Review
Author: WNxSöjk
Stepmania CVS 3.95 with ITG theme
Platform: PC
Genre Catagory: N/A
Date of Release: Out right now
ESRB: E
Publisher: N/A
Developer: N/A
Rating: A
Official Site URL: www.stepmaniaonline.com
Intoduction:
Dance Dance Revolution, the popular arcade game that got released in the middle of the 90's have been ported to PSone, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and now for PC, Mac and linux. Stepmania has been out for a while but has improved alot, with online support and other stuff. Stepmania is a great game if you got the money and if you got enough patience to fix the sync. Heres my review of Stepmania CVS 3.95 with the ITG2 theme and notes.
Story:
Story for a dance game? i wouldnt think so, so we are going to skip this part.
Gameplay:
This is the best and strongest part of the game.
the gameplay in the Dance Dance Revolution ( DDR ) and In The Groove ( ITG ) is special and really fun.
you can play this game with either your feet on a dancemat/pad or with the keyboard.
In the game you can pick between 4 different dance modes and 3 different ways to dance them. ( sience this review is done with the ITG theme, theres no solo mode or pump )
the 4 different modes are:
Dance - Just regular dancing. great for newbies.
Battle - Play against the computer or a friend, and launch special mods/attacks on eachother like making the notes slower and fast or just disapear for example.
Marathon - Play alot of different songs in a row with different mods.
Survival - Play a number of songs trying to survive for a long as possible.
And the 3 different ways to dance them is:
1 player - i think this mode speaks for itself
2 player - same as above. speaks for itself.
Double - 1 player plays on 2 pads/mats.
The way the acuall gameplay is that you got 4 different notes that looks like arrows at the top ( 8 if your playing double )
and then, notes like: up, down, left and right will come against the arrows at top, when a note comes to the top where the other arrows are. u press/stomp on that direction. you can look at the screenshots if you don't understand what i mean
and then theres ''jumps'' thats when you gotta jump/press on 2 different arrows at the same time.
then theres the Freeze/hold where you have to keep on pressing on a button for some seconds or a second.
there you pretty much got the basics.
when you get better at the game, you will notice 3 or 4 notes coming at the same time, or while your holding down 2 holds and just regular notes come at the same time.
and sience you only got 2 legs, your gonna have to use hands or knees to get the other notes. this can get really stressy when you have to hit a lot of notes then hit 2 holds, quickly crouch down, push a arrow on you pad, then quickly stand up and hit even more arrows.
Theres 6 different difficulties you can play on, if the song step maker made that many difficulties.
the different difficulties are:
Novice
Easy
Medium
Hard
Expert
Edit - some extra thing if the step maker for example wanted 2 different Hard modes instead of only 1.
If you play this game with dancepad/mat you will notice after a while of playing ( if your pro you will notice it after 1 song ) that you will sweat really bad and get really tired sience you move around alot, this is a good thing. Alot of people complain that when you play games you dont move at all, get bad health and all that crap. but DDR/ITG is probably the game when you move around most and is a good game to get fit.
The grade system is different from the regular Stepmania and DDR sience im using the ITG theme.
but this is how it works:
like in all dance games, there are 6 different ''comments'' on your timing.
Fantastic - right when your supposed to press
Excellent - kinda close to exacly on the notes
Great - you pressed at a ok time, but not really after the notes.
Decent - you pressed to early or late.
Way off - you completly stomped/pressed at the wrong time
Miss - you never even stomped/pressed or on the wrong note
This effects your final grade after the song. you can get an:
F - you loose
D - you passed the song, but not good
C - you passed the song pretty decent, but not that good
B - pretty good
A - nice, really good
S - almost best
1 star
2 stars
3 stars
4 stars - Highest, you have to get Fantastic on every note.
the grading in ITG is in Precent instead of points.
Sience you can play this game with keyboard and dancepad/mat, there's some songs with steps made especially made for keyboard, which are so hard that its pretty much impossible with feet. but, more and more people have started to play keyboard songs with their feet.
Now we are done with gameplay stuff, now over to...
