's. May you stay safe and joyful.

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And in the StepManiaX thread of all places

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This is like some chud on EventHubs who won't stop chucking fireballs as Ryu like its SF2 bitching that his balance suggestions aren't being considered by the SF6 dev team.

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Thanks for letting me know there's an SMX Discord, I gotta check that out. It will be swell to finally find a place to have any meaningful talk about this game without people having such amazing takes as the absolute fucking nothingness that gets posted everywhere else. Thanks, you've made like 50 accounts here and you finally contributed something to my life


Honestly most of the criticism I see of this game genuinely makes me think either "have you played this in years?" and "have you played this... at all? Or... are you just, like... making up a video game in your head that isn't this?" cuz aside from doubles being hit-and-miss I can't tell what the fuck they're talking about.


1) Stunning and brave, as we all know Step Revolution has a history of assassinating those who say "this chart sucks". I'm proud of you for speaking up about this abuse.

2) Fun fact, DDR named a step artist once! It was the original chart of Paranoia Eternal.

That step artist proceeded to get death threats.

They never did it again.

Food for thought.

anyway actual news about the game, looks like we're getting the first rollout of the plus charts

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u too bby 💋

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Dual mode is reminscent of the "Half Double" mode from earlier Pump games. It's more geared towards singles players who haven't played doubles before, with its simpler charts and only using six panels. It also functions as a "doubles easy mode" of sorts, since the charts are mostly level 10-18.

What songs did you play that were "DDR 17 with mines" ? It's not until level 24 Wild charts that you start getting things as hard as DDR 17s.

In my experiences, having played almost the whole Wild folder:
Wild 20/21 = DDR high 13 / low 14
Wild 22/23 = DDR 15
Wild 24 = DDR 16
Wild 25+ = DDR 17/18

Give or take.

The difficulty curve is perfectly fine. Sort by difficulty and play more charts.

It takes a while to get used to, but once the muscle memory clicks, the center step feels really nice to hit.

This isn't something SMX staff can change. It's up to the arcade operator to set their own prices.

I know a lot of them are just dumb and set "1 credit = 1 song" because that's what Guitar Hero Arcade defaults to, and most normies just play 1 song and then walk off anyways.

There's shitloads of originals in the game already. Just because 5% of the songlist is Dancemania does not mean SMX has no original songs.

If you ask me, SMX's "identity" is that it is a celebration of ITG, DDR and PIU. It has songs from each of those games in it. It has something for any player of those three games.

Born to Run - Red Parker
EMEA (Europe Middle East Africa) - Re-venG
Forever and a Day (Fracus & Darwin Remix) - Dy5on Feat. Silver Angelina
Hava Nagila - Quiqman
Therapy - Conro

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Just noticed Hollywood Bowl is getting its First StepManiaX....

and with that we now have more Deluxe StepManiaX cabs in the UK than we do DDR A3 cabs

/funny joke

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Good. I'd love to see Stepmaniax just take over if Konami isn't going to step up. Maybe the extra competition will finally make them stop treating non-Asian countries so terribly.

Bambole (Ole) / Papa Gonzales
Bassline Shatter / M-Project & S218
Just Dance / Bad Computer
Make It Tonight / Fracus & Darwin Feat. Jake
Northern Lights / Saxquatch

First Crab Rave now Saxsquatch?!

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Do My Thing / PRTY ANML
Down Low / Hr. Troels x Felix Schorn
Nothing Else Matters / Katya Ocean
Samurai / Rameses B
Techno World / NAOKI underground

