Happy New Year!
Happy new year to all of you keysmashers. 2016 proved to be a great year for the game on a number of fronts – a huge amount of file judgments completed, a number of great game updates, and of course, we had our 11th Official FFR tournament, which proved to be a more punishing than normal endeavor for most of you. But with that, the 2016 page of FFR’s book has been turned.
To open 2017 for FFR, we’re releasing a song that is familiar to most of you: Our Journey and Epilogue. by aaaa. “But wait, isn’t that in game already?” Yes, bmah graced FFR with his great chart, but it’s for a shorter version. Today, we bring you a chart for the entire composition, in all of its 5:47 glory. The chart should feel somewhat familiar to most players – it’s relatively close in difficulty to the original, but is more technical from start to finish and requires more focus to piece together.
Our Journey and Epilogue.
Musician: aaaa
Step Artist: YoshL
Genre: Game Music
Difficulty: 94
Song Length: 5:47
FFRMas Conclusion
Thank you all for your continued patience on the results and prize distribution of FFRMas prizes! I’ve got everything tabulated out for you guys and it will all be paid out to you tonight.
On day 11 of FFRMas, I announced that there would be a raffle for three chances to win the more elusive Event tokens (FREEDOM DiVE and The Wises Were Wrong).
The winners of that raffle are: MarcusHawkins, MikeShinoda12345, and sickufully. If you have both tokens already, or don’t desire the tokens (i.e. you’re an R^3 player and can’t play The Wisest Were Wrong), feel free to say as such and I’ll give you 25,000 credits instead.
lurker/evil smoke: You did not designate a specific token for your prize on the corresponding FFRMas day, so you can feel free to drop that in here as well.
Again, happy new year, everyone!
With the exception of lurker/evil smoke and their token selections, all prizes for FFRMas have been paid out.
- TC_Halogen
FFRMas 2016: Day 12
And at last, we have arrived at the final day of our event. I wish that I could announce that I had something special that FFRMas gave to you, but the lack of announcements due to the hectic timing of everything made it a bit tougher to manage. At the end of the day, I still hope that you guys at least had a great time with the releases overall. I feel like the song line-up this year was really good, and it had a lot of differentiation between song style, and stepartists. Difficulty mixing was a little tough to manage due to a lot of the easier stuff being purged from the previous FFR Official Tournament, but we made do to bring you something.
I like to think that it’s always great to save the best for last, and in my opinion, we’ve done just that: the final release for the FFRMas event is none other than the incredible Violet Rose, the sequel song to OSTER Project’s amazing Blue Rose – which has been a fan favorite on FFR for quite some time. This song takes a very rightful position as a sibling: it too runs just shy of the 6-minute mark, carries a very respectable note count at just shy of 4,000, and is somewhat into that For Gurus Only difficulty, sitting in the lower 90s.
When planning this event, this song was immediately placed in the Day 12 slot, because I knew it was worth sharing to everyone on Christmas day. I judged this file in a batch, and -tried- to find things that I didn’t like about it to prevent from giving it a perfect 10, and… I couldn’t do it.
Violet Rose
Musician: OSTER Project
Step Artist: bmah
Genre: Latin Jazz Trio
Difficulty: 91
Length: 5:47
Yesterday, I said that I would reward those who participated in the event, and that I will! For each day you participated, I will add an entry for you to be one of three winners of the more elusive event tokens. The more you participated, the higher your chances are to actually win something! All of you who participated will receive 5,000 credits for every day that you submitted an entry to a spontaneous contest.
I will try to get these credits/prizes paid out as soon as possible, but I’m still gonna be out on travels for the next two days. Be patient, guys! <3
Happy holidays, everyone!
FFRMas 2016: Day 11
I hope everyone is having a great holiday today! I’m releasing this song a bit on the earlier side today, as the family festivities are typically held on the day before Christmas over here.
Eternal Excavation
Musician: jmr
Step Artist: Silvuh
Genre: VG Remix
Difficulty: 58
Length: 2:47
Spontaneous Contest: Post a full combo on Eternal Excavation, and I’ll give you 1,000 credits. This is the last spontaneous contest of the event: if you haven’t gotten involved with one, you’re going to want to, as tomorrow will reward those who have!
FFRMas 2016: Day 10
Getting this stuff up from a hotel. I hope that you all are having (or will be having) a good holiday weekend!
where is my balls
Musician: LOLI RIPE
Step Artist: YoshL
Genre: Mashcore
Difficulty: 97
Length: 2:54
Spontaneous Contest: For every perfect (or amazing + perfect) you get on where is my balls on 1.0x rate (velocity/legacy players: don’t worry, you’re fine), I will give you 3 credits.
FFRMas 2016: Day 9
Apologies: it’s a little hectic here prepping for holiday travels.
AirTrip-SF#2-
Musician: TiS
Step Artist: bmah
Song Genre: Fusion
Difficulty: 78
Length: 2:20
No spontaneous contest today, just have fun with the release.
FFRMas 2016: Day 8
Note: from now on, I’m gonna put the releases down to 7:30 PM server time. It’s a bit easier of a time for me to remember/handle all this stuff.
On the eighth day of Christmas, FFRMas gave to me…
…a trapstep song with a difficulty over 100.
