Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

[kmay]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

things like techniques would need to be address. hand positioning, posture, key setup. ways to improve faster, like isolations and rates.

[Deadlyx39]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

1: I'm trying to get my friends involved in FFR and/or Stepmania and I don't know how to go about it. What's a good idea to get them involved in FFR or Stepmania?

2: Do you think DJ Hero could have lasted as a franchise if there wasn't money problems that shut down the series?

3: Do you think that next gen consoles will get a rhythm game released that doesn't use the Kinect or the PlayStation camera? To be more specific, will a peripheral based rhythm game ever be released on next gen consoles?

[Trumpet63]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

1.) Do you know anything about SDO-X?

2.) Do you know anything about Flow (the psychological concept)?

3.) If you had to create a logical structure through which to analyze and differentiate all rhythm games, what categories or parameters would you use?

[rushyrulz]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

Does it help in bed?

[_Zenith_]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

1.) Do you know anything about SDO-X?

You are literally the first person that I have seen mention SDO-X since I have tried to mention it years ago.

Don't dare say you play SDO-X or even any of the other SDOs (China being the biggest and first in their industry, America being the only SDO that has crashed and been removed entirely). I have a lot of friends who still play SDO-X (which is predominantly Malaysian, but more Chinese have been playing lately, and you still have your Southern Americans during the day-time in America) and it's been infested with a program used to hack during the game.

And the rate that this is happening is not going down, but exponentially increasing, soon to be only filled with hackers. This is the main reason why I have quit SDO-X and will never touch it again.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

Question 1: Thoughts on the current direction of new age rhythm games Japan is producing? (Jubeats 2008~, Sound Voltex 2012~, etc)

Question 2: Best medium, your opinion + opinion of general masses/consumers, for rhythm game (GuitarHero/RockBand, IIDX, DDR, etc) ~Generally the masses of western of audience I assume unless you're somewhere in the east.

Question 3: Could DDR-esque games be used as a form of free style long duration cardio and be recognized at the state level for gym periods at public/private schools (Odd ball question: My high school had a custom cabinet made by one of the gym teachers who used it to play around and eventually got the school's permission to play with it for a while every friday gym class instead of doing a standard run we could spend the entire 40 minute period doing non stop ddr. -It only lasted for a few tries before people just started doing the runs again because people were playing too difficult songs *cough*)

Question 4: With the current state of western arcades dying; if you were tasked to revive the scene, how would you do it (if at all possible) -assume there's no depression and middle/lower class can afford to play around at an arcade for an hour or so after school.

1)

So this is actually a more complicated question than you realize, because if I answer it directly I'll have to explain what I mean, so I'll just explain what I mean first.

Rhythm games are distinguished by several types of difficulty:

1. Physical (a better term might be 'biomechanic difficulty' since everything is physical but you know what I mean by 'physical')

2. Visual / pattern-recognition (being able to see what is going on, know what you're supposed to do and execute that)

3. Aural synchronization (being able to hear what is going on and sync up with it)

You can break these down further -- visual difficulty might include being able to read fast charts, slow charts, charts with lots of weird arrow changes, and so on. But for our purposes we need to break down physical difficulty, so there is:

1. Muscular (your muscles physically cannot move at the speed you need to)
2. Neurological adaptation (your muscles find the movements weird, and it takes a lot of time for the movements to become automatic/"second-nature")

Stepmania on 4 keys is almost entirely muscular difficulty. There might be mild neuro-adaptation difficulty with index files that use turns/crossovers, but that's mild; if you were using a larger limb, like your bicep or whole arm instead of your fingers, it would be thought of as an extended muscular endurance exercise to music. It's a lot more similar to lifting than you realize.

Here's where your question comes in: music games in Japan have moved from high degrees of muscular difficulty to what seems like greater degrees of visual difficulty and neuro-adaptation difficulty. They have started making the inputs weirder, the graphics flashier / more sci-fi, and the concepts more abstract, from "you are playing [insert instrument]" to "you are interacting with the music in this cool new way."

I frankly don't like this direction. You can achieve neuro-adaptation difficulty by making a million weird inputs that do a bunch of different things and make all kinds of Bill Nye The Science Guy ding dong sounds, then force people to press those at weird intervals. Neuro-adaptation difficulty is something that is quickly overridden by repeat play, and once you get to a certain point, the game feels easy or at the very least the difficulty feels cheap relative to what you're doing.

