Classic Pump: I dunno?

Well I promised you bastards an article, and I’ll be damned if I don’t make at least some semblance of an effort to deliver.  I just got back from a tournament in The South, specifically North Carolina and Virginia.  I had previously acquainted myself with Raleigh during other traveled.  Virginia was new to me.  If there is ever a state that could be accidentally mistaken for a golf course, Virginia fits the bill.  Other than that there isn’t much I can say.  I flew 6 hours to Raleigh, and then hitched a ride with a local furry chap for the 4 hour drive to the location.  Immediately after we crossed the border we were severely accosted by local authorities.  Ostensibly for excessive speed and driving in the median, but such a pretense is ridiculous.  This was quite plainly an instance of fursecution, and also clearly of athletic intolerance, as speeding is the name of the game for Pump players.  (cue worlds faintest rimshot.  Seriously, wikipedia will be necessary to understand the humour of the last sentence fragment.)

Anyways, this tournament was supposed to be a shot across the bow for all the bastards of the classic pump community.  I have been involved in a number of high profile quarrels in the past, both over my tournament record and over my involvement with Pro.  It started with the pretty dramatic botching of the MMSD pump tournament way back in the summer of 2007, in Omaha.  To explain further it will be necessary for me to deliver some context.

Music games other than guitar hero and rock band have something called a timing window.  This differentiates between different levels of accuracy when hitting a note, as opposed to simple hit and miss.  In classic pump, it is extremely easy to hit notes with the highest level of accuracy.  However, there is also something in dance games called machine score.  For the longest time I thought it operated through some sort of voodoo magic, and to a certain extent I still think that plays a role.  In pump, the machine calculates score something like this:

Perfect = +200

Great = +100

Good = 0

Bad = -100 and combo break

Miss = -200 and combo break

In addition, everything good or better increases combo and every combo over 50 adds something like +200 per note.  A combo break resets this, essentially making a bad worth as much as -11,000 and a miss worth as much as -12,000 (from optimum score, being an FPC or full perfect combo.)

In contrast, music games like DDR, ITG, and more recently Pump Pro have not included combo in their machine scoring mechanisms.  Tournament organizers have also made no effort to stress combo play.  They have, however, made efforts to remove it from pump.  This is what happened at MMSD.  It happened badly.

Let me elaborate.  A system where minus points are delivered for certain levels of innacuracy is absolutely necessary to PA (perfect attack) play.  This was not done at MMSD.  Instead, 1 point was awarded per perfect, no other factors were considered.  This makes a miss of exactly as much consequence as a great.  This means a player such as myself could literally ignore the more technical parts of songs, focus on getting perfects on the easy parts, and win.  The technical patterns in question are what classic pump players center most of their training around learning how to hit.  They determine who the winner is in any sort of high level play, and rightfully so.

There were other sins committed as well, but none of them quite so egregious.  Anyways, way back in the day I took second (of 6) at the tournament in question.  A list of winners of the tournament went up.  My name was omitted.  About a year later I revisited the topic and complained.  Apparently this was taken as a sign of an ego problem, triggering a drama cascade which continues until this day.

So there’s a whole load of rather specific context.  More broadly, classic pump players tend to hate PA based systems and prefer combo based systems.  Why?  I can’t be sure.  As far as I have been able to discern, combo play only makes accuracy less important to the extent that sliding is easier than turning.  This is profoundly ironic given the stated emphasis classic pump players place on turning.  The real epiphany for me came when playing a song called Love is a Danger Zone, which is filled with rather complex turns.  I had learned them all, and in the process I had raised my score on Pro to a 96%, which I’m told is in roughly the top 6 recorded scores in the world.  I had 5 misses.  Asking Jboy if this was a competitive miss count for classic pump, he flat out told me no.  Then he showed me how it was customary to play it.  He comboed the most technical section without turning, finishing with a dramatically low percent score.

PA based pump play incorporates turning, and it incorporates comboing by necessity except in very specific cases, those ironically being difficult turns which can be better comboed by sliding or double stepping than by turning.  That much I have learned, and am confident of.  Hence from experience I have concluded that the classic pump purists do not actually understand the game.  Their issue can only be the lack of applicability of combo-based strategy to PA systems; It is my firm impression that PA-based strategy has greater applicability to combo-based gameplay than vice versa.  Certainly more than the purists would care to admit.

This tournament was supposed to be a test case.  Instead, it ended up being pretty close to Omaha all over again.  About 18 people were supposed to show up.  It ended up being 5.  I took first, but I can’t even begin to claim any sort of consequence to it.  I did not even perform to my own satisfaction, picking up misses on songs I am accustomed to FPC-ing consistently.  In the entire tournament, I believe there was only one song I lost.  It was Bemera CZ, and as far as I know I only lost because I gave up halfway through the (5 minutes of 200 BPM drills of the) song.

I wanted to consider the importance of strategy on PA vs combo systems, as opposed to simple skill.  I cannot really evaluate that at present.  My hypothesis was that it would be harder to consistently combo a song than to play it for accuracy, and that this would lead to players being strong on certain songs and weak on others, hence making information about other players more important.  I suspected this because of some of the more eccentric pump charts, and the techniques they required for comboing.  I realize now that to the largest extent, PA techniques translate to comboing techniques, and there are not enough eccentric charts to lessen the importance of simple skill.  The tested skill set just broadens to incorporate sloppy techniques like sliding.

Foot alternation does not change in utility.  Hand use does not change in utility.  Turning decreases in utility.  That is the only discernable difference I have so far encountered.  The only other issue I could possibly consider is which style of play requires greater consistency.  It seems to me that combo based play might, and that this would stress the importance of stamina more than usual.  Given the higher priority of sliding techniques, and the lack of sufficient evidence to examine, it is hard to rule either way.  My intuition tells me that stamina and consistency are marginally more important in classic pump than in pro.  It also tells me the difference isn’t enough to actually make a difference for a high level player.