Graphics and Sound:
Well a dance game isnt really in need of pixel shading, anistropic filtering, dynamic shadows and all that graphics stuff. sience you will only see arrows, and a background theres no need for it.
altho you can add models that are ''dancing'' from the DDR games but i didnt. But, that doesent mean the graphics sucks. sience when im writing this review, im using the ITG2 theme. and it improves the game graphicly.
higher resolutioned textures, cooler song selection, more mods and cooler mods.
Sience im also using the ITG Notes instead of DDR notes, they looks graphicly much better. but they are buggy, the 3D verison of them doesent like ATI cards for some reason, and the 2D verison doesent like Nvidia cards. so you're gonna have to use Nvidia cards on 3D verison and 2D on ATI. the 3D verison looks better ofcourse.
The backgrounds are different on every song, if the step maker put in some background. you can put in either a movie in the background, which is mostly just a bunch of clips of some effects like fireworks or some cyber looking envoirement. or you can put in just a picture or more that will pop up during the song. if theres no background with the movie there will only be some background saying In The Groove 2.
Now we are going to talk about sound. The sound quality depends on the note maker. if its a MP3 song with sucky quality, well then it will suck in the game too. so the quality is different. but we are not going to talk about the quality. We are going to talk about the songs instead, if you like Techno music or britney spears like music ( which i hate ) you will love most of the music in this game. But alot of people that listen to rock and metal complains that there's no rock and metal, there are some songs. but most are really hard songs that are for keyboard sience metal music is kinda... ''stressy''
If you ask me, i personally like the techno music more than that pop music. its kinda embaressing having a song thats a cover of the ''oops i did it again'' coming out of my speakers.
Issues:
this game is really good, but got 2 issues.
the first issue is the price. The acuall game is free, but a dancepad/mat isnt, a dancemat costs around 20-50 euro's. it may sound cheap, but it wont be if you play the game alot. because after a while, it will probably stop working because it cant take that much of a beating.
if you want a metal pad or something like it, you are going to have to spend alot of money. but they will last longer and are easier to play on.
your gonna have to pay around 100-360 euro's for them which sure is alot of money.
I got my self a Cobalt Flux, its the best dancepad on the market which costed me a whopping 337 euro's
its fun, but its really expensive.
The second issue is the sync/timing.
for some reason when playing with a dancepad/mat you will have to adjust the steps in game. This is really hard and really frustrating. if your a newbie at DDR, this will be really hard to do, so you can either goto the arcade and practice playing there or try to ''hire'' a pro at DDR/ITG and get him to sync for you. This stuff can be really irritating and if you have gotten used to the unsynced steps. this can über hard to do.
this is a huge minus.
it would be cool having a ''calibrate audio sync'' like they have in the Beta verison of ITG for PC.
Now, lets wrap this all up. Stepmania is a awesome game with unique gameplay, but is expensive and syncing every song is really frustrating.
But if you got a Cobalt Flux and a Synced every song. Your gonna have really fun with this game.
hehe, im gonna rate this game the way PCgamer does it
+ Huge Community
+ Tons of songs
+ Unique Gameplay
+ Good for your health
- The Price
- Syncing
86%
Screenshots:
The ''mod options'' you can adjust speed of the notes and put effects on them here.
The red things are mines. touch them and some of your health bar on the side will disapear
final score
The song list
end credits. shows the ammount of kcal you burns too and other info
the ingame editor
Double mode
gameplay
gameplay, example on hands.
Download the game at:
www.stepmania.com
online verison:
www.stepmaniaonline.com
Theres no real known system requirements for this game, but they are pretty low.
if you want links to songs and packs send me a PM
but you can find alot at
www.stepmania.com
i didnt really get stuff from any sources, all screenshots have been taken from me.
Keep on a lookout for my review for the real verison of ITG on PC when it comes out.
you can try the Beta at
www.inthegroove.com
goto community then the official forums.
Tell me if there's something i can improve in my future reviews.
-Söjk
05-28-2006, 02:34 PM
05-29-2006, 08:25 AM
Theo
05-29-2006, 03:29 PM
