Merk vs. IndyDDR: Waiting for a Merk-acle

[Merk]

Speed Over Beethoven

[Ho]

Ok...but, yikes! If we're complaining about Love Shine, I have a feeling there will be no end to the moaning (and wheezing) from this one.

[Ho]

Speed Over Beethoven is about as hard as I was expecting it to be. I played it three times (but definitely not in a row). Damn, I was winded after each time. I went from a C, to a B, and then to an A. I figured that would be good enough for now. 114 greats, 3 NC, 626 DP.

[Merk]

Jesus Christ, I haven't looked at the chart, is it that hard? Does it have some sort of gimmick (constant stream, gallops, jumps, etc.)

[Ho]

It's a 9...which is why I was kind of surprised you picked it. Mostly it's just kind of fast with dense streams. A mild stamina buster...but my stamina is busted right now, so it's not very easy.

[Merk]

Shit! This was a completely blind pick, I figured it was an 8 at most!

[Merk]

I burned and installed the DDR Superdisc so now I can play just about all of the 573 mixes! I played for just a tiny bit to test and make sure the disc wasn't super messed up but I plan on playing this upcoming week.

Remember that song Wonderland? That was a good song and its doubles chart is p fun and it has a goofy ending.

I AIN'T GOING OUT LIKE A SUCKA

[Ho]

Welcome back!














(it's about damn time)

[Merk]

I played some DDR yesterday! Man, 4th mix+ is great and I dare say it's better than 5th although they're both close.

Would you guys say that 4th+ or 5th was the better mix? 4th has a better song selection but man that 30fps framerate is complete ass.

[Ho]

That's a pretty hard judgement to make...

4th Plus certainly has the larger song list with almost all of the content that had appeared up to that point in the series and pretty strong new songs. Lots of good stuff and fan favorites here. But the old engine was feeling pretty old at that point. And the menu system is complete garbage.

5th Plus took the first dive (ironically, also introduced Dive) in the series as far as song count. It lost a lot of the "classic" songs that people liked. But it did replace them some great new licenses, K-originals, and some crossovers from IIDX. A lot of people's favorites were lost, but there are many favorite songs on 5th that were introduced or even exclusive to this mix. In addition, the engine makes the jump from 30fps to 60 and really establishes what would be the look and feel of DDR for most of the next decade. All the way up through DDR X, the basic UX is essentially just reskinned 5th Mix with incremental changes and additions.

So, IMHO, I would pick 5th Mix as "better" for its bigger changes to the DDR experience and its lasting impact on the series as a whole.

[Ho]

Hey, duder. How's it going? I'm waiting for you to catch up with at least the 3rd Mix stuff before we call some new songs. In the meantime, I've been playing through all the 5th Mix exclusives (and anything else I feel like along the way). I've already played through them all on double and started playing the singles last night. I'm finding it interesting that some of my 5-8 year old scores in StayOnSync have actually been a bit of a challenge for me to beat.

[Merk]

Thought about playing yesterday but I hadn't played Beet in like a month so I decided to give that a play for about an hour yesterday. Gonna play tonight before the lady friend and I make tacos or Taco Tuesday! She's going to run on the treadmill and I'm going to play DDR simultaneously to see if that's something that we can do together and not interfere with our respective mojos. I played a bit last week but mostly stuck to singles and some easy doubles and just played songs that were nostalgic for me that you can't play on Extreme. I gave a few korean double charts a play but didn't get any fantastic scores - Tell Me Tell Me was a pretty weird chart IMO

[Ho]

A lot of those Korean charts are weird. I hope you like jumping.

[Merk]

kk, I did play!

Ba Kkwo - 25 greats, 1 miss
Byul - 17 greats, FC
Sung Suk - 23 greats, 1 miss
Wa - 17 greats, 2 miss
Face - 26 greats, FC

Stay on Sync has been updated! I just checked the OP and *none* of these are in the OP. I'm guessing none of these were in 3rd mix?


And yeah, holy shit, you're right about the Korean charts. It's all just a bunch of jumps, jacks, and jump-jacks. I wonder if one guy made all the charts or if Konani told the step writers, "Make these charts as goofy as possible" for all the Korean songs. I'm going to say that Face is probably the best chart and Tell Me Tell Me is probably the worst and doesn't go with the song at all.

It got me thinking though, do you think that Konami thought of the steps first for a song or did they come up with a song first and then the steps? Take Afronova for example, do you think that they wanted to make a turny step pattern song that ended in a bunch of jumps so Konami had Naoki write some weird tribal song or do you think they had Naoki make a weird tribal song first and the step writer thought that the turny-jumpy step pattern was the most appropriate chart for that song?

[Ho]

Now you've played all of the Korean songs that we *didn't* pick.

Other than Bu Dam (which you didn't play for some reason), you played the songs that made it out of 3rd Mix Ver.KOREA2 into the Japanese 3rd Plus, 4th, and 4th Plus. I had picked all the songs that were exclusive to 3rd VK2.

I'm almost done playing through all the 5th Mix exclusives. I can probably finish that up in one more play session. I'll toss 4th Plus in after that and play all the Korean songs. Go ahead and add your new scores to the table on the OP. I'll fill in my scores for those shortly. Are you going to play the VK2 exclusives?

BTW, Bu Dam has a fantastic stream chart.