I lost my opportunity to shut them up this time, but I have a renewed sense of dedication to that purpose now.  Classic pump, by all measures I can yet see, is an inferior game for an inferior player.  Also, all I won for my troubles was a copy of Fallout 3.  They didn’t even give out door prizes as promised.  So yeah, now I have a $400 dollar copy of Fallout 3.  Maybe I’ll review that sometime.

– Kilroy

The Heart in the Middle of Nowhere

I remember I was first introduced to the small town of Lyons, Colorado several years ago in a most incidental fashion.  A post on DDRfreak said “Lyons Classic Pinball x/x” (wherein the x’s represent dates).  Pinball was not intensely familiar to me at the time, something which remains more or less true.  In addition it suffers from a lack of being ITG.  Nonetheless I found myself going, and I ended up being fascinated by what I saw.  It also turned out that the reason I was supposed to be there was because it was someones birthday party, but now that every DDR player in the Southwest region hates me I don’t have to feel guilty about not getting him anything.

With that nostalgia and fascination still inside me, I decided to make an adventure to Lyons again, and even to bring Mazo.  I do not regret it.  The city has maintained every ounce of its character and beauty.  In fact it might even have gained some.  When Mazo and I first rolled into town, this is what we were greeted by:

Uncle Sam is as ornery as always

The details of the seizure of; wait, subway!?

Yes, it seems that a Subway Sandwhich shop was closed down due to tax evasion, the noblest of all human pursuits.  If one wants to measure the love a man has of his country and for freedom, he need only count the number of dollars he refused his government.  In this case, $10,048.47.  Thoreau would be proud, I am certain.

Shortly after this, Mazo and I both partook of food and drink, and there was great merriment.

This is actually his 7th beer

Thereafter, we were fully prepared for our journalistic duties.  In this case, principally taking random pictures while terrorizing the locals.  Our first branch of investigation placed us conveniently close to the bathrooms.  We adventured deep into the walkout basement of Oskar Wilde’s Blues, and proceeded to examine their arcade.  It is a very nice arcade, filled to the brim with classic games including Donkey Kong, Paperboy, and Missile Command.

You don’t have to just take my word for it here though.  You can take it in video form instead.

At last being more or less done at the restaurant, we headed off to what was arguably the point of our going to this town in the first place, if such a point could indeed be said to exist.  This involved walking, unfortunately, but thankfully it was only for a very brief number of feet.

It strikes me that more of this article is picture than is text.  However the experience is so visceral I feel pictures do it a sort of justice even my standard level of verbosity cannot match.  We arrived at last, after countless seconds of walking, at Lyons Classic Pinball.  It was beautiful.

I intended to make a video tour of Lyons Pinball as well, however I accidently let myself get distracted while pondering the Godlessness of modern liberal culture, and hence it slipped my mind.  Fortunately, someone else made a video tour which is a good deal better than anything I ever could have made, perhaps even if I had technical competency, a decent camera, or a computer.  You can find it here.

Lyons Pinball is an amazing place.  It has everything a place should have: Diligent workers of character and class, an assortment of miscleaneous people who are good at things, a slightly smaller assortment of people who aren’t good at things so that you can tell the difference, and most importantly, the things it proclaims to have on a large sign outside of it.  In addition to all of this however, it has something ever more important: competitions.

Yes, fullblown double elimination tournaments with prizes a colorado gamer like myself could only dream about.  The most I’ve ever won at a tournament was $600 dollars, and that was at a once a year tournament held in Las Vegas.  The only dance game tournaments left in Colorado happen on a Stepmania machine in Colorado Springs and standardly involve pots as large as $20.  They also occur anywhere from once to twice a year.  By comparison, the pinball tournament scene is practically the PGA tour.  Just to send this home, take a look at this tournament schedule.

Even worse, that’s just the scene here in Colorado!  Just based on this sheet of paper alone it doesn’t seem farfetched at all to imagine a person could pay their way through life simply by playing pinball.  All these years I’ve been playing the wrong damn games.  I suppose it doesn’t help that there are people with 30+ years of training on me though.  This is one game that I honestly doubt I could ever become competitive at, regardless of my ambitions or level of dedication.  It makes me feel sad.  It also, however, imbues me with a new found sense of respect.  Respect for a type of gamer that I hadn’t even had the sense to give attention to before.

Just so you can see how terrible Mazo and I are at pinball, here is a video of us playing Joust.

I think it’s safe to say that making a jump into a scene like this is probably beyond either of us at the moment.  That’s ok though, I suppose I don’t have to try and become competitive at every game I ever see being played competitively.  Although in my heart there is nothing I would like more.

The size of the bracket sheets along imbues a sense of insignificance.

So that’s that.  Lyons as a town is essentially magic.  This in the sense that most of what’s there is as equally substantial as it is beyond me.  The people, based on my limited experience, are basically awesome.  There are a few hangups, like that time the book store owner sold me a defective book that got me in trouble with all of my college professors, and how the prevalence of art galleries in the town suggests people there might actually consider art a legitimate subject or pursuit.  I can ignore that though, because when it comes right down to it I am just as transfized and awed with what’s there now as I was when I first set eyes upon it, so many* years ago.

To play us out, here is a hard hitting interview I conducted with one of the employees of Lyons Classic Pinball.  In it I ask a number of highly important, significant questions, if I do say so myself.  Please enjoy with a proper degree of reverence and dignity.

-Kilroy

* two.  two years.

Also here is another video that I took that I couldn’t find a place for within the body of the article.

Nevermind

And thus ended my first, and likely last, Martial Arts tournament.  Oh wait, I haven’t written anything yet.

