Wednesday, August 30, 2023

DJ Old Man Toji aka わしはトジジだ!

Many years ago, I played Beatmania IIDX. As there were no IIDX arcade machines in my home town - I settled for the PS2 games. While it could be played on a PS2 controller, it doesn't come close to the arcade experience if you don't have a Konami IIDX controller.

Of course the console IIDX controllers don't have anything on their arcade counterparts, but they were still pretty good. Though the keys some times stuck, that could be overcome with some minor modification - then the US released their own Konami IIDX controller which solved the issue of sticky keys. While I did put some time in to it, I didn't put enough to really reach a level beyond a small handful of low Hyper difficulty songs.

花吹雪 (Hanafubuki) / Normal difficulty

Skip to over a decade later, and I picked up IIDX again just a little over a month ago. Of course, I didn't bring my PS2 or my extensive collection of games with me to Japan. So what did I do? Head over to the ゲームセンター aka the arcade and play IIDX there. After a few attempts of navigating around the menu and figuring out how to not play double mode (aka 14 keys and 2 turntables), I slowly got back in to the swing of things.

The one thing I love about the arcade version - or at the very least the current version (IIDX 30 Resident), is that you can make your own playlist of songs. Given that there are 30 games' worth of IIDX songs, this is a really neat feature, instead of having to navigate around trying to find the song I want to play.


 It also means, I can save songs that I remember playing back on the PS2 over 10 years ago, and even now, I'm picking songs that I didn't realise I forgot until I started playing them and started to remember again.

In the meantime, I've taken a break from Jubeat, as I felt I hit a slump, despite playing on Extreme difficulty. There some patterns that I'm having a hard time adapting to. On the other hand, it feels good to get back in to IIDX

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