2)

I don't know what you mean by "best medium" but I think Stepmania is the best rhythm game to ever exist because it can be adapted to be nearly every rhythm game to exist. It's free; it's open source; you can play it in theory anywhere. I could play Stepmania in the goddamned Congo jungle if I wanted to. I could play Stepmania in space. And I could play files for so many rhythm games that have existed on so many different setups.

3)

Absolutely. In fact, DDR-as-cardio is something I've been toying around with.

As someone who is currently working on a strength and conditioning certification, I spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing. I eventually switched my cardio from treadmill running to ITG because it's a more efficient form of HIIT (high-intensity interval training) I knew of. Unlike running on a treadmill, which is a poor condition to measure your mile-long runs anyway, ITG conditions don't change and your scores are more or less the same every time. Getting a higher score on a song is motivation to continue pushing yourself. Mile-long running does not necessarily achieve this, and mile-long running on a treadmill is not comparable to running on a track. (And running on your street is not comparable to running on a track, since the ground change in steepness.) If I had a track readily available, I might alternate between mile runs and ITG, but for now I strongly prefer ITG as my choice of HIIT.

Does it work? Well, I can lose >30lb in three months any time I need to. I've had to do it two separate times in my life. The recommended rate of weight loss is about 1.5lb/week at most but really should be closer to 0.5kg/week if you're going to retain strength gains and muscular gains. If nearly triple the recommended rate of weight loss isn't good enough for you, I don't know what to tell you.

A word about high-intensity interval training: HIIT is by far the superior form of cardio because it's more anabolic than low-intensity cardio, because it builds cardiovascular endurance better than low-intensity cardio, and because you can burn more calories in shorter periods of time. With HIIT you burn calories as you rest, whereas with low-intensity your resting periods don't necessarily burn many calories.

ITG and DDR are not necessarily optimized for HIIT. This is because they were designed for arcade environments where people pay per song. So, if you're paying for four songs, optimally you want to play all of those four songs or you're wasting your money on songs you're not playing.

But that's a shitty form of training. HIIT usually involves doing some exercise and completely beating the shit out of yourself and then resting until you can do it again. In ITG/DDR terms this would mean playing something like Pandemonium Expert or Paranoia Revolution challenge, resting for 1-5 minutes or however long it takes to recover, and then doing it again. On some machines you can run the timer completely to 3 minutes and this is enough, but I've had to rest as long as 10 minutes for some songs where I just completely annihilated my body.

Playing 8-footers constantly will not boost your cardiovascular endurance. They will when 8-footers are hard to you, but when you're at the point where you can full combo them they won't. This is why some people plateau and eventually develop rationalizations like "I play for fun!!!" because they aren't willing to push their endurance levels to the point where they could pass harder songs. They were playing for fun before when they pushed themselves from 4 footers to 7 footers, so it's not like it's any different now, but suddenly when they realize they can coast and feel like they're mostly able to pass everything they develop a sense of satisfaction with their progress and never improve.

Also, an aside: I think playing with the bar is better than playing without the bar. When you play no-bar you should be in a half-squat position for spinal support and if everyone did this playing no-bar would be fine but in practice people will use whatever stance is intuitive for them or whatever stance lets them get scores. So a lot of players will play no-bar with horrible form that leads to poor posture / poor back health and just keep doing that out of some sense of superiority because the bar didn't come with the game. What's better: playing in a way that fuck your back health merely because the game designers know jack shit about this sort of thing, or playing in a way that, while not intended by the designers, is better for your back health?

I've honestly thought about making a version of Stepmania optimized for gyms. All you would need is one or two ITG-X pads with the bar mod installed and a flatscreen. The problem with installing Stepmania anywhere is that often, gyms and arcades have licensing fees for some of the equipment they use. I know that Ultra Arcade, an arcade here in San Antonio, told me that they had to actually pay for the licenses for some of their games. So the solution to this would be to make sure that every song in the game is licensed under the Creative Commons Commercial Use license (not every creative commons license is created equal -- look this up); I know Kevin MacLeod uses the Commercial Use license, and a couple of artists at Creative Commons music websites do too. The upside to this is that if people did start making Commercial Use packs, arcades could have Stepmania there too, and it would cost them $1200 at most compared to the $5000 cost of a DDR machine.