The day started off bad enough.  I had to wake up much earlier than I would have preferred.  That’s hardly a solid start.  Really though I should have known based on the previous day, which consisted of 4 hours of sitting around and a direct order to eat food.  I don’t like food.  Well, maybe when it’s free, like some of it was, but not even then really.

So the Taekwondoka thing apparently consists entirely of breaking boards, patterns, and sparring that lacks any sort of legitimate contact.  I thought that maybe this wasn’t the case, and that training was different from tournament play.  I was wrong.  I hung around the scene too long.  Bad things happened.  I broke someone’s arm, caused structural damage to someones diaphragm, and worst of all I put on muscle.  By the time the tournament came around I should have been long gone.  One of the only things that kept me there was the commitment I had made to team patterns, and I knew my team would directly suffer if I didn’t show.  Of course it’s not like things could have been much worse in that area.

It was the first event of the day.  Understandably everyone was still tired.  I’m not sure how that excuses this shit though.  I can understand staying awake until 3am the day before a tournament; I can’t approve, but I can understand.  No, what was really ridiculous was contained squarely in how shit went down.  First off there was the 5 minutes or so of everyone in my team running over ideas while we were at attention waiting to be called up.  Then there was the little issue of a dispute over who should call the commands, which ended in two different people calling them at 3 different times.

I wasn’t innocent in all this.  I suppose, however, that I could say my crime stemmed from rashly trying to compensate for the failures of my teammates.

So that ended poorly.  There were still 2 other events though, surely they would go better!

Armed with early morning tiredness combined with bounded optimism, I prepared for the breaking tournament.  It started with one of my classmates failing to break 2 boards.  Then there was this conversation, which went on for about 10 minutes:

“Man, that’s one gnarly knot in that board.  I’m going to wait until someone else breaks that board.  Do you want to go?”

“No, I don’t want to go.  I’m going to wait until someone else breaks that board.”

“Well I don’t want to break that board.”

“I don’t want to break that board either.”

“Excuse me tournament director, can we break a different board?”

“No I am the tournament director you can only break the board I put there I am the tournament director.”

After what seemed like an eternity of that, I stepped forward and, fearing the board of doom, neglected to put up additional boards.  Then with my mighty foot of justice I smited the damned thing to the 9th circle of tree and tree product hell, allowing the breaking tournament to continue.  Did I get thanks from anyone for this dirty work?  Did anyone stop to realize that things would have been different for me under different circumstances, that by taking this task upon myself I removed myself from competition?  No, of course not.  No praise for a fallen American hero.

The only interesting part of the tournament happened in the 10 hours between this and the third event.  I was called upon to coach Talon, a fighter who even at his young age has managed to have a totally badass name.  Thanks to what I could only possibly credit as my outstanding ability to shout platitudes and contextually inappropriate advice, he rose to 2nd place in his division.  None of the other coaches were skilled enough in that department, and I maintain the only reason he didn’t take first was because of the superior size and reach advantage of the other coach.  He also happened to be a grand master but whatever.

Then I stood around for 100 hours.  In defense of the tournament organizers, the standing took place in a large number of different locations, but if I am paying to stand then I would expect the standing to be much higher quality than what was provided here.  This was hardly even well thought out standing.

When it finally came time to do what I was most looking forward to, sparring, I had been standing around for at least 1000 hours.  Other people had ruined the fun and used excessive contact to the point someone ended up going to the hospital.  There was a big lecture about it, in which the tournament organizer, my instructor, told people that TKD was not about hitting people and that they should do MMA if they wanted to hit people.  Point taken, but also hilarious.

So I got up there and was worried purely about not having a repeat of previous incidents in a highly public, official setting.  So I didn’t throw a single technique with any sort of commitment or enthusiasm, and was promptly run over by a proper Irishman doing what came naturally to him; moving directly forward and punching a lot.  This strategy proved so successful that he took first place completely without incident.  The tournament was single elimination, and there were 5 people in the bracket.  This means 3 lost in their first match.  However for whatever arbitrary reason one of them was given a bye.  Because of that, he took 3rd in the bracket.  No,  no round robin or anything, and double elimination is apparently much too tedious, but a person deserves a medal if they managed to beat the fictitious person designed to balance brackets.

I mean Bye isn’t even good.  He’s been in damn near every tournament I’ve ever been in, sometimes in multiple brackets and sometimes even in the same bracket multiple times, yet he’s never won so much as a single match.  Bye sucks.  If I had been up against him, I would certainly have won, and so would anyone else, yet for whatever reason one person was seeded against him.  So that one person took 3rd.  That person, who prepared for the tournament by staying awake until 3am.  Talk about getting blown by the brackets.

This tournament was offensive in a number of ways.  Standing around doing nothing for 10000 hours was offensive.  Patterns, team patterns, breaking, sparring, the perfect body of the EMT (minus her injured Diaphram), the lectures, the pomposity, and the sheer ratio of tourney-faggotry not perpetrated by me over actual tournament, all make me pretty confident I wasted several hundred dollars.  There wasn’t even the possibility of a money finish even, just of a trophy.  That’s basically just a shiny, physical representation of the words “good job“.

So I think I’m done with martial arts.  I liked Judo better, but I was putting on muscle doing all of this stuff and I would like to at least try and salvage something of the figure I once had, before I start transitioning in a few months.  Also this is definitely not all just an elaborate excuse to avoid the problems and difficulties that would arise from training martial arts while transitioning, shut up.

Book Review: Arcade Mania!

Surely the question that immediately springs to the mind of the savvy reader is “what makes this book review worth my time?  There are many book reviews on this subject, and why should I spend my time reading and digesting this one as opposed to any of the others freely and readily available to me?”  Well dear reader, let me tell you why; because this review has character.  First of all, I don’t just have one but rather TWO copies of the book.  By simple math that makes this review at least twice as good as certain other book reviews that shall remain unnamed.  Secondly, there’s a better story behind it.  I didn’t go the boringly pedestrian route of buying my copies of the book, oh no.  I won them, in glorious MSpaint battle for the pleasure of Sir Aaron of Japan.  A man, I might inform you, of supremely high standing.  His forums exist as a glorious beacon for the righteous and proper ideals of music gaming (even in these dark times).  In addition to all of that, however, he actually makes a contribution to the contents of the book under discussion!  That, my friend, is why this is the superior book review.

