General DanceDanceRevolution Discussion

Oh shit, I can't read.

Bag is overrated, if not low-hanging fruit.

Lesson By DJ?

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So, currently one of the usual ITG v.s. DDR spats is going on in the DDR A thread. First off, it'd be appreciated if said discussion was redirected here so as not to take that thread off-topic. Second, I do have my own two cents on the matter.

My problems with In the Groove

1. It wasn't a good game to get casuals interested

You actually look at the songlists for the 2 games, and there's really not much there that anyone who's not already a rhythm game geek will recognize, unless you took a time machine back to 2005 after playing 2007's Pump it Up Pro or something, a privilege I metaphorically had with my playing order.

In the Groove 1 had:

My Favourite Game (Dance Cover)
PA Theme
Torn (Dance Cover)
Tough Enough

Meanwhile, In the Groove 2 brought absolutely nothing a casual player would be familiar with, instead doubling down on bringing songs familiar to DDR vets of the DanceMania selections, which brings me to my second gripe with In the Groove...

2. It relied a little too much on DDR nostalgia for its own good

You've got more DanceMania resteps than you've got familiar hits, several of the original songs are obvious expies of DDR classics (e.g. Disconnected trying to be the PARANOiA, VerTex being MAX, Anubis is AFRONOVA right down to sharing the walking cross patterns), and several of the other acts tapped were done so with DDR in mind, namely Nina, Spacekats, and Missing Heart/E-ROTIC. It kinda makes ITG feel less like it has its own identity and like it's a high-budget ripoff.

3. The chart quality is not as good as most remember

There's a reason so many charts are memetic (Utopia, Tell, VerTex^2, My Favourite Game): a lot of the high-end charts are rather obnoxiously written and don't hold up to modern standards. Maybe the lower-end stuff will be satisfying? Nope, quite a handful of it feels like it was written on autopilot. I think the starving for higher difficulties gave people rose-tinted glasses when it came to this game "dominating" DDR even to this day. Well, that, and one other thing...

4. The custom songs mechanic as flaunted by fans is both non-canon and suspect

Let's not pretend there's not a reason why no commercial title since this has had a similar mechanic: the system was legally a very dark shade of grey to its core and it's a miracle Roxor didn't get sued for it first before Konami could even come after them. In addition, a lot of players basically praise either the R21 iteration of the system or even just OITG as if that's canon in the slightest. No, the only way one can say ITG is the superior game still is by its final official iteration, R23, and nobody will go up to bat to it for good reason. Otherwise, you're just saying either the disowned abandonware or StepMania is better than DDR, to which the answers are respectively "OK, then why isn't Rock Band 3 pre-Nov. 2011 patch considered the best Rock Band?" and "Well duh, DDR's encapsulated in StepMania by its nature and you can ignore licensing entirely".

I fully agree with you on #3. ITG officials are ass to play.

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See the argument about it not being good to get casuals invested is subjective, back when the game was released, ITG1 was really popular with casuals in the coastal town I played it, the scoreboards were filled with random names I didn’t know and there was always someone on it, ITG2 I’ve seen plenty of casuals pick up and enjoy, the amount of bubblegum pop style music in it is actually really friendly for casuals and in a way works better than actual recognised licensed songs because when they know when a song comes out, they’ll know how old it is.

Might just strictly be our particular area but that was how I observed it.

I do agree some of the ideas were essentially copied like having disconnected as a parallel to paranoia but some of your comparisons were a bit odd, like Anubis being afronova , I might be a little hazy but I sure as heck don’t remember Anubis being 200b and having sideways crossovers on its highest chart, nor do I remember afronova having 24ths or jacks on individual arrows in streams or even 32nds (assuming you slowed it down to half bpm to match Anubis)

Nina as an artist I don’t believe had anything in ddr so not sure why you’d say she was used to make people think of nostalgic ddr personally, I see spacekats though as bus stop so I agree with that one, but just like with missing heart and e-rotic there had been no songs added to ddr by them in years so it feels more like it was done because maybe they just liked the artists more and it’s unintentionally looking like it was copied?

Chart quality is a very odd one. I liked the direction the charting was going in ITG 1 where it was more difficult patterns that don’t necessarily clamp down on how the music goes with karaoke style stepping which I see a lot in modern files, it sure as hell wasnt polished and when ITG2 came out it seemed like they pulled back a bit on it being slightly overcharted, which I personally didn’t enjoy as much, but it was certainly different from DDR to a substantial enough degree that it had its own identity, it was like a middle ground between ddr and pump in terms of style for ITG1 but just felt kind of generic when 2 came out. Although I do have to ask why my favourite game was considered a meme chart, I unironically enjoyed playing that a lot (disregarding it’s terrible syncing)

The custom song argument, they knew the machines were being hacked anyway, they probably knew they were losing their rights to continue making the games in the lawsuit, figured it’d be a nice last gift to the players, i personally don’t think allowing custom content on their game would be illegal, look at games like beat sabre which are nothing but custom songs, it’s down to people making sure they aren’t sharing copyrighted music.

