"End of the Road"

This might be me just waxing nostalgia, but I recall that back in the Stepmania 3.9 days, the game came with a handful of predefined nonstop and challenge courses.

One of them was named End of the Road (obvious reference to Legend Road), and it immediately jumped out at me because it looks like just about the hardest possible mod course a player could even think about pulling off.

The course consists of:

- Random 7-footer, 1.5x Reverse
- Random 7-footer, Expand (Wave in DDR)
- Random 8-footer, 0.25x
- Random 8-footer, Hidden Boost
- Random 9-footer, 3x Dark Reverse
- Random 9-footer, Brake Big Supershuffle (Stream Blender in ITG)
- Random 10-footer, 1.2x rate Dizzy Drunk (Drift in ITG)
- Random 10-footer, Tornado Shuffle Dark

So you've got 8 songs in a row, with both difficulty and modifiers increasing in difficulty throughout, only to culminate in 3 songs (including 2 bosses) with absolutely ridiculous modifier combinations. (At the time, this would've been the original 1-10 footer scale.)

Specifically,

- SM seems to apply Supershuffle after it applies Big, so all the added streams are blendered too. This will give you heaping piles of jackhammers, with Brake on top.
- 1.2x rate on an old-school (pre-SN1) 10-footer isn't too horrific; in Extreme, the fastest you get is 400 BPM 8th streams (sped up The legend of Max) and 348 BPM 8th crossovers (sped up PSMO), both of which top players can handle. It's Dizzy and Drift together that start the headaches - if Dizzy is "read the columns, not the arrows" and Drift is "read the arrows, not the columns", then the two combined is close to unreadable. Still doable though, by someone who's put a lot of muscle memory and/or memorization work into the subset of boss songs.
- Tornado and Shuffle together might as well be a kill screen. I haven't heard of a single person who can read Tornado at all, and then Shuffle takes away the memorization/muscle memory option. This might be 'possible' to do for someone who's really, really good at reading Flip on bosses - there's a window about 2/3 of the way down the screen where the helix of arrows is shaped identically to Flip.

Oh, and this is all a Challenging Mode course which means you have only 4 lives to complete it with.

Of course it would be trivial to cheat the requirements, since the song picks are based on labeled difficulty only (to make the course work with any Stepmania songlist). Above, I've considered a 'reasonable' songlist like Extreme's, since this course dates back to ~2005 or so if I remember correctly.

The question I've got is, has anyone seriously or not-so-seriously actually attempted this course? What's the farthest anyone has gotten? Has anyone managed to clear it? Overall, it might be comparable to something like ITG's Breaking Point or Nightmare marathons, minus the whole 4 lives thing. The world records on both of those are above 97%.

On a different note, anyone know who originally came up with the idea for this course, or any of the other predefined courses in SM3.9?


Edit: So it looks like the deadly Dizzy+Drift combination is actually used in ITG2's Nightmare course, plus Mirror to mess up muscle memory/memorization, on Vertex^2 of all songs. It's not nearly as mean as this course though, starting at 20% Dizzy 20% Drift and slowly ramping it up to 60% Dizzy 60% Drift (whereas this course puts it at 100% for both throughout the whole song). But it might be not as unreadable as I thought.

I also messed around with some CRS files to attempt the last song of this course as Max 300, and found a (difficult) trick for dealing with Tornado better. Regarding the "Flip spot" about 2/3 of the way down the screen, you can turn on Mini to zoom out the playfield so it's only 1/3 of the way down. Then there's enough room for the helix shape to curve back around again, creating a new spot about 2/3 of the way down where the arrows can just barely be read normally. Then turn on 2x Boost so arrows in that region are at a reasonable speed (slowed to less than 2x near the bottom of the screen, then quickly accelerating to the targets so you don't have to remember them for long). Playing the whole course with 2x Boost Mini shouldn't be too bad either.

As someone who has been known to read nods really well, tornado has been a pain in my backside, until one day I sat down and tried to figure it out, it seems like there’s a sort of nice happy zone where the arrows are normal enough that you can read them, especially on 1x. But as the speed mod goes up the nice reading area seems to slowly drag off the screen. Also the fact it’s so kinda difficult to naturally read is why I think it defaults to 65% if you select it on itg as opposed to a raw 100%.