4)

First, arcades for teenagers aren't going to work anymore. Arcade games are dorky as fuck compared to the games teens play. Think about this dude -- in Battlefield 4 I can go and shoot some guy's head off and call him a *** on the internet. To a 13 year old that's the most entertaining thing on the planet.

You might be asking yourself: "why would anyone want to do that?"

You are not a teenager. Teenagers love that shit. They are bound by rules constantly and games where they can shoot terrorists with super-realistic graphics and call people fags is like, the ultimate freedom from whatever the fuck White Kid Suburb Shit they have to do in their day to day life.

Why did kids go to arcades in the first place? Because of all the games with guns that let you shoot things. Now those games have horrible graphics, and, guess what, people play shooting games on their computers / consoles but with their friends and other people from other states.

Then you have to think about what is involved in a teenager going to an arcade. They have to get their mom to give them money to go play the games, and they have to convince their mom to give them a ride. Then they have to have their mom pick them up after a certain period and feel like a dork who is completely controlled by their parents. Which they are, legally and financially, but teenagers hate remembering that. They want to go and call people fags on the internet. Battlefield 4 lets you do that and shoot people in the head. And if you're nerdier but still fundamentally that type of kid, League of Legends lets you do that with magician women who dress like strippers.

Do dancing games have any chance of competing with that? I doubt it.

Do you know what kind of kids go to arcades in my city now? Hood kids on the west side who live within walking distance of malls. They go to arcades because their parents are doing their best to support their children and can't be available all the time. So, the kids walk to arcades and dick around there and maybe play DDR if they have money. $5 for a bunch of DDR songs? Yeah, sure, they can afford that a few times a month.

The days of White Kids In Suburbs going to arcades are over.

Arcades in Japan might still be going with teens. I have no idea. My impression of teens in Japan is that they're far more obedient to what their parents want and have less of a desire to get out all the tendencies that they feel are being restricted by society. I don't think Japan values freedom of expression or individualism as much as the US, so that might be it. On a slightly racist note, I get the impression that Japan in general is less aggressive/extraverted/energetic than the US and arcades appeal to people who keep to themselves and are mild-mannered all the time. You can somewhat notice this in the differences between American and Japanese videos; the male ITG players react to scores in the way that male football fans react to football plays.

Now, there is a new kind of arcade that I think MIGHT work in the United States and that's 18+ bar/arcade combos that serve alcohol. Alamo Drafthouse in San Antonio is extremely popular because you can order alcohol while watching your movie. A movie is far less entertaining than a video game while drunk because a movie is not interactive. Playing video games drunk is extremely entertaining because you can watch, real-time, your motor skills fail miserably. People who play video games are no longer kids. It's fully an adult hobby now and people realize this. Adults have less time for shit, but, frankly, I have way more free time working 40 hours/week than I did in high school when I was taking a shit ton of AP classes and extracurriculars or in college when I was taking 18 hours of hard classes -- I think adults just rationalize their lives. (Now, if you're one of those people who works 70+ hours/week in investment banking or whatever, yeah, that's insane. The most I've worked was 80 hours in a week and I think my dick touched my girlfriend's vagina twice that whole week. We hadn't gone a single day without sex for 6 or 7 months prior to that.)

The model of arcade, also, is getting different. Arcades used to be pay-per-game but now it makes far more sense to just have a library of games and have a person pay a certain fee per hour. LAN cafes do this, and bars effectively do this with cover, so I don't see why you couldn't do this with arcades. This means, though, that expensive games ($3000+ per machine) aren't happening. Ultra Arcade charges $8/hour so for one $3000 machine that would mean a player would have to spend 375 hours playing that game to justify the cost of the machine.

So, to summarize:

- the equipment needs to get cheaper and the software needs to be more adaptable
- arcades, if they are to be revived, will be for adults (and possibly involve alcohol)
- the subscription model is better than the pay-per-play model

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

When is blur v2 coming out (I'm serious)

When I made blur I was I think 14 and had the goal of making a 240bpm song with lots of 16th notes. I only did this to have a song with faster notes per second than people were used to.