As for which I’d say is superior I don’t think it’s fair to judge them both as the same thing, they really aren’t. I literally wouldn’t be able to choose between extreme and stock ITG 2 with an up to date patch (ignoring custom support) because they both have good and bad things going for them, but at the very least ITG gave the music game scene the kick in the rear it needed and caused us to get supernova worldwide which probably helped us get to the point where we have DDR A worldwide (albeit heavily crippled over here) so even if you don’t like ITG as a game or concept I think people should still be glad it existed, it’s just a shame now any cabinet that had it running would have been converted to stepmania 5 or have so many theme and song changes it’s basically just stepmania with a specific set of timing windows now, because it’s the least likely game to be preserved hownit was intended to be played.

Just my personal opinions though, but there are some people like there who like the game for its own merits, there’s just not as many of us as there were circa 2006 sadly.




P.s. the doubles charts were literally the worst things in existence for the majority and I don’t think anybody would ever argue against that sadly.

I think the reason for that is because it was never meant to be. It was released as something to play if you already played rhythm games and knew them well, pretty much the rhythm game version of TGM.


I can't stand the argument that "songs are expies of DDR songs". How in the hell does Disconnected sound like PARANOiA aside from the fact "it became a series"? I don't remember any MAX song being quite like the VerTex duo, and Anubis sounds NOHING like AFRONOVA, so if patterns are enough to earn this for you, I think we've set quite a low bar. And, again, this wasn't meant for the casual crowd looking for "familiar hits". And no arcade DDR game really is overflowing with those to begin with!


VerTex^2 and Tell are good charts, idgaf what people say

VerTex^2 is a crazy, bizzare and unconventional chart from start to finish. It has a heavy amount of variety and fair patterns that aren't asking you to doublestep every five seconds (hello, DDR 19s.)

Tell just has really bizzare stepjumps. They're mentally difficult, sure, but extremely fair.


>Then why isn't Rock Band 3 pre-Nov.2011 considered the best RB
Wait... it isn't? Huh, I've been living under a rock.

That aside, R21 was the most common thing to find simply because it was the best version of the game. Just because it's an earlier patch doesn't mean it's not the official game. That's silly.

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Guess I better add something since it was originally my offhand comment that started the whole fiasco. In the original thread, I was saying that in comparison to DDR Supernova, ITG was the superior game. I liked DDR Supernova and I'd gladly take it over Extreme for the umpteenth time any day of the week, but you could tell that Konami was desperately trying (and failing) to emulate some of ITG's ITG-isms with most of the boss charts. And to a certain extent, they still are. ITG felt like something made by fans of the game who really understood what people liked and wanted to give that back to them. By comparison, Supernova just felt like something Konami put out so they could say "hey, we're still here". Supernova 2 was a pretty drastic improvement in my opinion aside from the really janky song ratings (Paranoia Hades an 8? suck my ass) and aside from DDR X, every mix has felt like an improvement over the previous and I can definitely say Ace is the mix I've liked the most, despite all of the issues that I acknowledge it has.

At this point, I can't really say if ITG is the superior game because ITG/ITG2 as an official game in 2006/2007 and ITG in its current state are basically two separate things that just happen to share the same name. But I do like and prefer the amount of freedom ITG has and I'd gladly take well made custom charts over Valkyrie Dimension and fucking Dead End Groove Radar Special.

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I looked at a good handful of ITG official doubles charts. Up to Hard, I think they're mostly fine. On Expert, on the other hand... yeah. I do like a select few (July, Euphoria, On a Day Like Today come to mind), but a lot of the others make me feel as if the developers forgot that not every player is 6 feet tall.

How so? I'm not saying I agree or disagree, but I want to know what you felt was a drastic improvement in SuperNOVA2 over SuperNOVA.

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Other than the still incredibly inconsistent boss songs, i felt like the overall chart quality in Supernova 2 was probably the biggest improvement. There's still plenty of charts i revisit from Supernova 2 on Ace like Why Not and Electrified, whereas i don't even touch the Extreme folder outside of like, 2 or 3 songs. For reasons that are probably pretty obvious (BLUE EVERYWHERE), it also appealed to me more aesthetically. It felt like they were finally starting to put the effort into actually making a good DDR game rather than just feeling like something they were obligated to put out like the first Supernova did.