As for the course I remember playing it all the time as a kid and failing repeatedly but if I were to try it nowadays with say extreme or max 2 and earlier only (the course I believe was in 3.0 final and extreme didn’t exist back then as it was still relatively new, at least I remember getting stepmania 3.0 and extreme sinfiles were still taken from screen recordings and hand written charts) I’d probably walk all over it providing I don’t get screwed over with song picks in for the last stage. I’m fairly sure big just made a song had 8ths by the way as an opposite to little, for raw 16ths you wanted quick or bmr-Ize which was an unselectable mod I believe?

Whilst on the subject of janky courses from back in the day, the ddruk cabinet that was in London used to have a class mode like iidx. I still remember everyone talking for years how impossible it’s top Dan course was as it was all things like bmrs colours on challenge and other such things. Wish I could remember what they all were though because I’m fairly sure by today’s standards they are really tame

I've tried this way back when with ITG Rebirth songs, though I'll confess that I cheated and used the regular lifebar for it. Even with that, I only got as far as Stage 6 because it picked Beautiful Morning . 95 BPM and Brake is an ugly combination.

@Dancefreak Yeah Tornado's definitely one of the hardest mods to read. You could make the case that Tornado is slightly above Flip in terms of difficulty, since there's an easy trick to read Tornado if you can read Flip. I can't speak for the happy zone you describe though - on SM3.9, the two spots on the screen close to normal are about 1/6 of the way down, and about 4/3 of the way down. Then the former is way too close to the top (especially for an Extreme-era 10-footer) unless you've turned on 0.25x or something, and the latter is off-screen unless you've turned on Mini.

At least on SM3.9, the helix shape of Tornado doesn't change at all if the speed mod changes. The arrows still curve at the same points on the screen (they just move faster or slower). So the areas that are nice to read are still 1/6 of the way down and 4/3 of the way down no matter what the speed mod is set to. I'd be curious to know if this is another implementation difference between SM3.9's Tornado and ITG's Tornado.

Yup, ITG definitely has at least a few mods that are different from their SM3.9 direct counterparts, and I'd believe you if you said Tornado was one of them. Another one I know for sure is Mini - on SM3.9 it halves the size of the playfield, while on ITG it definitely doesn't shrink it that much.

Very interesting to hear that this course existed before SM3.9 - I've never played a Stepmania version older than that. Picking and choosing (standardized) songlists to optimize this course is a valid strategy; if you pick Max 2 and earlier then the only 10-footers you can get are Max 300 and Maxx Unlimited. (Or you could even pick Max 1's songlist and guarantee that the last two songs are Max 300 twice.) Great to hear that someone besides me has seriously attempted it, though I think the farthest I've gotten on 4 lives is the third song, where I can somewhat read 0.25x but not well enough to 4-life it. If you keep making attempts, you might even be the first person to pass it with proof!

So that's where Big's name comes from - I've always just equated it to ITG's Stream and didn't think much more past "it adds lots of streams". Cool.

I'm very unfamiliar with iidx past the raw gameplay - what's class mode?

@Harman Smith Interesting idea to try it out with ITG-related songlists; that should make it very slightly easier I'd think (if only because most of the songs would be at the same BPM, instead of the last 2 songs suddenly doubling the BPM with an Extreme-era songlist). Have you tried it again since?

I mean for what it’s worth flip isn’t hard to read if you just take some time to learn it, I remembered playing sinfiles I wrote back in like 2002 2003 I think? To learn it. I wish I could remember exactly when the course came out because if it wasn’t 3 final it’d have been from one of the first release candidate releases after 3.0 final. But to stick with the spirit of it you’d definitely play it with extreme and earlier only files, doing it with just max 300 would be kinda cheating especially as I’m fairly sure the 0.25x came from trick in extreme in hindsight, if you wanted harder courses just poke around the uksrt discord and look at some of the stuff that’s been made in there. Especially the things made by windeu and TaroNuke if you want stuff that’s difficult but polished. As for official courses you hit it on the head with breaking point and nightmare being the hardest for difficulty but in terms of mod density, automation is kinda stupid as it ends with clockwork genesis on centered and different variations of split, alternate and hallway. But it can be cheated quite heavily by turning all those mods on as they negate each other out if done right.

As for iidx class mode it was just a nonstop mode but the courses were progressively harder much like dance drills in ddr x ?

Thinking about it there’s never been a real hard mod challenge style course where the focus was on mods but not using the scripted timed mods style since extreme really.