DDR Supernova JP!

[Amp Divorax]

The Japanese release of DDR Supernova is now available. I mentioned before that there were quite a few songs missing from the US version that premiered in the arcade. Well, in this release only 2 songs didn't make the jump. One of them is a licensed song which I can understand (I don't remember which one it was at the moment) but the other one was the original version of Flow. Honestly, I don't even understand why it's not on there, but oh well.

Oh, I should also mention that this release doesn't pull that stupid crap where some songs can only be played in online mode. However, they still use that godawful stellar master mode! Overall though, this release is much better than the US version.

[Intermezzo]

A friend who owns it was telling me about it.

I'm jealous. It blows Supernova US right out of the water and then shoots it in the face. Why don't we get any cool games, Konami?! >:[ (cue dull shot of beatmania US) (cue shot of Happy Sky with angelic music and golden lights and stuff)

also I enjoyed Stellar Master Mode.

[MonMotha]

A friend who owns it was telling me about it.

I'm jealous. It blows Supernova US right out of the water and then shoots it in the face. Why don't we get any cool games, Konami?! >:[ (cue dull shot of beatmania US) (cue shot of Happy Sky with angelic music and golden lights and stuff)

also I enjoyed Stellar Master Mode.

CS? No clue, but KoA does seem to consistently put out releases which are utterly dwarfed by their Japanese counterparts, even when given the opportunity to be on the level (as with SuperNova - disclaimer: I haven't compared SN US and SN JP yet). Why this happens, I'm really not sure at all. The last US CS release I would consider GOOD was DDR Konamix. It was about on par with Japanese 4th mix (too bad they also got Extra). MAX and Extreme 2 were passable, but pretty well blown out of the water by their corresponding Japanese releases, despite DDR being supposedly "dead" in Japan (at least as far as the arcade scene was concerned).

AC? Simple: we don't play them. Nobody plays arcades here in the US. Even DDR seems to have a much bigger following amongst console users than arcade dwellers. People don't play them enough for operators to make back their investment on the machine, so operators don't buy the machines, so Konami doesn't offer them for sale. Couple this with the fact that Konami of America shut down their arcade division a few years ago, and you can understand why there's a lack of Bemani arcades in the USA.

Konami of America seems to want to cater to the "average joe" audience. That's understandable: you make a lot more money if you sell things to the general population simply due to higher sales. This means that they spend lots of time on making things easy for beginners, nerfing hard stuff, and doing interface tweaks. Most of the more experienced players have no use for this and want what the Japanese market is getting: more songs and harder charts. The market for this in the USA is small, however, so it makes no sense to cater to it. Many of the people in said market in the USA have already acquired everything they need to import the Japanese releases, anyway, and are in fact actively doing so.

Another problem may be that a lot of this stuff is actually developed by Konami of Japan and is only released and marketed by KoA. As such, there are two problems:
1. Konami of Japan may be under the (possibly mistaken) impression that everybody in the USA sucks at Bemani and can't handle the hard stuff, so they spend time doing (bad) interface tweaks and trying to make things easy.
2. Konami of America is stuck marketing something they had no real hand in making.

You can probably see where the problems we've had may be arising from. Crappy releases when compared with their Japanese counterparts with little to no marketing. Look at BMUS for a great example of both of these. While it had decent songs, the songlist is rather minimal and consists of a lot of older, easier revivals, and it was ugly and completely unadvertised.

How to fix this? I have no clue. It seems like what may need to happen is Konami of Japan somehow getting the message that there are in fact people in the USA who play these things and who are interested in releases which are as frequent as and of the caliber of the Japanese releases. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the market for that is really present. Until such a market materializes, the more dedicated players will be stuck doing what they are now: importing Japanese CS releases and buying their own arcades if they really must have a cabinet to play on. Of course, by the time the market gets big enough, Bemani may be dead in Japan, or KoJ may feel content to continue having Americans import their Japanese releases.

The hardest part may be succesfully tapping both markets. To do so, they'd have to give the people already buying the Japanese releases an incentive to buy the American versions instead. This means the American versions have to either be significantly cheaper (BMUS eventually met this criteria after being discounted by retailers, especially since it came with a controller, and is why many fairly hardcore IIDX players own BMUS) while still including at least some new material or significantly better. I have little faith at this point in them doing either. They make too much money off their American releases (at least DDR) in their current state to bother changing. Perhaps if they were to attempt a real US release of something else in the series (IIDX would seem to be out, so perhaps GF/DM or pop'n music) they might try a new approach, but BMUS suggests no.

