Well, I plugged my Pop’n controller in yesterday to get some more play time in and ~ dead. It was dead… I have no idea how. I am guessing that it was the controller PCB and it just died from “normal use” or what ever. I got my Kagura Ransai shell in this morning (yes, my mail was delivered before 7 AM on Monday morning 0_o) so I have to take apart my Ghetto Box and transfer everything over to the new one. I may as well just rewire it while I am at it. There goes my whole night…

So the good news is that I am getting much more competent at Pop’n. I passed at least 6 level 29+ songs. One was a 32 I belive, most were 31’s. I got 2 bars away from beating ee’mall Trance - Colors. Seriously, this hurts my arms at this point. My hands and arms are moving so quickly that if I do any more than tell my hands where to go (i.e. actually pay attention to where they are going and if they hit the right button) I will get confused. It is kind of weird: I know how fast my hands are and how fast they are moving, yet it supprises and shocks me. Kind of cool really.

EDIT: Got the list of songs (I compiled a list for the accomplishments thread at Bemanistyle):
Winter Dance -White Eve Hyper
Hyper J-Pop 2 - North Wind Hyper
Depa Funk - Talk of Depa Underground Hyper
Rock Guitar - Absolute Hyper
Lesson - Pop-Step-Up Hyper (I BS’d my way though the speed scales though)
Psyche - L.A.N. Hyper
Passion Live - Lovers Day Hyper (I think, I may have remembered this wrong)

Mad Maestro: Gimmick over game?

Yea, here is my mini-review of it. After a few hours of play with it I have decided that I will more than likely never invest the full time to “master” the game. The premise of a good game is there. A skill based rhythem game with a classical music theme (I do enjoy classical music) that suffers. Why? Pressure sensitive buttons. That is right, you have to press the buttons at different pressures. Now realising what pressure your supposed to press it at is easy, but actually doing it… is mainly luck.

There is light, medium, and heavy presses on the beat of the note count (either 4/4 or 3/6 manily). The heavy presses are not too much of a problem nor is light, but going from light to medium, heavy to medium, or medium to eithther is quite difficult. On top of this your quite likely to hit early on heavy presses or late on light presses. So why do this? It feels like they did not properly test the game. Having the X button as light Square or Circle as medium and Triange as heavy would have been much better.

I think that this game suffered from thinking that being a brand new feature with the dualshock2 controllers that they would get more people to buy it with a new feature/gimmick actually being used. This could have been a really solid game, but it just leaves you cold.