John Zeitler

Konami, you got some splainin’ to do.

I will say this, though. The presentation is, without a doubt, light-years beyond what Beat’n Groovy was. This actually feels like a real pop’n game in terms of the visuals and sounds. However… it controls terribly. It’s nearly impossible to hit the blue notes by themselves, and there’s no option to alter the sensitivity of the controls. I can forgive mucking with the menus (they’re closer to something like We Cheer than the traditional “wheel” menu); I can totally understand dropping the honorifics, and the very very minor edits to the characters are also understandable (Poet no longer has her halo, mostly because the backstory that explains her as an angel of Christmas is kind of not there). You guys even get props for not having horribly-mangled Engrish voices, and even more points for using master tracks (seriously, Ace of Spades ’08, by real-live Motorhead? AWE. SOME.).

But all that goes away when you can barely control the damn thing. Die-hard bemaniacs (like, well, me alone around these parts) will want it just to support the concept, but unfortunately I doubt Konami will manage to try again with a proper control scheme. I certainly hope they do, but it just doesn’t look likely.

(This entry was set up on time-delay, so don’t fret: I just wanted to make sure that I got my thoughts out of the way and a post set up for today, Sunday. Most of today will be spent at Legions in the North Hills, taking part in my first-ever Warhammer 40K tournament. My greenskin Boyz are definitely ready to kick some ‘oomie butt. Maybe if I get a little bit of extra time this week I’ll write up a report on the process… hm, sounds like a fun thing to do. I’ll shoot for that after I hit 30K words on Frangible Time.)