However, I had no idea what music theory even was. I didn't know how much I needed to actually write music. The only music creation I was exposed to (i.e. the only music creation I had seen in-person) was from bros on guitars who plucked notes and that was it. So, that's what I imagined music creation was like.

When I started to understand the breadth of shit I didn't know I realized two things:

1. If I was going to actually make music, I needed to learn a lot of shit
2. I don't actually want to make music that much, considering my goal was just a 240bpm stepmania song with lots of 16ths.

Gaussian Mist II by Kang is very close to what I had in my head when I imagined what kind of music I wanted to write, so you might as well consider that blur v2, because if I were tasked with writing music and were good at it that's the kind of thing I'd make.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

things like techniques would need to be address. hand positioning, posture, key setup. ways to improve faster, like isolations and rates.

Is this a question? I think you're asking how to improve but I'm not sure

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

1: I'm trying to get my friends involved in FFR and/or Stepmania and I don't know how to go about it. What's a good idea to get them involved in FFR or Stepmania?

2: Do you think DJ Hero could have lasted as a franchise if there wasn't money problems that shut down the series?

3: Do you think that next gen consoles will get a rhythm game released that doesn't use the Kinect or the PlayStation camera? To be more specific, will a peripheral based rhythm game ever be released on next gen consoles?

1)

I have no idea. It was easier to get my girlfriend to play Dwarf Fortress than it was to get her to play Stepmania. Actually, it's easier to get laid than to get people to play Stepmania. I'd even go so far as to say it's easier to have a FFM threesome than it is to convert my friends to playing Stepmania. So if you have a good answer to this, hit me up.

2)

Not really.

DJ Hero always was a dinky thing. American culture and western culture in general very much values authenticity. DJ Hero seems like it's trying to be something rather than actually being something. It was a poor concept from the start, and it requires you to purchase this plastic controller and get used to a bunch of weird input alternations. The weirdness wouldn't be an issue if you marketed the game as trying to be nothing other than what it is (e.g. Stepmania doesn't attempt to be a piano simulator, or a dance simulator, or anything; it's hitting buttons to music and honest about that) but since you're marketing it as being a DJ game people are always going to compare it to DJing and it looks pathetic in that regard.

3)

I have no idea, but rhythm games for consoles and arcades usually take advantage of whatever hardware is novel. So, if you can find some creative hardware use, maybe. But I've never been interested in rhythm games that merely use novel as their gimmick hardware because they're short-lived; it's very easy to reach the skill ceiling. Any rhythm game with a high skill ceiling will rely on muscular difficulty (see my previous reply to FF_rules) over anything else.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

1.) Do you know anything about SDO-X?

2.) Do you know anything about Flow (the psychological concept)?

3.) If you had to create a logical structure through which to analyze and differentiate all rhythm games, what categories or parameters would you use?

1)

Yeah. I had watched videos of it before and I think reach mentioned SDO-X to me a long time ago.

It's basically standardized spread Stepmania. I think SDO-X has an advantage in having a standardized song list, so that's one good lesson to be learned from it. Competitive games generally work better when there is a standard metric for skill. If you compare this to Stepmania, there are so few songs that are regarded as Standard Good Player Songs and the ones that are change constantly. Meanwhile, ITG has Pandemonium and so on.

2)

Not until you mentioned it, but after reading a little bit about the term it sounds extremely familiar to hyperfocus, which I am very familiar with as I'm borderline ADHD. I tend to have the highest degrees of focus in the following things: 1. extreme immersion in something I am writing 2. in arguments 3. when playing rhythm games 4. lifting very heavy weights 5. driving really fast (100+ mph) 6. sex and perhaps other things I've forgotten here. I also hyperfocus in situations where I feel like I'm in danger or where I feel like I might face some penalty, so at times I pursue behavior that is on the line of acceptability deliberately just to see if I can get away with it. I worked at a call center once and joked to a mother that her daughter might be pregnant; I was ranked #1 at that place (out of 300 people) a few months later.

