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Same old complaints. The songs were bad. Excessively bad. Mines and Plants weren't fun. Sure, the note charts were hard, but I'd rather play a more simple note chart to a Bemani song then anything that was ever in ITG. The only cool feature in ITG was a USB interface.

BTW Zach, it should have been their. But, anyways, this is incredibly gay. Now, even if they do make an ITG3 it's going to have a bunch of gay J-Pop and nothing legitimately hard (no stops and starts, etc.)

Fluffyumpkins wrote:Same old complaints. The songs were bad. Excessively bad. Mines and Plants weren't fun. Sure, the note charts were hard, but I'd rather play a more simple note chart to a Bemani song then anything that was ever in ITG. The only cool feature in ITG was a USB interface.

Mines werent, but hands sure were! and not just like piu does it, more like the hands in bend your mind... I really hope they make itg3

And yeah, most of the music sucked, except for the songs

dance1005 wrote:BTW Zach, it should have been their. But, anyways, this is incredibly gay. Now, even if they do make an ITG3 it's going to have a bunch of gay J-Pop and nothing legitimately hard (no stops and starts, etc.)

It was a joke Dan. Correcting grammar with incorrect grammar? BRILLIANT!

And I personally don't enjoy Jpop, and would rather have songs like While Tha Rekkid Spinz and Destiny.

The harder stepcharts are meant for tech players, that's why they're HARDER. Just cause a chart is harder doesn't translate to it being a bad chart. A chart is good if it's got (somewhat)creative, fun patterns that go with the song.

Some songs abuse the mines, but some patterns are actually fun. So sad when you have to move for things other than arrows!

Hands add to the game in my opinion.

u kids and your ITG. play pump. much more fun

Dyme wrote:u kids and your ITG. play pump. much more fun

It doesn't matter. I don't have ITG or Pump within decent driving distance anymore.

Hey, Roxor is making a Tux Racer 2 so obviously it couldnt have sold too poorly. I've seen Tux Racer 1 in a few arcades .

Roxor knew this lawsuit was coming. I think they were honeslty just trying to get a few games out and get some money out of it before they got sued. ITG didn't ever really feel like DDR though. It felt very very offbrand. I never was a avid ITG player because when I got on the machine it just felt weird. There wasn't the same feeling in ITG that I get from DDR.

ITG showed Konami that we are interested in Dance games here in the states. So of course that's what was responsable for DDR SuperNova. They're not stupid, they saw that a clone of their product was doing well, so they wanted to kick em out and take over basically.

While ITG may have has something to do with the resurgance of DDR AC in the USA, I'm of the understanding that there were some key patents on the design on the machine/stage that were not owned by Konami in the USA (Andamiro had at least a few of these). If you look back at the history of the lawsuits surrounding this stuff, DDR AC magically disappeared about the time when Andamiro (who was sued by Konami) and Konami settled with each other. After that point, DDR existed in the USA in CS form only.

I'm guessing that a key patent recently expired (which seems soon, perhaps it wasn't renewed) since there were also no other music game arcades (well, other than MTV's silly drumscape, which has its own patents) in the USA until about the time SuperNova was announced. Percussion master showed up around that time. I would not be surprised if this was a reason for DDR returning. Notice that all other Bemani arcades magically went bye-bye about the same time DDR did in the USA (there was certainly at least a small-scale release or large scale test of Guitar Freaks, Hip Hop mania, and apparently a pop'n music test was done). This could simply be due to the Konami/Andamiro settlement though, and not be part of a wider patent case.

I've done some digging on these patents in the past and it is kinda hard to turn up results since patents in the USA are always worded so obtusely and of course the USPTO website isn't the best. Certainly the entire area, especially dance games wrt DDR/PIU, is a patent minefield.

Note that much of this is speculation inferred from things I was told by an Andamiro representative, a little patent digging of my own, and observations of the market. I'm not saying it's 100% correct, but there certainly seems to be more going on than people getting "angwy" with each other because "so-and-so ripped off my game!".

As I mentioned before, many if not most of Konami's claims against Roxor were trademark related. I'm surprised that they didn't reach an agreement where Roxor would still be allowed to make their own cabinets (which should be trademark infringement free) while discontinuing DDR conversion kits. Since this this was a settlement, not a court ruling, the actual facts and situation have little to do with the outcome: this is simply an agreement reached between the two companies. Perhaps Roxor decided to throw in the towel when faced with the potential for litigation with a much larger company (i.e. more lawyers) and cut their losses. It sounds like they received compensation in return for handing over the ITG franchise to Konami, which is potentially more than they would have gotten had they completely lost the corresponding suit in court.

As for what this means for ITG, I can't really speculate. Konami may decide to can it (possibly putting a few songs/charts on the next DDR, which could be interesting if they use the licenses that were on DDR previously) or they may develop both series side-by-side. The latter would be kinda humorous to me - Konami commercially developing a product running on StepMania? Priceless! ITG was certainly one of the big competitors to DDR upon its arcade revival, and Konami seems to have taken a few cues from it when creating songs/charts for SuperNova. They may see having two established names as beneficial for competing against their remaining dance game competitors (which basically consists of Pump It Up here in the USA) or they may decide to build the DDR brand stronger by removing the other brand.

Unfortunately, almost all suits brought in this industry have resulted in settlements. Be that good or bad for the players and companies involved, it doesn't leave much publicly available documentation laying around for people interested in figuring things out.

I should point out that I'm not a lawyer, but I dabble in intellectual property law as a hobby, and I've been fairly interested in the situation regarding music games for a while now.

Dyme wrote:u kids and your ITG. play pump. much more fun

But they just dont do hands like itg does... ^_^

Pheonixguy wrote:

Dyme wrote:u kids and your ITG. play pump. much more fun

But they just dont do hands like itg does... ^_^

haha. thats getting sig'd

I feel so special! Nothing ive said has ever been sig'd before!

Pheonixguy wrote:I feel so special! Nothing ive said has ever been sig'd before!

I get sig'd all the time. In fact, watch, in the next two days this'll get sig'd or teh intranetz will break.

Lawlz.

heh