[Amp Divorax]

A bit of a correction, I have unlocked the original Flow and the songlist I was using was incorrect in this respect so only 1 song didn't make the jump.

Edit: Something that I am having a hard time finding is a translation of the Options Menu for Supernova JP.

[Fluffyumpkins]

http://mieya.cool.ne.jp/database/ddr/cs ... clist.html

[Pheonixguy]

A friend who owns it was telling me about it.

I'm jealous. It blows Supernova US right out of the water and then shoots it in the face. Why don't we get any cool games, Konami?! >:[ (cue dull shot of beatmania US) (cue shot of Happy Sky with angelic music and golden lights and stuff)

also I enjoyed Stellar Master Mode.

CS? No clue, but KoA does seem to consistently put out releases which are utterly dwarfed by their Japanese counterparts, even when given the opportunity to be on the level (as with SuperNova - disclaimer: I haven't compared SN US and SN JP yet). Why this happens, I'm really not sure at all. The last US CS release I would consider GOOD was DDR Konamix. It was about on par with Japanese 4th mix (too bad they also got Extra). MAX and Extreme 2 were passable, but pretty well blown out of the water by their corresponding Japanese releases, despite DDR being supposedly "dead" in Japan (at least as far as the arcade scene was concerned).

AC? Simple: we don't play them. Nobody plays arcades here in the US. Even DDR seems to have a much bigger following amongst console users than arcade dwellers. People don't play them enough for operators to make back their investment on the machine, so operators don't buy the machines, so Konami doesn't offer them for sale. Couple this with the fact that Konami of America shut down their arcade division a few years ago, and you can understand why there's a lack of Bemani arcades in the USA.

Konami of America seems to want to cater to the "average joe" audience. That's understandable: you make a lot more money if you sell things to the general population simply due to higher sales. This means that they spend lots of time on making things easy for beginners, nerfing hard stuff, and doing interface tweaks. Most of the more experienced players have no use for this and want what the Japanese market is getting: more songs and harder charts. The market for this in the USA is small, however, so it makes no sense to cater to it. Many of the people in said market in the USA have already acquired everything they need to import the Japanese releases, anyway, and are in fact actively doing so.

Another problem may be that a lot of this stuff is actually developed by Konami of Japan and is only released and marketed by KoA. As such, there are two problems:
1. Konami of Japan may be under the (possibly mistaken) impression that everybody in the USA sucks at Bemani and can't handle the hard stuff, so they spend time doing (bad) interface tweaks and trying to make things easy.
2. Konami of America is stuck marketing something they had no real hand in making.

You can probably see where the problems we've had may be arising from. Crappy releases when compared with their Japanese counterparts with little to no marketing. Look at BMUS for a great example of both of these. While it had decent songs, the songlist is rather minimal and consists of a lot of older, easier revivals, and it was ugly and completely unadvertised.

How to fix this? I have no clue. It seems like what may need to happen is Konami of Japan somehow getting the message that there are in fact people in the USA who play these things and who are interested in releases which are as frequent as and of the caliber of the Japanese releases. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the market for that is really present. Until such a market materializes, the more dedicated players will be stuck doing what they are now: importing Japanese CS releases and buying their own arcades if they really must have a cabinet to play on. Of course, by the time the market gets big enough, Bemani may be dead in Japan, or KoJ may feel content to continue having Americans import their Japanese releases.

The hardest part may be succesfully tapping both markets. To do so, they'd have to give the people already buying the Japanese releases an incentive to buy the American versions instead. This means the American versions have to either be significantly cheaper (BMUS eventually met this criteria after being discounted by retailers, especially since it came with a controller, and is why many fairly hardcore IIDX players own BMUS) while still including at least some new material or significantly better. I have little faith at this point in them doing either. They make too much money off their American releases (at least DDR) in their current state to bother changing. Perhaps if they were to attempt a real US release of something else in the series (IIDX would seem to be out, so perhaps GF/DM or pop'n music) they might try a new approach, but BMUS suggests no.

The sad thing is i would buy more iidx, but i really dont want to go through the troble of modding and importing and such... but im probably in the minority

[Amp Divorax]

Alright, this is something that I just found out about that I really like about this game. The timing options have been overhauled.

The first timing option is Judgement timing, which moves the timing forwards and backwards for those with laggy audio. The second timing option is display timing, which moves the display of the arrows forwards and backwards for those people with TVs that have lag (Lower End LCDs and whatnot.) Also, the systems work in 0.4 incriments from +6.0 to -6.0 and feels more dead on than past timing offset settings for me.

[Pheonixguy]

sweet