A lot is covered in a fairly short period of words in this book, something I am at once suspicious of, as sheer unbridled verbosity is quite naturally a major goal of any true writer.  The book is organized as a Japanese game center presumably is, although having never been to Japan I can only question whether or not it even exists.  This in addition to clear contradictions like reports of game centers dedicated entirely to only one game, such as Purika no Mecca, which specializes in photo booths.  As far as I can tell photo booths aren’t actually a game at all.  Strike two Mr. Ashcraft.

The section on music games is about as slanderous and ridiculous as anything that has ever been said on the subject, which leads me to question why Sir Aaron of Japan has chosen to affiliate himself with it.  Then again, an outsider could never possibly understand the complexities of electronic rhythm-action games and the glorious and intricate communities that have been built around them.  This would hold equally whether they were writing a book on the subject or in fact reading it.  Upon investigation it turned out that Sir Aaron had been misquoted.  I suppose such errors will simply have to be written off as an unavoidable part of the cross-cultural discussion.  A non-player will simply never understand such subtle distinctions as, for example, the difference between doubles mode and 2p mode, or the difference between pattern recognition and pattern memorization.  It is not within their range of cognition.

Given this I cannot obviously recommend this book as a sound overview of music gaming.  In fact I am not sure I can do so for any type of gaming, as I can’t be certain that similarly eggregious offenses weren’t commited when describing other important genres and cultures.  However, as an unsound overview it may just be adequate, and in that capacity I not only recommend it but in fact wholeheartedly endorse it.

From this book I learned, rightly or wrongly, about the sheer complexity of 2d shoot ’em ups, or “shmups”.  The genre is much more malleable and rife for creative exploitation than I ever could have imagined, with games like Parodius, Otomedius, and Muchi Muchi Pork apparently combining classical 2d shooting action with pornography!  Truly exciting stuff.  “A shmup is  a good playground to try new game features” says Doujin software maker Kenta Cho.  Indeed.  With a backlog of clever genre mashups to look through, I will have plenty to study for ideas when I begin production on the shmup that I have been planning for the past few seconds.

One of the things that impressed me throughout the book was the constant reports of individuals and small groups who had made big things happen in the gaming industry despite seemingly large obstacles.  This includes Doujin software makers like Kenta Cho, but also Manga artist collective CLAMP and even the group that made Ikaruga, both of which consisted of a mere 4 people.  I guess it just goes to show that people can really do amazing things when they just get off their damn asses and put forth something even vaguely resembling an effort, Jeff.

The section on games of both luck and skill was interesting as well.  I thought it was especially fascinating to see the the subject of bad beats brought up in the context of Mahjong, because it reminds me that there are people who complain that they lost illegitimately or by luck in every game, and even though some of them are bound to be right, infinitely more are just whiny good-for-nothing scrubs.

Lastly the discussion about epic card-based arcade games was, well, epic.  I can’t understand how demand doesn’t exist for them stateside, considering things like Derby Owners Club made the trip across the pacific.  Apparently soccer based card game World Club Champion Football was released in Europe, I imagine principally due to the lasting international appeal referring to Soccer by the wrong name has for foreigners.  Games like Sangokushi Taisen, however, which is set in the Three Kingdoms era of the fictitious nation of China are apparently too culturally distant to present to Gaijin, even though stabbing people with swords for justice is generally a theme that carries quite well across cultures.  It’s also been my experience that westerners are typically quite eager to voraciously and senselessly devour anything that even hints of being cultural (in this case cultural meaning anything from somewhere else).  Truthfully, I always figured eastern culture was more popular in the west than it was in the east.  You’ll certainly never find any westerners extolling the virtues of western culture.  I say that fictional or not, the east is quite marketable in the west, and companies should bring games like these stateside.  I also wish arcades weren’t all dead here.

In conclusion this was a book review.  Goodbye.

-Kilroy Del Dancefighter Estallion the First

The most pretentious article on this blog

So I was reading through the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, online of course, thinking about how much it’s sucked recently in comparison to the not so distant past.  Being how I am, it kind of blurred together, along with random other texts I’ve read, and this article is the result of that.  This article is about what I think of gaming culture.  Or maybe it’s about the zeitgeist.  Hell if I know, there’s certainly no reason it can’t be about both.

Anyways, I started off reading this shit and managed to go from start to finish without my brain engaging to pick it apart, as it normally does.  I think that was mostly because I wasn’t paying attention though.  It felt like a delayed reaction almost, like a blow that takes a moment to register, because as soon as the last sentence had filtered through my mind a number of confusions arose.  “Is the proposed model actually different from prevalent folk conceptions about behavior, or does it just rename them in a way that sounds novel?”, “How does the fact we are made of component thought processes somehow contradict with a permament self?”, and “why are permanency and maturity given such de-facto association with each other?”

I guess as “a gamer” the idea that impulsivity and immediacy are tied so offhandedly to bad things by this model is threatening.  Mostly though, the idea of different selves over time generates a number of extremely intriguing curiosities which I now feel the need to play around with.  The article mentions Multiple Personality Disorders as an extreme form of what, it contends, is the universal manner in which the human brain functions.  I remember not to long ago in “Intro to Psych” when the teacher, perhaps bored with the elementary nature of the curriculum, went off on a tangent about legal precedent.  Apparently there was a case where two teens had been having sex in a car when one of them turned out to be, so we heard, more than one teen.  Suddenly Ms.  Not-always-home woke up right in the middle of something she hadn’t remembered getting herself into!  So she freaked out and ran down the streets yelling rape.  Since she wasn’t showing any superficial signs of madness, the man was promptly arrested and the case was set to go to court.  Then the bombshell came and the trial turned into a regular quagmire of philosophical and legal ideas.  Ultimately the judge just said “no” and the case was simply dismissed.

