Ok, it has a few redeeming qualities, but most of the new stuff is pretty damn lame.
To get it out of the way quickly, the main new thing I like is having Marvelouses in regular gameplay. Hawt. Awesome. We're done with this section except for saying that the main other good thing about the game is that there are plenty of songs from Extreme and earlier.
Now to find the bad new stuff you pretty much have to subtract the good new stuff (Marvelouses) from everything else. That will leave you with... well, pretty much everything else.
Yes, I really dislike most of the new songs. I really dislike most of the new courses.
Why do I dislike so many of the new songs? Aside from seemingly most of them being licensed covers (which isn't really a bad thing in and of itself), almost all of them have misrated difficulties, poor stepcharts, and stupid stupid STUPID tempo changes.
For the Expert difficulty I like to classify songs in three categories:
- Songs that are really too easy.
- Songs of a nice difficulty level--stuff is happening but not too much stuff.
- Uberfast/complicated songs, usually the 10 footers
I'm sorry Konami, but I have an intense hatred for RANDOM STUPID USELESS TEMPO CHANGES AND STOPS. Seriously, NO MORE. There are far, far too many of these on these new songs.
Let's look at one of my least favorite examples of this phenomenom: Giri Giri. About halfway through the song there's a random tempo stop. A little bit later there's another. And another. And another. Hell, there may even be another. God, why the hell did they decide to do that? It's absolutely terrible and unneeded.
Furthermore, I pretty much only play double, and in Giri Giri on double there's a sequence of 1/8th notes that go Player 2 Right, Player 2 Down, Player 1 Down.
Have you tried doing that? It usually results in a literal jump, almost a leap, to the other pad. The first time I played the song I was confused because I was sure that no way did they just want me to go airborn leaping from pad to pad. Bah.
Yes, ITG did it, and no, I really thought it was stupid then, too.
So where does this leave me? If you watch the songwheel when I'm in the Supernova 2 section you'll see a bunch of Es on 8-foot songs. Why? It's because when the song starts doing these dumb-shit tempo stops/changes for no reason except to artificially bump up the difficulty, it tends to really screw me up, and I end up failing. Once I know that the song is so freakin' stupid, I tend to never play it again.
So then where does that leave me? It leaves me almost exclusively playing the songs from Extreme and before, which I count as the only real good thing in this mix: the stuff from previous mixes.
I was at the arcade earlier today, and I just really had to get this off my chest.