Z-I-v: Tower of Eight Panels

255 (st2020 Mix) – 8/10
Pretty great file overall. Would have loved to see you go for the bonus requirement to actually make it feel like a ranged attack of sorts, but it’s a very nice run file that works well.

Artillery - ???
Lock and load! Perhaps one of my silliest gimmick experiments so far. With so many good submissions all around this time, I’m probably not going to rank very well, will I?

Clotho and the Stargazer – 6/10
A runny chart with gaps here and there which I felt could have been more deliberate at parts. The slowdown-speedup with the forward-backward staircase feels a little strange. The chart feels like a 16 overall, but there’s a doublestep near the end leading to one of your stairs. It’s pretty well-thought out overall other than those.

Crab Rave – 10/10
Other than just how much my pants might rip from playing this on pads, this is pretty much exactly how I’d want it to play. It’s called Crab Rave, so of course, crab walk stretches are the most appropriate thing to do for the whole song, and this chart does it just right.

Funk Assembly – 9/10
I personally find 1U-2L-2D-2L-1U or its mirrored variation jarring but other than that, it feels very well-thought out. Those short bursts give off some CHAOS Terror-Tech Mix vibes.

Gothic and Loneliness – 8/10
Perhaps the most straightforward chart submitted in this round. Not an 18, but it incorporates the stretch element inherent to the theme well nonetheless. The runs, though, feel like they have short wide drills there out of spite rather than for an actual reason, which I felt could have been liven out a little better.

I Lose Control – 8/10
Pretty great chart. I’d personally change those 3-panel wide 16th bursts at 135 BPM and that last transition burst (especially since it’s way harder than the similar burst you put near the beginning) to something a little smoother since we’re talking about a 14 here, but it’s nicely paced other than that. Good SM5 gimmicks too.

Makin’ Out – 4/10
Uhh, what is that starting roll into a stop, then surprise speedup resume near the start, with a jump? I don’t feel like that’s not a very pleasing combination of gimmicks to do, especially when the jump is far too close to the target zone. The rest of the chart feels far too easy for a 15, as you have no sustained runs or confusing stretch twists despite the BPM only being 144. The slowdown with the very few 16ths felt like it presented an opportunity for you to attack the bonus requirement which you chose not to take. There are a lot more interesting things you could do with 3-panel gaps between arrows if you took the time to explore, but this particular file feels like it’s been rushed to completion without you really trying to do anything flavorful. Just something you might want to look into in the future. On the bright side, at least all your movements are coherent.

Railgun Roulette – 7/10
“Machine gun” jack steps/trills, huh. It’s definitely an annoying pattern to put consistently at this kind of speed but it works to the nature of the song you picked. The mines definitely make it feel more like the “roulette” like in the title. That said, it’s not always very easy to pay attention to whether they were there or not on something as dense as this chart, which in this case, is important because you also used them to mark footswitches, which are sometimes just straight jacks instead. The 32nd bursts going into stretch leaps present a pretty serious momentum break as well.

Reasons to Run (Fox Stevenson Remix) – 5/10
There’s nothing wrong with submitting an easy chart for a contest, but the way this chart plays just reads to me as “I just converted the whole thing from a single chart to make a normal-looking double chart initially and changed bits and pieces here and there afterwards to meet the main requirement for a contest round”, which not only feels like a really lazy thing to do, but also fails to give the chart the desired flavor for a theme it tries to show. There are some measures near the end with just arrows entirely on the left pad, and when there are 3-panel gaps between arrows, they do not seem to follow any sort of consistency or are built around a theme to them, but instead feel sprinkled randomly throughout the chart. There were some sounds that have stretches and then very similar sounds afterwards that do not have them at all. The quarter notes in the “run… run… run… run” parts presented ample opportunity to prepare those “ranged attacks” but it was sadly a missed one.

THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING – 7/10
The way you used transitions back and forth so frequently at 164 BPM including a backwards swivel, makes it an upper 11, rather than a 10, but what I ultimately wished it did better was incorporating the ranged attacks into the chart more forcibly and deliberately, like I wrote for a number of other submissions. The transitions themselves are enjoyable, I’ll give the file that.

Undercover – 6/10
Pretty goofy chart but it’s also pretty cute. The difficulty distribution is a little odd though, as it goes from incredibly sparse to just continuous 12th note transitions here and there, and it gets quite really difficult for a 12 at times, particularly towards the end. The part around combo 60 is a little awkward because it’s not immediately clear how/which way to turn, as is around combo 112. I like that you leave the player to be able to do many things, like footswitching all the 12th note gallops or actually making all the turns as they come, though. And then come the runs with the wider steps. Not sure what happened near the end but there’s a massive flow break in one of your 12th streams.

Vairocana - 10
Brain-melting. I need to look at more doubles tech charts lol. This owned. Well paced and good mix of comfortable and twisty patterning. Not much else to say

Babylonia - 5
Watch out for how the player goes into jumps during pad transitions, as well as how the player faces as they cross the center panels. There were some rather uncomfortable stretches. Also I could tell where the 16ths were being cheesed lol

Caliburne - 7
Generally good patterning, and most of the crossover flow felt really nice. However there were some really harsh transitions from P1 down to P2 up, etc. that appeared out of nowhere that I wasn't really fond of

Master Of Puppets - 8
Man I'm not sure how to tackle those time sig shifts. Great pattern motifs that go to the song well. Some turns that look rather uncomfortable unless you know which way to face in advance.

CHOCOLATE PHILOSOPHY - 9
Patterning flowed really well. Subjectively would've liked to see more jumps and jump-based patterning to accent prominent sounds in the song. Freeze section in the 14 was cute!