Now, this is rather unfortunate, because a precedent such as that would have given us some sort of logically formulated position to inspect, to turn over and to either accept or refute.  It would have given us a starting place for our inspection of the article in question.  Instead we just have the same question the trial itself posed, and we have to decide for ourselves whether or not to treat it rhetorically.  If we accept that different selves exist within a single body, and deny that they comprise a singular self, what does that do for the notion of personal responsibility?

Now, being the smarmy world-upsetting sort that I am, I have chosen not to treat such a question as rhetorical.  Indeed I remember raising it in response to another text, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market.  Rothbard contended that any argument about the moral supremacy of investment (as opposed to expenditure) had to contend with the premium placed on immediate consumption.  He contended that the soundness of investment depended upon individual and subjective time-preference.  Some people might like one hamburger today more than they would like two hamburgers tomorrow.

“Question” I thought “what if someone decides they are willing to invest 20 years of their life and labor, effectively being an indentured servent, in the promise of some grand amount of money.  Then, 15 years into it they change their mind.  What if 15 years is enough time for them to become a different person [end italic text]”?  Under Rothbard, a contract is a matter of personal arbitration, not subject to third party intervention or regulation.*  What if the contract says that walking away after 15 years voids all obligations and debts on the part of the employer?  What if the contract says walking away after 15 years mandates death?  Can we throw out the contract on the basis that the person on trial is a different person from the one that signed the contract?

My answer was no, simply because shortening the time period enough otherwise makes a yes absurd, and without any clear delineation of significance between “larger” and “smaller” time periods I couldn’t reasonably approve of the exception.  Now this speculative mess of an article comes along, taking it to the other extreme.  I think now that not only does this other extreme seem unpalatable to me, but perhaps it thinks a bit too much of what it can even establish.  So naturally I have to ride out and meet its pretentiousness with some of my own.

Dwelling on that business, I stumbled into my next article, a piece by none other than the Great White Gay Hero of the Blogosphere himself, Andrew Sullivan.  It might just be that I’m very suggestable, but this article seemed to fit right into and promptly intensify my confusion with the previous article.  Here is Sullivan, explaining how Blogging is an instantaneous medium, one which cannot be entered into with a mind for the long-term, one which the writer impulsively flows into.  Yet, he argues, legitimate.  Subject to greater scrutity than traditional media forms.  Now while my personal biases, which are awesome, caused me to see a great deal of stupid in what he wrote, most of it made sense.  Blogging is similar in format to Dialogue.  Print media is similar in format to Lecture or text.  The former is more immediate, impulsive, and impermanent than the latter.  Would it be spoken of badly by the writer of the first article?

The writer of the article, along with some professional economists I’ve never heard of apparently, condones government intervention on the basis that “self-binding” would be more efficient if the government did it.  I guess that flows pretty nicely actually, since if you restrict what “you” can do in the future on the basis that in the future it won’t be “you”, why shouldn’t the government be able to restrict the future Not-You.  Both cases are instances of one person controlling a seperate one.  My discomfort continues.

Mostly I’m just offended by the notion that our apparent virtuous traits; concentration, focus, complex decision making; are tied to long-term selves rather than short term selves.  As a gamer, a blogger, an athlete, as all of those things and more it makes little sense.  And I’m not even a very good any-of-those-things.  Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure concentration and focus can exist in a very profound sense in the short term, and that decision making can occupy a few seconds just as easily as it can occupy an hour or a day.  Perhaps the short-term self can be developed just as much as the long-term self?  How else to explain how an athlete can within a handful of seconds take signals from teammates, formulate a strategy, implement it, and implement it well, with sound technique?  How many decisions go into this process?  Where do the split-second spatial recognition and planning skills a master of Tetris demonstrate come from?  How do I write these words in english rather than gibberish?

I think a better and more simplistic hypothesis would be:  shit takes practice.  I like dialog.  I like games.  I like blogging.  The important thing though, is that in all of them there is room for improvement despite their short term nature.

I had a media professor who told us an anecdote once.  “The western world” he said “has moved from one that told its stories impermanently, by lecture, and then by dialog, to one which found permanency in its stories in the written word, and then, with the birth of the internet, back to one of dialog”.  This was grand irony to him.  I suspect he considered the technological advancement to correspond to a cultural step backward.

I consider that bias foolish.  Mine is much better.  There are so many occasions on which I wish professionals had been trained in dialogue rather than in reflection, because there are just as many occasions on which their supposed reflection has revealed folly.  Thinking longer is not always thinking better.  Not when you use it as an excuse to never come to rest at a conclusion.  Not when a moment of reflection turns into an infinity of reflection.

Sullivan said something else.  He said that blogging was an inherently post-modern medium, because of its impermanency and propensity for exposing the error in the thinking of writers.  I thought this was his error.  Karl Popper wrote that it was the duty of all thinkers to seek out their errors.  He also wrote that it was the duty of all thinkers to defend their positions as long as they appeared free of error.  Everyone can be wrong, this isn’t unique to people who make decisions quickly.  The important thing is that you actually make decisions, because otherwise I don’t think you ever become good at it.  A person that takes an infinite period of time to conclude something, is a person that can never learn.

Discipline comes not from never committing to anything, or from committing to things only for some arbitrary period of time, but from committing to something for exactly as long as that something makes sense.  If things always stop making sense to you at some point, or if everything always makes sense forever, then you just need more practice.

– Kilroy

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*(subject to third party enforcement in accordance with the terms of the contract, yes, but that’s something else altogether).