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I think ITG...


... is okay. I played officials just to give them a try, and I don't really remember anything to complain about. There were a few infamous gimmick charts that I didn't care for, but I respect they tried things that DDR didn't. And didn't do them quite as badly as DDR's introduction of mines shock arrows. It's hardly fair to comare the officials to the several iterations of DDR when they have a fraction of the songs... it's almost safe to say ITG has the same percentage of good charts as DDR did.

Compared to just Supernova? Iono, there's a bunch of Supernova charts I really liked. They stick out to me more than the ITG stuff but I can't put a scientific reason as to why one or the other is "better." Just DDR was already rooted in me and I played it way more. Alls I remember wanting to play from ITG was Monolith.

Actually wait, backtracking on gimmicks I didn't like from ITG, hand plants / virtually anything with more than 2 arrows are actual pain. bearing in mind several people must like them 'cause they keep appearing in custom charts mumblr grumble

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I think what people should understand is that what ITG did was pretty influential to the DDR or the Stepmania pad community.

Keep in mind that when ITG/ITG2 came out, the last DDR game we had was DDR Extreme, and people were already pushing the limit of that game. The hardest song at that time was Paranoia Survivor Max Oni, and the highest official rating was a 10-footer.

ITG decided it was going to be a game that would push the limit of players and raise the upper limit of 4-panel charts. It introduced charts going as high as level 13, and the highest difficulty level "Expert" being only as low as level 9. This made it so now a majority of songs would have at least a hard enough chart (at the time) for even high level players to enjoy. It also helped differentiate a lot of harder charts instead of just bunching them all to level 10 making it an extremely wide/varied difficulty in itself (before DDR created the new rating scale in DDR X)

It also introduced mines which, although controversial in itself, did spice up the gameplay a bit. It was something fresh and new at the time that brought some added difficulty to an already established game design. Same goes with hands.

Unfortunately, the charts (just like quite a few old DDR charts as well) didn't age too well, so nowadays we don't really see them as "good" anymore. This also doesn't help that the stepmania pad community's chart design philosophy has improved in itself, so the official ITG charts are most definitely dated compared to them.

But we can't really deny what ITG has brought, despite not being the most original idea of a game. I will also admit the songlist was definitely not as strong as DDR even for the time.

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A lot of the expert charts I feel are still fun to play at least (to me they've aged well imo), that's definitely where all the attention went towards to. Hard charts are honestly hit or miss, most often miss, they're fairly bland and boring. Stepmaniax feels the same in that regard, the hard charts just feel like no effort went into them.

is there any videos of the original basic chart of R3 in DDR 2nd Mix CLUB VERSION 1? (and not the playstation club version as that version is the one in club version 2)

Ugh, had a piece of trash thrown at me today. Sometimes it's just not your day.

while playing? or just in general?

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near the end of a song, just long enough for them to get away and for me to still need to concentrate on the song.

if Konami were to ever release another CS game, what songs do you think would be sure to make it?

The last DDR CS game was DDR HOTTEST PARTY 5 / II, which is essentially X2 CS, so everything from X3vs2nd on would be new.
From the way DDR II was made (as in, it actually had a lot of X2's songlist, really good song selection), I think most KONAMI originals from X3 - A would be safe -- apart from those that already were removed, of course. Some songs might miss, but the most popular stuff I think would be in a new game for sure (especially if the CS game would be international and not only US/EU like Ultramix/UNIVERSE, but rather for the entire world. It is 2018 and I don't believe KONAMI would push out a JP-exclusive game at this time in the video game industry. Maybe a Switch release?)

As in for licenses, I do not think KONAMI would have to get new licenses specifially for a new CS game, but they almost definitely would, just for marketing the game to the "mainstream" market. I don't think the current licenses would "flash" players new to DDR (or rhythm games as a whole). DDR II / HP5 had VERY good license picks, so I think they wouldn't screw that up.

What I *hope* is that when the next DDR (hopefully) gets announced somewhere in 2019, Konami decide to bring a CS port that stays truthful to the ACTUAL arcade game and receives updates and new songs in the same fashion that the arcade games get, but this is probably wishful thinking.

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None, because we're not ever getting another CS game. DDR II/Hottest Party 5 was basically the one everyone always wanted and nobody fucking bought it.

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Making another CS game seems redundant anyway. We have the ones we got and I couldn't ask for more.
HP5 isn't nearly as good as people make it out to be.

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What is sadly nowadays, is that the majority DDR fans, like us, we can watch videos gameplays only.

About the possibility of DDR in console is difficult, Now DDR survive with their arcades only, and their events and uploads are little.

I don't believe that DDR film is a helpful for it franchise.

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