This has nothing to do with your question, but I'm ashamed of it because it's a public safety issue, so I'm going to clarify anyway: driving fast is a bad habit I used to have when I was about 20/21 and I've since dropped it. I don't think I've ever been more focused on anything in my life than when I regularly did that though; I very much could have become the kind of person who is addicted to street racing, because the exhilaration is unlike anything I've ever felt. But even if I can get away with it, it's immoral on principle because it's an unsustainable behavior -- if everyone acted like I did, car deaths would rise dramatically, and sustainable behaviors are behaviors that everyone can do without serious collective harm.

3)

Well, you wouldn't use a logical structure because logic has nothing to do with representing concepts but rather the relationships between concepts (inferences etc.) but, that being said, I think what you mean to ask is what kind of framework (conceptual models) I would use. To a degree I've already done this.

Here is a framework I've made to analyze rhythm game skill: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3E...ew?usp=sharing

[_Zenith_]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

I played SDO X for years and the song list is cool, but they have gotten so heavy with bpm changes and speedmod changes that it's painfully annoying to play on since you have a predetermined rate you have to use. For example, if SDO X adopted CMod rates, then it would be more enjoyable. IMO, stay away from the game in general. 9.5/10 times you'll run into someone using a hack to play. And there are no leaderboards.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

Does it help in bed?

It depends on the rhythm game. Something like DJ Hero would probably not help you at all. Games that would help are games that involve either muscular endurance in your hands or cardiovascular endurance or both.

If you play DDR/ITG at very high levels (18+ on the new DDR scale, 12-13s on the ITG scale) as a form of high intensity interval training, it probably will help your cardiovascular endurance which will help intense sex.

There's a position my girlfriend and I like a lot where she'll put her legs around my neck, thighs close together, and I'll grab her torso just below where her serratus anterior is:



This allows me to pull her toward me in a way unlike any other position I've tried. I can annihilate her vagina this way; we had to break for a whole day once because it made her too sore. But it requires a lot of energy and you can get winded quickly doing it, so cardiovascular endurance helps a lot here.

Stepmania may or may not help you for clitoral/vaginal fingering depending on what the woman likes.

Some women for example really like clitoris tapping. My girlfriend likes really fast clitoris tapping, almost like a pseudo-vibration, and for women who like that sort of thing you really can't get a person more qualified to do that than a Stepmania player. On the other hand, I've slept with some women who hate that and prefer light circular rubbing.

Stepmania probably helps you evoke squirting. The easiest way I've found to make a woman squirt (without added oral stimulation) is to just jackhammer the shit out of a gspot with your middle finger after you've already induced an orgasm. You're not touching the gspot deliberately but passing over it with each thrust. Some women do not respond well to this at all but for the women I've known who can squirt, this usually achieves it.

Also, stepmania will increase muscular endurance in your fingers, and sometimes when I've been fingering a woman's vagina and rectum at the same time (you can stimulate the fornix through the rectum) I felt my hand about to fail, in the lifting sense of "lifting to failure." Since I'd wager I have more muscular endurance in my fingers than 99% of the population (but not 99% of the Stepmania population, obviously) I would say most people probably couldn't do that, so Stepmania ostensibly helped in that respect.

It's a lot easier to make my girlfriend squirt through oral sex than through fingering though, but oral sex is unrelated to your question and I'm probably already pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable subject matter for this thread by answering it in the detail I have.

Since I think you're a woman, Stepmania would probably help for handjobs by increasing muscular endurance in your forearms. Though, regular weight training would probably be better for this, especially deadlifts. I'm bisexual and also a guy and I'm pretty confident that guys prefer blowjobs to handjobs about 99% of the time unless you have pioneered some revolutionary handjob technique, but on the other hand, my girlfriend does a combo handjob/blowjob thing that I think is pretty amazing so perhaps Stepmania would help if forearm endurance becomes an issue.

I still think weight training would be superior for forearm endurance though, but then I think everyone should do some form of weight training. (If you haven't picked up a weight ever, I wrote a program for beginners that's worth checking out.)

[noname219]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

Here is a framework I've made to analyze rhythm game skill: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3E...ew?usp=sharing

Can I use a portion if not the entirety of your text to create an article on the FFR wiki about skill ? (notions, how to improve, etc.)

edit : thanks

[Arch0wl]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

Yeah, go for it.

[rushyrulz]

Re: Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

oh my god.

also I'm not a woman pfft