EDM mastermind and ex-Krewella member Rain Man graciously gave us permission to use his song Make the Fire Burn for FFR (thanks, Kayla!), and this was an opportunity that I sure as hell was not gonna miss. Yes, “I” – as in, the 8th FFRMas release with a difficulty of over 100 is charted by me… and I’ll say this while I have the chance: I am not sorry.
Clocking in at a difficulty of 102 (and easily the hardest of them), Make the Fire Burn now holds the record for the fastest sustained streams in the game, featuring several sequences of streams of 176 BPM 32nds, and unlike its Eclipse-counterpart, the patterns are much tougher to auto-pilot your way through. Even the best of players in the game are gonna get a run for their money – if the nasty streams don’t get them, then the ungodly rigid burst/jack transitions outside of them will.
Make the Fire Burn
Musician: Rain Man
Step Artist: TC_Halogen
Song Genre: Trapstep
Difficulty: 102
Length: 3:35
Spontaneous Contest: Pass Make The Fire Burn (at 1.0 rate, for you R^3 folks) with over 1,000 boos, get 4,000 credits. Piece of cake. EDIT: Changed it from 2,000 to 1,000. Having 700 notes of buffer is good in a normal file, but when more than that is composed in ridiculous 32nd note streams where mashing keeps your lifebar filled with no hope of overmashing, I suppose that’s an issue. :p
If you can get to 2,000 – I’ll double your prize.
FFRMas 2016: Day 7
On the seventh day of Ch— NOPE I’M RUNNING LATE NO TIME FOR INTRODUCTIONS
(PLACEHOLDER FOR NOT SO INTERESTING STUFF TO TALK ABOUT)
G4M3 0V3R
Musician: Celldweller
Step Artist: gameboy42690
Song Genre: Dance 2
Difficulty: 61
Length: 2:09
GAME OVER MAN GAME OVER
Spontaneous Contest: Despite having this release a bit late, the difficulty is actually something that is sorted out. Get the right number that the FFR Difficulty Consultants have in mind, and I’ll give you that number * 100 credits.
I CAN’T EVEN GET SPON CONS RIGHT THANKS HAKU
FFRMas 2016: Day 6
On the six day of Christmas, FFRMas gave to me…
…some haulin’ chipcore (I think that’s what you cool kids would call this.)
YZYX is an artist that, in my personal opinion, is a mixed bag of awesome. Introduced as an artist to the game with Dysnomia, a ridiculously paced orchestral-turned breakcore song with a (thankfully) comparatively tame chart, those who were not familiar with the world of Stepmania, or well… YZYX, might have assumed that Powerflux’s entry to the game was going to be some savage breakcore song that would murder even the top of players. Instead, we got a kickass, absolutely ballistic 8-bit-esque sounding hybrid of a whole bunch of stuff that well… ok, it still managed to get the best of even the game’s best players. This time, we’re going along a very similar route in terms of song sound, featuring yet another high-speed chiptune/breakcore/IDM/(etc) hybrid.
As familiarly identified with the lovely red background by our graphic contest winner, Shikari (show him some love), ._Pulse clocks well into the 200s of BPM, and has a decent mix of patterns from start to finish; those of you with weaknesses to constant, unbroken streaming will feel the pain with heavy jumpstream density, and, if i’m not mistake, the longest sustained handstream over 200 BPM in all of FFR. Best of luck, you will need it!
._Pulse
Musician: YZYX
Step Artist: GammaBlaster
Song Genre: Arcade
Difficulty: 95
Song Length: 2:10
Spontaneous Contest: Full combo ._Pulse, and I’ll give you 2,500 credits. I don’t care how you do it, so long as you’re not physically cheating, using a bot, or something along those lines (to which your account shall be eviscerated).
For those of you wondering: credits have not been paid out for the spontaneous contests past Day 2. I will get to them – do not worry; you won’t be stiffed.
FFRMas 2016: Day 5
On the fifth day of Christmas, FFRMas gave to me…
…a fresh Monstercat release!
(Apologies for being late: I had it ready for almost two hours and then… just forgot to release it, hahaha)
We’ve not seen Monstercat-released content in a little while, but the drought has been broken by FFRMas’ 5th day, a Pegboard Nerds track called Try This. It’s not quite as explicitly dubby/drum-steppy in terms of melody, but it’s still a banger that sounds like the would-be background music of a bank heist. (Actually, I get the feeling that this is what they were going for, given the graphic used for the release, at least on Soundcloud.) In any case, this chart’s deceptively difficult – the density doesn’t ever peak to particularly high levels, and it certainly doesn’t try to cram a huge amount of notes at a time either (957 steps in 1:53), but the pattern choices are somewhat unforgiving. If you’re not fending off heavy layering, you’re contending with some variety of trills, flams, or balancing into/out of repeated notes.
Created by rushyrulz, this chart will certainly put a ton of pressure on mid-level players.
Try This
Musician: Pegboard Nerds
Step Artist: rushyrulz
Song Genre: Dance 2
Difficulty: 66
Song Length: 1:53
Spontaneous Contest: TRY THIS - pass Try This with a raw score of less than 11,500 and I will give you a support token of your choice.
For those of you wondering: credits have not been paid out for the spontaneous contests past Day 2. I will get to them – do not worry; you won’t be stiffed.
Click here to go to the FFRMas release thread (it’s been pretty lonely).
