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Ah, ITG. I had the singular experience of being spoken to in one of the most accusatory and hostile tones I think I've ever experienced at E3 2005 when I went to demo ITG. For context, RoXoR and Konami were involved in a fairly standard, but acrimonious lawsuit in May 2005. Essentially Konami claimed that ITG, although it wasn't based on any kind of code Konami had written, was infringing on their intellectual property by copying exactly their format for a dance game, I.E. four arrows, scrolling up to a step zone, etc. In July, the scope of the lawsuit was expanded to the home version of In The Groove, which had been released two weeks prior. Konami ended up winning the IP rights to ITG in the lawsuit a year later, and the rest of the ITG code was made freely available. Anyway, I showed up to demo the PS2 version of the game in the Kentia Hall. Kentia was the sort of tertiary hall that E3 used to have (I have no idea if it still does) to demo games and technology from companies who couldn't afford to pay the rates for the main hall, which were pretty exorbitant in 2005. RedOctane, the producer of the very first Guitar Hero for the PS2, and still, at that time, a manufacturer of fairly sturdy dance pads, was demoing Guitar Hero for the first time a couple of booths away, and RoXoR was using their mats for the demonstration. I played a couple of songs, and was, after my second song, accosted by one of the gentlemen demoing the game that day. He had been eying me and whispering for most of the duration of my second song. "How do you like the game?" He sneered. "It's great. I'm a fan, I've been following your guys' development eagerly. Konami hasn't been putting enough challenging songs in their games of late, and you guys could be the push and competition they need to actually innovate." I replied. "Really? I guess the reason you're here to see it is that you're scared." "Uh, what?" "Why else would you be suing us if you didn't feel we posed any kind of a threat to you?" "Huh?" I was a little bit flabbergasted at this point. "But no, instead you can spend your time down here looking at the competition and stealing from us instead. Don't think we won't bring this up in court" At that point I was looking extremely confused, and didn't know what to say to respond, so he took a look at my badge, which stated that I was there representing Artech as a programmer. "Wait, you don't work for Konami? You're not Jason Enos?" "No, man, he's been upstairs working the Konami stage show for like two days." "Oh... Well..." He then turned and walked away without saying another word, and continued to stare at me until I left, feeling slightly insulted, and slightly amused. But that remains the only time I've been mistaken for a Konami senior brand manager, and the only time I've seen someone go from full-on furious snark to embarassed rage in four sentences. In The Groove, though, fun game. I was never good enough to actually pass the harder songs on ITG, I was only barely able to pass MAX300 in DDR, and it's since progressed so far beyond the game I recognize that it's almost difficult to follow. A couple of questions, based on your first video: 1) I can't see your upper body in the video, but I'm assuming based on the body position that you bar hump (I don't like this term, but I can't think of a suitable alternative that isn't worse). Horrible lexical connotations aside, what do you think of the practice? 2) What's your feeling on the recent Konami releases? Assuming you've kept up-to-date, have they done enough to actually innovate in terms of stepcharts or is it still the same stuff it used to be? I haven't kept up with DDR, so I have no real knowledge of this on my own, just curious to ask someone who's obviously very good, as it used to be a real issue. 3) What do you think of the copyright/IP issue between the two companies, and, more broadly, about open-source or alternative versions of popular games using identical formats, e.g. Lunatic Rave, Stepmania, OSU!, etc.? Good luck on the LP otherwise, and good luck on Vertex and Vertex^2 Those are stupid charts.
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Jun 4, 2014 22:23
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Maple Leaf posted:I use the bar, yeah. I honestly don't see what the big deal is about using the bar or not. I mean, it's there, why not just play the game how you like? That said, some charts in ITG are so intensely difficult that I'd have a huge amount of trouble trying to beat them without it. I like to go barless for some easier charts but there's no way I'm beating Hardcore of the North without it. Yeah, I agree. I kind of feel like it's required for anything over a 10, which, I suppose, is why I've never used it myself, I've just never been good enough to need it. HotN is one of those charts which I love, because it's got a ludicrous amount of notes, but there's no tomfoolery, it just follows the beat of the song. My equivalent song for that back in the day was So Deep, loved that song. Vertex^2, though, has stoppages for absolutely no reason, and with no warning, and the only way you could possibly prepare for them is to know exactly when they're coming. Maple Leaf posted:I played a bit of the X series, and it felt like Konami just... forgot, or, like, didn't know how to make a decent chart that was also hard. Arrows would go to nothing and have patterns that didn't make sense; they were hard for the sake of being hard. I played DDR 2013, though, and that felt really well polished, especially coming from X. They don't really try to push the envelope with new ideas, but they take old ideas and refine them, I think. I found it funny that the only real innovation in terms of gameplay that they've been able to introduce over the past ten years is... mines, which ITG sort of pioneered. Maple Leaf posted:Vertex is just a big ole' softy when you take the time to learn it. Vertex2 is going to be a bitch, though. Yeah, that's why I could never do this. I'm a sightreader by nature, in most music games I play, so songs like Vertex would kill me with that speedup at the end. Also the mines. The stupid amount of mines on that song made it almost impossible for me to read, when I was playing. I was one of those people who could do Bag on 1x but not PSM because it just came at you too quickly for my eyes.
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Jun 5, 2014 02:55
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