Qoyote
Well-Known Member
TLDR; Your bank account is a temple and you shouldn't desecrate it with games like this one
I've been getting back into Pokemon (first love with a Pokemon fanatic'll do that to you) and people keep complaining about the games the last few years. In Dexit/Dexgate (it's really called that lmao), they took out the National Dex so you can't "catch em all" anymore. There's also bad animations or something (idk why they moved to 3D anyway like did anyone really care or did they just know they were supposed to care because better graphics good).
That all sucks, I get it. I hate that any big enough market trends towards "just barely good enough you don't leave our product" rather than real quality. I also think it's hilarious that Nintendo feels threatened by fangames better than theirs . But I've been a Dance Dance Revolution fan since I was 6. I know how Konami of all companies treats its side games. And Pokemon fans, you ain't seen nothing yet.
The Evolution of Dance
DDR was that dorky dancing game with the four arrows from 15-20 years ago. If you saw it you'd remember it. If you're younger than that think Friday Night Funkin but with your feetand it doesn't make you want to claw your eyes and ears out.
DDR used to have console games in the 2000's. That's how I got into it. But then the bottom fell out of the home rhythm game market around 2010 and the releases stopped. This wasn't a huge problem though, because of a program called Stepmania. It's a free program that emulates DDR. You still need to buy a pad, otherwise you're just playing with your fingers... which is a big thing people do but anyway. You can download any song for free*. It's technically not a perfect emulation, the timing (extremely important in a rhythm game) isn't EXACTLY the same, but you won't notice unless you're really good.
If you don't want Stepmania, you can find most of the old console games (at least the PS2 ones) for $~10 or even less on Amazon. Don't click the "refurbished" version, keep scrolling and go to used (I've bought four used ones and they were all fine). These include 80 songs, including many classics long gone from the arcade, and all kinds of special features like mission modes and workout modes. Remember that price point.
Another important thing is songs only last 1:30-2:00, not three or four minutes like you might think. So "three songs" is like seven minutes including the time to pick the next song.
Konami released a PC game last year, Grand Prix, and that's what we're here about today. But that's not the first time we saw this game, oh no. When COVID hit they panicked and released the free alpha over a year early... if you can call it that.
*Konami's known about Stepmania for at least 15 years. Unlike some emulators Stepmania doesn't try to hide and people talk about it openly everywhere. The biggest DDR forum keeps a library of songs you can get to from the front page. If any massive company thought it was hurting them they could shut them down instantly, but they never have.
Big Rigs: Over the Club Dancing
Dance Dance Revolution V (which stands for Vic, which I guess stands for Victory, so why doesn't it just stand for Victory) was a disaster. Some people defended it because it was a free alpha, of course it was unfinished, but it wasn't just "unfinished", it was almost unplayable.
Your life started at 0% and you couldn't die. The two notes in a jump (hitting up and down at the same time, for example) were graded separately. The announcer talked every 20 steps so he talked over himself if the song was too fast, you could get the 99% grade with only 90% score, and oh yeah, the hit windows were at least four times as wide as they should be so you could be completely off-rhythm and still get a perfect score. Except they weren't ALWAYS four times as wide because it depended on the song speed!
And sure, it was all free, but Stepmania had been free for 19 years and that's what gets me. Did Konami think we'd just forget about it? Seriously, why would you put this out in a world where everyone knows Stepmania? It's like if Elon Musk made a three-wheeled car that could do 20 and said he invented the gas-powered car. (his biggest fans might believe him but still )
Guess that's why it doesn't stand for Victory, the concept of victory's incompatible with this game.
"So, the point emerges"
Fast forward to last August and the game comes out for real. Grand Prix. All the bugs are fixed, and best of all it has arcade-accurate timing so you know getting a score here is the same as getting one at the arcade. Convenient for people like me who live hundreds of miles from a modern version. So what's wrong with that? The price.
See, DDR players love the smell of burning money. I sort of knew that because they always tell you to buy a metal pad, which often cost $500 or even more, like it's no big deal (I don't have one). But this...
So you have two options*. First, you can pay $1.10 to play three songs (remember, three songs = ~7 mins) or until you die. It's limited; some useful modifiers are locked, you can't earn the extra song you can in the arcade, you can't unlock songs (almost half the songs in modern versions are unlocks) and you can't save your scores (the main reason to play this over Stepmania, though obviously you can still write them down, they just won't be verifiable to other players... in a community where most of what you do is score-posting).
