dog$

I've been wondering what these posts are for months, and now I'm in a position where I can finally ask: what game is this for?

Beatmania IIDX, but specifically the PC sim of it called Lunatic Rave 2.

I play a warmup course which consists of 5 songs, then, on days like today, I play individual songs under a so called "Extra Mode", which is exclusive to LR2. The way the song charts are made (particularly of the more recent arcade games), the key sounds are first split up and then selectively put into the chart. This means that some sounds of the songs are not used by the game. Extra Mode tosses all the unused extra notes into the chart. LR2 doesn't save Extra Mode records, so I have to keep a separate text file of what I do; this is why I even bother to write these posts, because I'm making the notes anyway. (And because I like to talk about the game and have nobody to talk about it with, because the ED article about IIDX being only played by friendless hikko NEETs is all true.)

When I have new songs to play, I give a baseline score of the unaltered chart and say a few words about my opinion of how it sounds.

Across all folders I have about 100GB of song files which total to about 2200 songs that I can play on Double mode (which is all I ever play), and probably a thousand more on Single.

This is the controller that I use to play the game. The keys light up when pressed (blue and white). It's 4 feet in width and weighs about 50 pounds. It was made in China and the cost, with shipping, was $1300.00.

I've played Beatmania no less than once a week since 1997, IIDX since 1999, and daily for at least the last four years.

$1300 seems insane initially, but I guess when I consider how long you've been playing (and then ponder the amount of peripherals I've collected over the years that are just collecting dust or sitting in boxes), it's not that unreasonable. How do you go about acquiring more songs? Do fans (or you) create charts for them?

Yeah, all the sim stuff is fan made. There are people who have it all figured out as far as how to take the arcade game data and make it into the sim files (BMS). There are BMS editors used to make these files, but I'll be damned if I know how to go about it. The most recent arcade game officially came out a few months ago, and the full collection of the BMS files for it came out just this recent Christmas -and that was after giving a customary waiting period.

Meanwhile, there are fanmade songs as well. There's an annual event called BMS Of Fighters where teams submit up to three songs, which are voted on by the fan base. Refer: http://manbow.nothing.sh/event/event...t_def&event=74 . BOF 2011 was concluded a few months ago, resulting in 10GB/120+ songs. They've done this for a few years now. There's also obscure Japanese pages floating around for Internet ranking of specifically difficult charts and the like, where you can find songs like these hosted. Example - http://www.dream-pro.info/~lavalse/L...vel=0&14keys=1 . You can see some songs on that page which I have mentioned in posts here.

That's pretty cool, actually. You get a large chunk of new material to play around with, and everybody is putting forth what I would imagine is their best creative efforts (since it's being submitted to the community to be voted on).

Thanks for taking the time to explain all that to me. Now when I check back I'll actually know what I'm looking at.

Glad to.

Originally Posted by No One

everybody is putting forth what I would imagine is their best creative efforts

... yeah, unfortunately, what makes for strenuous creative effort doesn't necessarily translate into palatable music. It is the age of the Internet, where WACKY RANDOM is King, and these are WACKY JAPANESE people with their WACKY humor or esoteric music theories sometimes being put to use.

IIDX isn't a game for music elitists (and being a music elitist is not a bad thing).