A swiss-cheese overview of the Bemani Community, and the like

So I guess I’ve waited long enough for our furry friend and will have to give my final proclamations about MGD3 independently of his watchful eye.  Hopefully this won’t permanently bias my perception, but if it does then that’s cool too, I guess.  He probably would have just docked it for having too much heterosexual furry sex anyways.

So the past year, and even the past month specifically, have seen some interesting developments in the world of music games.  Pump Pro was released, Mungyodance 3 yiffed its way into existence, ITG Rebirth finally came together, and WinDEU managed to get his ass onto the development team for all three, somehow.  I’m going to talk about a lot of things in this article.  Maybe even too many.  In the meantime though, let me give you a brief assessment of all three.

Pump Pro is my favorite of the three, and not just because I’m the best in my state at it.  It addressed a major problem I had with other Pump games by replacing their combo based scoring system with an accuracy based scoring system and marginally stricter timing windows.  The result is something like a cross between classic Pump and ITG; which of course means that most competitive Pump players hate it because they can’t time and have developed their style of play entirely around comboing things, and most DDR players hate it because it has strict timing, 16th runs, and very complex crossovers.  ITG players are split; some of them hate it just because of the extra panel, some because it reminds them that ITG is dead.

It should make sense that Pro is reminescent of ITG because it was designed and developed by the same people, operating in conjunction with Andamiro as they have been historically known to do in an effort to screw over Konami.  Pro runs on the 4.0 build of Stepmania built into either a dedicab, or sold as an upgrade for existing Pump cabinets.  Some people still have hangups about Stepmania based arcade rhythm games in general.  This is something I’ll get to later.

Pro is great because it has, well, strict timing, 16th runs, and very complex crossovers.  It’s something new to conquer, and its conventions, though not universal throughout the game, are rule based.  That’s good to see, on a certain level (maybe not a competitive level; we’ll get to that).  It basically means that shuffling every chart in the game would force a completely different style of play than simply playing the charts as given, which isn’t the case for some music games.  Techniques are pretty much implicit in the charts, and hence a good chart can be discerned from a not-so-good one just by the methods that the player is forced or otherwise persuaded to use in order to play it or play it well.  What I’m basically saying is that a bad chart is one that deviates from the established rules of composition without establishing any new, reasonable ones.  Pro follows pretty uniform rules with its stepcharts.

Of course, this might also be a sign of the infancy of 5 panel games, but this isn’t that big of a problem for me, and I’ll get to this in a bit.

MUNGYODANCE 3.  Well, I suppose the two things that immediately spring to mind are the major aspects of the game, the steps and the gameplay mechanics, and the third thing that springs to mind is how the release of a stepmania pack of all the songs in the game makes the second thing that sprung to mind not so important anymore.  So let me talk about the second thing first, that way I’ve said something about it before it (rightfully) fades from memory.

Mungyodance 3 is also built on Stepmania, although they opted to remove timing altogether.  Why, I’ll never know, but MGD3 is strictly combo based.  Unlike classic pump, it doesn’t even have timing categories.  In that sense it might be said to share more in common with Guitar Hero or Rock Band than any traditional dance game, but the timing windows actually seem looser, and there is quite a bit less complexity possible with 4 panels as opposed to with any instrument you would find in either aforementioned game (except perhaps vocals, lulz).  Additionally, instead of a lifebar there is a numeric life system which deducts 1 life for every NC and adds one for both every 50 step combo and every freeze held.  This system is very questionably conceived, for a very simple reason: both placement of and quantity of freezes per chart is not a uniform factor.  As a hilarious result, there are charts where a plethora of freezes will shoot you up to 100 life and you can literally walk off the pad after playing 2/3rds of the song.  I don’t know if anyone has noticed this or done this, or even if anyone would want to, but within the context of the game mechanics it is strictly speaking a possibility.

As to the charts themselves, after having played all the new content in MGD3 and most of the stuff from 1 and 2, this is my assessment.  There are a number of very traditional stepcharts, which use steps sparingly, mostly in the the 4th and 8th denominations, turn selectively, leave downtime between streams, etc.  Most of these are solid.  Then there are very eccentric stepcharts; these aren’t just limited to expirimentals, mind you, although those are the most self-conscious and so I appreciate a lot of them better.  This includes joke files like the Dash Hopes series (the Another for Dash Hopes 3 is outstanding, btw).  It also includes stepcharts that use gimmicks like a constant BPM shift to force an artificial wave (not a new technique, for those of you who have really been paying attention to stepchartistry over the years), and that have step patterns which force highly sophisticated and hence uncommon techniques, like triples and quads placed in streams.  These are going to be harder for your average player to enjoy.

There is one other special thing about MGD3 worth noting.  Mines have been replaced with “mod-bombs”.  These are a unique if somewhat eccentric addition.  They don’t actually subtract from health.  In some charts, such as Nobody Likes the Records, I get the impression a mod bomb is actually intended to be hit as part of the song.  Naturally in the SM version these are replaced by actual mines, so they lose a little bit of something.  Probably not enough to cry over though.

However, there are also charts which include triples and quads and hands and such while being pretty bland in general.  I’m afraid this actually constitutes many of the charts.  I think the people that stepped MGD3 might have been suffering from collective A.D.D. because probably 80% of the charts are stepped purely and entirely to the most active song element of any given part of a song, with little to no downtime between streams.  So the bassline will be 8th notes at the beginning of the song, and the steps will go to it, then vocals and synth will kick in.  If the synth is just a humming it will be ignored and the vocals will be stepped, if the synth is a 16th rhythm the steps will favor that, even if it’s 50% softer than every other song element and hence harder to actually focus on.  The Drum and Bass folder is very generic on the whole.