If you don't want that, you can pay about $200 a year ($16 a month), a reasonable amount to spend on a single video game you can (mostly) emulate for free (remember triple-A blockbuster games cost $60-70 each so you're buying 3 major games a year to play one game). That lets you play without paying every three songs... but you can only play songs at least 15 years old! If you want the other 70% of the game, including almost all the songs that'd challenge the veterans who'd pay that much, you still have to pay $1.10 every three songs. You don't have those limitations from before, but still! At this point a sane person would realize they're paying $200 a year for the same subscription that costs $40 a year at the arcade (and there's a good chance they have BOTH subscriptions). But again, smell of burning money.
Real quick, you don't pay the $1.10 directly, you pay it for 5 tickets, which you use to play three songs. Why 5 for three songs and not 1? Because you need to pay SIX tickets to get the chance to earn an extra song and the chance to earn some of the unlocks. You can keep playing if you die, which might be worth it, but it's funny that you can pay $200 per year and $1.10 per game and still not get everything unless you pay even more. You can buy tickets in bulk to get better deals, but they aren't very good. Buy 200 tickets, you get 35 free. Buy only 25 tickets though, you get ONE free.
And actually you don't get everything even then; multi-song courses are only a minor feature in the arcade, but they're still there and not here. They're also on those old $10 console games and those let you make your own. You also couldn't do two player or the two-pad Doubles mode for a few months, though now you can.
It's also worth noting this program is way less efficient than Stepmania. It requires four times the processing speed and eight times the RAM (2.8GHz and 8 GB RAM isn't THAT much, but it won't run great on any cheapo laptop like Stepmania will). It takes up 40 gigabytes of space, while my Stepmania install, which has every song in Grand Prix and hundreds that aren't, is a third the size. And Stepmania supports Mac and Linux, while Grand Prix only supports Windows 10 and up.
*Technically three; you can play the new songs (36 out of ~1000), none of which are especially popular with fans, on the easiest difficulty for free.
The Slap Heard Round The World
But yea, the beneficent Konami saved us. Now you can pay for song packs you can play without buying tickets (you still need the subscription but forget that for a sec ). There are 20 songs in these packs, except the two that have 18 because they each count three different cuts of the same song as different songs. And you can buy these for... drumroll please... $40 each! Goodnight everybody!
The Shocking Conclusion
We all know how dramatic gamers are, so they hate this game, right? No! People were negative at launch but now they talk about playing it like it's no big deal. They'll whine and moan about every new steps that come down the pipeline (admittedly some of them are pretty bad, you don't wanna know what they did to Megalovania), but they're paying hundreds with the other hand.
Despite all logic, despite all common sense, Grand Prix is a success.
I've been getting back into Pokemon (first love with a Pokemon fanatic'll do that to you) and people keep complaining about the games the last few years. In Dexit/Dexgate (it's really called that lmao), they took out the National Dex so you can't "catch em all" anymore. There's also bad animations or something (idk why they moved to 3D anyway like did anyone really care or did they just know they were supposed to care because better graphics good).
That all sucks, I get it. I hate that any big enough market trends towards "just barely good enough you don't leave our product" rather than real quality. I also think it's hilarious that Nintendo feels threatened by fangames better than theirs . But I've been a Dance Dance Revolution fan since I was 6. I know how Konami of all companies treats its side games. And Pokemon fans, you ain't seen nothing yet.
The Evolution of Dance
DDR was that dorky dancing game with the four arrows from 15-20 years ago. If you saw it you'd remember it. If you're younger than that think Friday Night Funkin but with your feet
DDR used to have console games in the 2000's. That's how I got into it. But then the bottom fell out of the home rhythm game market around 2010 and the releases stopped. This wasn't a huge problem though, because of a program called Stepmania. It's a free program that emulates DDR. You still need to buy a pad, otherwise you're just playing with your fingers... which is a big thing people do but anyway. You can download any song for free*. It's technically not a perfect emulation, the timing (extremely important in a rhythm game) isn't EXACTLY the same, but you won't notice unless you're really good.
If you don't want Stepmania, you can find most of the old console games (at least the PS2 ones) for $~10 or even less on Amazon. Don't click the "refurbished" version, keep scrolling and go to used (I've bought four used ones and they were all fine). These include 80 songs, including many classics long gone from the arcade, and all kinds of special features like mission modes and workout modes. Remember that price point.
Another important thing is songs only last 1:30-2:00, not three or four minutes like you might think. So "three songs" is like seven minutes including the time to pick the next song.
Konami released a PC game last year, Grand Prix, and that's what we're here about today. But that's not the first time we saw this game, oh no. When COVID hit they panicked and released the free alpha over a year early... if you can call it that.
*Konami's known about Stepmania for at least 15 years. Unlike some emulators Stepmania doesn't try to hide and people talk about it openly everywhere. The biggest DDR forum keeps a library of songs you can get to from the front page. If any massive company thought it was hurting them they could shut them down instantly, but they never have.