I've been working on converting SMX charts to ITG 4 panel charts. I really really like SMX when I first played it, hell I LOVED it when I first played it but ironically over time I actually find I enjoy it less and less. I don't care for the platform design compared to the pump pads they just feel cheaper and there's a lot more impact force on your foot causing me to feel drained, you also have to be much more deliberate with your steps compared to a traditional pad. FSR sensors are amazing for adjusting settings and sensitivity but they have their own issues that people tend to over look in the face of new shiny tech. The charting itself is... bland. Now, not everything needs to be gimmick crazy like pump charts or filled with random stops and BPM changes like DDR, but SMX takes it to the polar extreme with very few memorable charts. I mean, c'mon let's get real, acting like Xuxa's rechart is anything but bland is a more egregious example. I also think the middle panel is under utilized to the point of redundancy. 90% of the time you can just ignore it and hit it as a bracket treating it as as a direction arrow. I think the irony of it all is that the charting style was designed to appeal to NA players who were mostly into ITG style charts, but the vast majority of players are not ITG players, because if they want to play ITG they will just play... ITG. SMX needs to embrace what makes it unique instead of just trying to be a pseudo ITG4. For the record I have beaten every song in the game except for Max 428, and my best high score is a 95% on Summer with 98+ on everything below a 23. The ratings are whack as fuck too, I mean, Gargoyle is rated as easier than Feel the Rythm or Link Line? The atypical rhythmic choices are sometimes bizzare as well like, I do not understand why the chart for Have Fun constantly changes what it's following. At least Canon D has a really fun chart, and although it's a bit much on the turns The Beginning has a really fun chart that ACTUALLY USES THE MIDDLE PANEL!

Basically to sum it up: Game needs less ITG style stream charts and more unique fun charts because the game needs to accept that it's a 5 panel game for boomers called StepmaniaX and not ITG 4

On the positive side, the music selection, while not to my personal taste, is definitely the right choice for NA players and I don't mind them bringing back songs if they added more dancemania it wouldn't bother me as long as the charts are fun. And the UI is easily the best of all the games, by far, in fact the UI is so far ahead of DDR and PIU that it makes the UI for those games seem downright archaic (seriously I love you Andamiro but why the fuck are you still using the scroll wheel and code input shit from goddamn 1998.) BUT then there is no profile saving options, and grinding out 10 rounds at the arcade, it gets old really fast having to redo my settings over and over. They already have it implemented with the app, I don't think it would be *that* hard to reverse implement some type of profile saving.

A few great additions to the songlist!
I know a few songs that are on StepManiaX have been used by Youtubers as Copyright Free Music.
If any of them end up in a StepManiaX video or stream, do you still need to copy the license if it gets used?

I think what bothers me with this is that ITG as a concept was very different from what's popular nowadays, and the charting in that was a lot more unique than a lot of the stuff seen in SMX But I get what you were going for with it..

I completely agree with you on the whole "It's designed for specific players" because i've literally seen that argument used in defence for why the doubles charting gradually turned into the bland sort of mess they are nowadays. JBean himself (who from what I can gather writes a good portion of charts?) has said in response to someone i know on twitter they want to cater to the playstyles to specific players, which basically results in charts where if you're lucky you'll find one or two minor twists in a chart at best, very little actual imagination or experimentation with the centre panel. Some of my friends have been writing their own custom doubles charts just to see what they could throw together and there's a lot you can do with a 5th panel in this layout that just isn't ever being used.

It's gotten to the point where when I'm asked my opinion by other players I say "It's a fantastic UI, looks great, the technology is pretty good in the pads so it's easy to maintain, but the gameplay is really disappointing" and i've started to point people to DDR Machines that have popped up near some of the SMX cabinets as alternatives when they struggle to find content they want to play which is a real shame

Just as a quick note: legit curious which parts feel "unmemorable", as calling those out would help any authors work on different styles or techniques. Any actual feedback to the authors would go a long way in seeing some of those idea or changes implemented, but you can't just go wild to the wall and overwhelm players. I can promise you that the mentality has never been "ITG3/4" when writing anything with the game.

Obviously different chart authors have different takes on what should be done, and I'm glad we've got a lot of them doing different things. We do have some _very_ twisty and center panel heavy charts too, some streamy focused ones, some that involve new and weird tech, and a good chunk that feel more accessible and fun - I'd really suggest checking out the songlist as a whole. With nearly 400 songs and 3000 charts, I'm sure there's what you're looking for.

RE: profiles. We've had profile saving/loading/option restoring for nearly a year now. Simply log in scanning the QR and all scores for your sessions are uploaded automatically, and if you set your default settings and save them, those will automatically be applied and restored when you log in without having to do anything.

Admittedly, the button that shows this UI is not that well called out, and we're working on making that stand out more to show people that they can use it. It's incredibly useful as we all know to not have to constantly be re-setting your settings, haha. It also has the advantage of having your name on gameplay/eval/etc too.