IndyDDR.com

Aoi-chan wrote:

Ho wrote:First off, welcome to IndyDDR, Aoi-chan. Your repair/maintenance/technical posts on DDR Freak have been consistently informative and insightful. I admit that not a lot of technical discussion goes on here, but I'm glad to have attracted a quality resource like yourself.

But to be perfectly honest, I really just don't play enough DDR at this point and wasn't particularly knocked out by the content in SN1 or SN2 to want to make the investment. If I was a public location and would make some of it back, that would be one thing. But in private collection it's pretty much just money out the door. Given the pricing I've heard on SN/SN2 upgrade kits, there are whole (used) machines I'd rather have for the same or less money.

Thanks! I've seen you on ddrfreak for years and always loved reading your posts. Your knowledge is impressive and I've learned quite a bit from you over the years. I recall first learning how to clean out a DDR pad from your online tutorial. Not sure how much of a "resource" I can be, but thanks for the confidence.

As for the SN upgrades, the prices are bound to go down eventually. I personally like SN for what it's worth, Extreme was just getting very old and boring to me personally. Having more songs and better graphics was a welcomed change. Too bad the majority of hardcore players in my area really hate SN and have been all over the ITG2 ahem*hacked*ahem cabinet we have running with over 1000 songs loaded on it. Here's hoping for a SN3 that doesn't suck in the eyes of the hardcore players.

I think the hardcore players expect more than DDR has/is-willing to offer. We'll just have to see about future releases.

Aoi-chan wrote:I personally like SN for what it's worth, Extreme was just getting very old and boring to me personally. Having more songs and better graphics was a welcomed change.

I generally agree. In fact, as much as many people don't like them, I was particularly happy to see the return of the dancing characters that had been absent since 5th Mix. They're still nowhere as impressive as the background animations in the likes of Pump It Up or IIDX, but I always though they were something of a signature look for the series since the very beginning and their absence in MAX-Extreme was sort of like DDR missing its soul (though the content in that era was generally pretty good).

But I definitely agree that Extreme was getting quite stale in its 5 year run. My interest in DDR in general really dropped during that period (for various reasons including boredom with the content in Extreme). I ended up picking up PIU during that time which had something like 3-4 different releases in the time that Extreme was out (!).

Seeing SuperNOVA bring the DDR series back to life was certainly welcomed by me. I do like the new look, but the interface seems really slow. I don't remember that kind of clunkiness in DDR since 4th Mix. SuperNOVA2 seems to have really fixed those issues. But in either case, the content just hasn't really brought me back to playing the series regularly.

I'm one of those players that's been playing long enough to want to do more than just easy-easy stuff, but I don't want to challenge myself with the super-challenging PA, speedfest, whacked out, kill myself charts either. For example, I think Maxx Unlimited is the most difficult chart I've ever passed...once...with like a C or a D. I just want to have midrange fun. Pump seems to provide a lot more content of that type (and freestyle opportunities that I really love!) than DDR does these days.

I'll certainly play SuperNOVA (or any other DDR) if I come across it or if I'm attending an event. It's just not the weekly event for me that it used to be in the 2001-2005 era.

I'd have to say I basically agree with everything you said about DDR and SN.

Too many of the hardcore players in my area are into ITG and all the double digit foot ratings. For me, I like a good song first, then a decent step chart. I'd also like to see DDR do more cool Oni courses, especially stuff similar to marathon mode in ITG with changing mods mid song. Stuff like that is fun and challenging.

But with the age of computers and so much user hackable data, if it's not stepmania or editable in the arcade, hardcore players just complain. Which begs the question about the future of dance games. Will we see more user created content available in commercial releases?

Fluffyumpkins wrote: I think the hardcore players expect more than DDR has/is-willing to offer. We'll just have to see about future releases.

I've talked about this with a few people in the past, but this is the major issue I have with the DDR series as a whole. It's had essentially NO progression since MAX introduced freeze arrows. While MAX2 and Extreme were god damned shit tons of fun, they got old. When SuperNova came out, I found numerous "issues" with both the game play (same thing since 2003), and Betson's builds on the cabinets (widely reported). It also doesn't help that I began finding most of the music provided for the series irritating.

The location test on SN2 did a better job of impressing me than SN, but not enough to really wow me like MAX2 and Extreme did. I will give them credit for enabling Marvelous timing and making scores actually matter again though.

Compare this to the immediate progression ITG/ITG2 offered for four/eight panel, and the content and mix ups and mechanic updates in the ensuing Pump mixes from Exceed to NX*. IIDX even progressed, why not DDR?


*Including NX2 in this is completely unfair to both four panel games. The amount of content in WorldMAX alone is staggering and is of far higher quality than most of the user content provided for ITG2.

YeehawMcKickass wrote:

Fluffyumpkins wrote: I think the hardcore players expect more than DDR has/is-willing to offer. We'll just have to see about future releases.

I've talked about this with a few people in the past, but this is the major issue I have with the DDR series as a whole. It's had essentially NO progression since MAX introduced freeze arrows. While MAX2 and Extreme were god damned shit tons of fun, they got old. When SuperNova came out, I found numerous "issues" with both the game play (same thing since 2003), and Betson's builds on the cabinets (widely reported). It also doesn't help that I began finding most of the music provided for the series irritating.

The location test on SN2 did a better job of impressing me than SN, but not enough to really wow me like MAX2 and Extreme did. I will give them credit for enabling Marvelous timing and making scores actually matter again though.

Compare this to the immediate progression ITG/ITG2 offered for four/eight panel, and the content and mix ups and mechanic updates in the ensuing Pump mixes from Exceed to NX*. IIDX even progressed, why not DDR?


*Including NX2 in this is completely unfair to both four panel games. The amount of content in WorldMAX alone is staggering and is of far higher quality than most of the user content provided for ITG2.

I can understand to some extent your feelings in that DDR hasn't really progressed all that much since MAX2/Extreme, but I do have to state that in the case of IIDX there hasn't been too much progression since Happy Sky AC aside from the songlist. In the case of issues with Supernova, the major issue with it was that Konami thought they could simply cut and paste songs over from CS now that they were on Playstation 2 hardware, but it backfired syncwise. Thankfully on Supernova 2 this issue is almost completely corrected from what I saw (Albeit I don't know if Healing D-Vision, Quick Master, and a couple of other SN1 songs are still f*cked or not.) and they also figured out that we need a way to unlock songs as well since half the new songs are time unlocks and Zukin Wars based.