Big Rigs: Over the Club Dancing
Dance Dance Revolution V (which stands for Vic, which I guess stands for Victory, so why doesn't it just stand for Victory) was a disaster. Some people defended it because it was a free alpha, of course it was unfinished, but it wasn't just "unfinished", it was almost unplayable.
Your life started at 0% and you couldn't die. The two notes in a jump (hitting up and down at the same time, for example) were graded separately. The announcer talked every 20 steps so he talked over himself if the song was too fast, you could get the 99% grade with only 90% score, and oh yeah, the hit windows were at least four times as wide as they should be so you could be completely off-rhythm and still get a perfect score. Except they weren't ALWAYS four times as wide because it depended on the song speed!
And sure, it was all free, but Stepmania had been free for 19 years and that's what gets me. Did Konami think we'd just forget about it? Seriously, why would you put this out in a world where everyone knows Stepmania? It's like if Elon Musk made a three-wheeled car that could do 20 and said he invented the gas-powered car. (his biggest fans might believe him but still )
Guess that's why it doesn't stand for Victory, the concept of victory's incompatible with this game.
"So, the point emerges"
Fast forward to last August and the game comes out for real. Grand Prix. All the bugs are fixed, and best of all it has arcade-accurate timing so you know getting a score here is the same as getting one at the arcade. Convenient for people like me who live hundreds of miles from a modern version. So what's wrong with that? The price.
See, DDR players love the smell of burning money. I sort of knew that because they always tell you to buy a metal pad, which often cost $500 or even more, like it's no big deal (I don't have one). But this...
So you have two options*. First, you can pay $1.10 to play three songs (remember, three songs = ~7 mins) or until you die. It's limited; some useful modifiers are locked, you can't earn the extra song you can in the arcade, you can't unlock songs (almost half the songs in modern versions are unlocks) and you can't save your scores (the main reason to play this over Stepmania, though obviously you can still write them down, they just won't be verifiable to other players... in a community where most of what you do is score-posting).
If you don't want that, you can pay about $200 a year ($16 a month), a reasonable amount to spend on a single video game you can (mostly) emulate for free (remember triple-A blockbuster games cost $60-70 each so you're buying 3 major games a year to play one game). That lets you play without paying every three songs... but you can only play songs at least 15 years old! If you want the other 70% of the game, including almost all the songs that'd challenge the veterans who'd pay that much, you still have to pay $1.10 every three songs. You don't have those limitations from before, but still! At this point a sane person would realize they're paying $200 a year for the same subscription that costs $40 a year at the arcade (and there's a good chance they have BOTH subscriptions). But again, smell of burning money.
Real quick, you don't pay the $1.10 directly, you pay it for 5 tickets, which you use to play three songs. Why 5 for three songs and not 1? Because you need to pay SIX tickets to get the chance to earn an extra song and the chance to earn some of the unlocks. You can keep playing if you die, which might be worth it, but it's funny that you can pay $200 per year and $1.10 per game and still not get everything unless you pay even more. You can buy tickets in bulk to get better deals, but they aren't very good. Buy 200 tickets, you get 35 free. Buy only 25 tickets though, you get ONE free.
And actually you don't get everything even then; multi-song courses are only a minor feature in the arcade, but they're still there and not here. They're also on those old $10 console games and those let you make your own. You also couldn't do two player or the two-pad Doubles mode for a few months, though now you can.
It's also worth noting this program is way less efficient than Stepmania. It requires four times the processing speed and eight times the RAM (2.8GHz and 8 GB RAM isn't THAT much, but it won't run great on any cheapo laptop like Stepmania will). It takes up 40 gigabytes of space, while my Stepmania install, which has every song in Grand Prix and hundreds that aren't, is a third the size. And Stepmania supports Mac and Linux, while Grand Prix only supports Windows 10 and up.
*Technically three; you can play the new songs (36 out of ~1000), none of which are especially popular with fans, on the easiest difficulty for free.
The Slap Heard Round The World
But yea, the beneficent Konami saved us. Now you can pay for song packs you can play without buying tickets (you still need the subscription but forget that for a sec ). There are 20 songs in these packs, except the two that have 18 because they each count three different cuts of the same song as different songs. And you can buy these for... drumroll please... $40 each! Goodnight everybody!
The Shocking Conclusion
We all know how dramatic gamers are, so they hate this game, right? No! People were negative at launch but now they talk about playing it like it's no big deal. They'll whine and moan about every new steps that come down the pipeline (admittedly some of them are pretty bad, you don't wanna know what they did to Megalovania), but they're paying hundreds with the other hand.
Despite all logic, despite all common sense, Grand Prix is a success.
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