Now let me just say, that I don’t think that’s even necessarily a bad way to step something.  In fact my tastes are ridiculously simple with stepcharts typically, to the point they might even seem hypocritical in light of other opinions of mine.  If I get in an argument about music and someone says that Schoenberg is great because 12-tonal is a brilliant way of blah-blah-blah, I tell them I don’t think dissonance constitutes a music style and to take their dodecaphony and shove it.  With stepcharts, I’ll pretty much defend anything as long as the artist seemed to have an intention behind what they were doing, even if it was a terrible one.  I mean hell, I made stuff like this because I thought it was funny.  And while it is true that I’m a horrible person (and we’ll get to that later), I’m actually starting to think I’m more consistent than I realized.  A joke is funny once, and maybe hysterical twice, but stretch it on forever and it wears thin.  There were too damn many stepcharts in MGD3, and most of them weren’t novel or entertaining.  The steps didn’t do anything for me that the music wouldn’t have done by itself, and most of them reminded me of each other.  The exceptions were great, but they kind of drowned in all the content; I’ll take a Timebomb or a The Big Orange Love over Cutie Chaser Morning Mix or a Baby Baby Give Me Your Love, but if you ask me to name as many songs as I could from the game I probably wouldn’t get to 30.  Out of 300+, that’s kind of not a lot.

If you want to play something from MGD, just download the stepmania pack, find the stuff you like, and delete the rest.  To give you a head start, the in-house music can be pretty safely ignored.  The IDM folder has in my opinion the best ratio of hits to misses, although there are some pretty big misses.

Alright, ITG Rebirth.  This was extremely solid.  As you should either know or be able to tell, it’s a fan project designed to make a song pack to play in Stepmania, and on R21 machines, in the vein of the ITG series.  In that capacity, it’s somewhat mixed.  On the whole it is much more crossover heavy than ITG ever was.  I don’t have a problem with this, but I’m sure there are people already whining because people tend to enjoy that.  ITG rebirth actually makes a mistake that MGD3 didn’t, in that it has a number of charts which start before the customary measure or two of song time to give the player an idea of what they will be doing.  This is easier to look past, though, because even with that little unconvention, most of the offending charts aren’t terrible, and the ratio of hits to misses is still pretty good (although it has much less content than MGD3.  On that note it’s pretty impressive that I can’t remember any charts from MGD3 that did that; or it’s a sign of how unmemorable the game was).  I think there is like, one 14 footer in the pack, and maybe a handful of things harder than 12.  So the distribution of difficulty follows the pyramid structure, just like ITG did, although the myths about the game seem to be growing exponentially to the point that I one day expect it to be common knowledge that every ITG chart had 64th rhythms at 200+ BPM.

Two experts discussing ITG

The steps are generally very ITG like in terms of rhythm and overall structure.  16ths will be used to complement certain elements of a song and not others (depending on difficulty at least) so that there is a diversity of patterns and the structure of the stepchart isn’t perfectly symmetrical with the structure of the song.  They seemed to have been constructed with an idea of their performance in mind, which as I said, is something I can appreciate.  Now that I think about it, it seems like MGD3 is the game that the overwhelming number of DDR players seem to think ITG was; gimmick heavy and hyperactive, which makes its popularity all the more confusing and appalling to me.  Blame the lack of timing windows?  I don’t know.

Rebirth is sound.  There are some gimmicks, but they can be appreciated as all of them are there for a reason.  They attempt to force novel techniques.  There doesn’t even seem to be any forced heel-toeing in Rebirth, as distinct from Mungyodance.  There are charts which heel-toeing would dominate, but it isn’t necessary to pass anything.  My only real problem with Rebirth were most of the things dragon (and Draigun) related.  Blame the furries?  Hell Yeah.

So that’s all that Jazz.  Now for the issues of Stepmania, 5 panel, and my epic degree of elitism.

OK, so most people remember that dance and music games started out with big companies and proprietary tech and hardware systems, even if they started playing DDR Extreme and not DDR 1st mix like a proper 16th hating 200-pound DDRFREAK moderator.  Of those people, most of them use and know of Stepmania as a simulator.  So the idea is that Stepmania is an imitation of DDR (and of Pump, and all the other game types it came to support), and a lot of people can’t get that out of their head.  It didn’t go away when 600,000 bajillion fan charts got uploaded to Bemanistyle, or when Arch0wl and friends first started making “keyboard” specific files.  It sure as hell didn’t go away when ITG came out running on Stepmania.  Pretty much nothing that followed from that ever made it go away, and it probably never will.

What I think these people are missing is an organic sense of these games.  DDR 3rd mix ran on different hardware than DDR MAX, had different gameplay mechanics, a different framerate, and even a different scoring system.  Still, no one questions the legitimacy of DDR Max as a progression from DDR 3rd mix.  When it comes right down to it, Stepmania does the same damn thing as proprietary DDR software.  It makes 4 arrows scroll up a god damn screen in time to god damn music until some god damn input is received which registers a given value in relation to time, culminating in an aggregate total value after all the motherfucking arrows are gone or halting when some sentinal value has been reached; 30 miss combo, no life left, whatever.  The mechanics are slightly different, and even modifiable, but it’s still a perfectly legitimate 4 panel game irrespective of everything else.

Same damn thing when it runs a 5 panel game.

I don’t expect people to ever get over this.  There are still people who refuse to use speed modifiers or the bar, based on some weird pseudo-philosophy or dance game machismo, and hey; that works for some of them better than good form works for other people, but something like this is just silly.  It’s anti-growth, in my opinion.  If people really think of stepcharts as a legitimate form of art (are they, even?  I guess maybe), it shouldn’t matter what hardware or software they run on just like whether a piece of music is played on a grand piano or a keyboard doesn’t really have much bearing on the music.  Similarly, if people think the performance of stepcharts can constitute some form of athleticism, it also shouldn’t matter, just as a baseball game played on Coors Field or Wrigley Field is still a baseball game.  Yes, there are substantive distinctions, like how does altitude affect performance, how do the recessed panels of a DDR machine make runs harder than the panels of an ITG machine, etc, but that’s mostly dressing and of little ultimate concern.

As to 5 panel.  Earlier I said that it may be in its infancy.  Now, let me clarify that, because I’m sure it has a lot of people going “WTF”, as it were.  Now, DDR had been around for a long time before ITG came out, but what kinds of innovations did it really create in that segment of its life?  It created freezes and “boss songs”, and fleshed out most variants of crossover and double step.  These are substantive things, and should not be neglected.  ITG, however, fleshed out the use of 16ths, pushed the envelope on difficulty, and innovated the use of mines and hands in charts.  It also created freeze rolls, which as used in ITG are almost entirely inconsequential and redundant.  The only place they really see novel use is in fan charts; Welcome to Rainbow and Tricky Disco spring to mind.  In addition to these things, however, ITG forced the development of full minimalist styles of play, heel-toeing and future, which went on to revolutionize 4 panel competitive play.  There are two types of people that win ITG tournaments, people that do heel-toe or future, and people that can heel-toe or future.  It’s very significant.

Do you remember at the very beginning of the article when I said that playing Pump charts on shuffle would result in a different playing style than playing them regularly?  Maybe if you have a really long memory, because I certainly wrote a large number of words here.  Anyways, now is when I can explain the full significance of that.  A truly skilled 4 panel player can pass any song on random, and they can outperform a less skilled player at the task just as easily as if it hadn’t been .  DukAmok picked Summer Random on Blake at the 2008 US ITG OPEN (note: Blake has the most highly skilled future technique in the world, and is #1 on Groovestats.  Only his tournament consistency is in question) and won by that method.

5 panel, not so much.  What this means is quite simply that 5 panel games have not had a fully minimal, effective style developed for them yet.  This might mean such a style doesn’t exist, but it also might mean the nature of stepcharts, or of the competitive community, simply hasn’t forced it yet.  Sorry Jboy, I think the future might yet favor sliding, or something similar to it; although by remaining competitive with a no-bar style you might also be demonstrating something unique about 5 panel games.  Heaven knows I haven’t been able to put my finger on it yet.  Maybe history will give us our explanation.

At any rate, there are games like IIDX, which require technique which isn’t fully and uniquely implicit in the patterns of the game.  Then there are games like ITG, where such technique isn’t required, but the ability to perform it, or at least have the tools necessary to perform it running in the background while you play the normal way, just in case, will determine the outcome of high level competitions.  5 panel is neither of these at the moment, and it that sense it may have a bit of room left to grow.  That’s all I meant.

What a convenient segway into the subject of my elitism!  Which is probably the worst way to end an article about games in the history of ever, but I wrote all these damn words so too bad!  As I was telling MC Burgertime, I’m pretty sure I’m the OFFICIAL SUPERVILLIAN of the bemani community, what with being banned from forums and accosted by moderators more times than any living person, and having the somewhat eccentric notion that pretentiousness and second-guessing are the two most virtuous things in the world.  They are of course.  Second guessing is how you get something right when you were wrong about it the first time, which helps with the whole being right about things thing, and pretentiousness is the enlightened person’s way of showing they care about things.  There’s another reason I’ve been making a habit of being a dick lately though, and it’s not the same reason I argue (I just gave that reason, although people in general will just take these two things as inextricably related and be done with it, it seems).  It’s the most effective way I have of convincing people to do things.

Now, I learned this from Michael Rosenthal, although I don’t know if he was doing it self-consciously or not.  If not then, well, LOL, but anyways what I learned is this.  People tend to get satisfied and complacent with their performance well before it becomes anything really noteworthy, so you can’t appeal directly to their desire to be happy with themselves.  Making them unhappy with themselves is also a sketchy approach at best.  However, if you go out of your way to try and make people unhappy with themselves, what happens is that they become unhappy with you instead.  This is a kickass motivation.  Nobody likes a loud, arrogant, grandstanding disgusting person, and they certainly don’t like thinking they can’t beat them at something.  So, as someone who was already universally considered loud, arrogant, and disgusting, all I have to do is some grandstanding to make people unhappy with me and BAM!  Motivation.  I would have preferred the other way, personally, but like I said, OFFICIAL BEMANI SUPERVILLIAN and all.  It’s not like I chose the title for myself, I had the mantle thrust upon me, but I guess I’ll just go ahead and run with it.

Kev tells it like it is

Besides which, I’m not even that good at things, which will make the triumph of good versus evil that much easier to obtain.  Plus I have all these legitimate character motivations which I can pretend to draw on, even though I’m actually too disciplined for my brain to work that way except when I’m acting, like my intense hatred of excuses and of people blaming their body for things, driven by my secret womanhood, and my intense hatred of people who let themselves feel entrapped and impotent by things they can actually change, driven by my unchangeable manhood, and my self-hating ways, driven by my hatred of myself, and my ability to say things that are completely 100% true in a way that people think I’m lying, driven by the fact I took acting classes but also by the fact I’ve lived the role of a man my entire life and come to understand that no one can actually discern jack shit about other people’s innermost character. Oh, and Mazo, somehow.

Besides which, since when did telling people things that they already knew about themselves become offensive?  Steve is old and Jason is large?  lololol.  I don’t even have to do anything particularly villainous, I just have to twirl my mustache while being mundane and apparently it’s enough.

So yeah, I wouldn’t do it, but when I go to play at Boondocks the day after I piss everyone off to see that I’m still no match for Blue, or that Bossycow came and took one of my scores, it makes me ecstatic.  I take it right back of course, and maybe there is some truth in the eternal platitude that jackasses like me make the game less enjoyable, but I don’t think so, otherwise you wouldn’t have come in looking to beat me down.  When you can actually do it then maybe you’ll have earned something for once in your life.