On the Run of 33. And 16. And 11.

MAX 300 Problems

With one week until I travel to Rhode Island to get absolutely destroyed in this tournament (Despite the topic title, actual cancellation of the tournament seems unlikely), I figured a fully DDR-centered post would be good.

MAX 300 was the first “10-footer” in DDR history. 10 feet is as high as the DDR difficulty scale goes (In the Groove went as high as 13 for its difficulty, and unofficial fan-made files for Stepmania go even higher than that), despite the fact that nowadays the range of “10s” is so wide that the game could really benefit from 11 or even 12 being added to said scale. But in any case, MAX 300 has become something of a project for me of late. I can get through the song with no problem, but there are a few spots in it I simply can’t seem to get right no matter how hard I try.

If you’d like to see these yourself, just click on the thumbnail above and have a look at the spots labeled 1, 2 and 3 (Warning, the file is big, about 1000*900 pixels. Also, my thanks to DDR Freak, who provided the original stepchart and who will hopefully not sue me into oblivion for putting up this modified version.). Spot 1 isn’t actually that difficult, but for some reason I like switching arrows 5 and 6 around in my head and thus missing both of them.

Spot 2 is the second half of the “run of 33” arrows, which is basically what you’d expect–a run of 33 continuous arrows (Although, because the first 16 are essentially just alternating two arrows back and forth, it doesn’t feel that bad). Once again, here I mess up arrows 5 and 6, which somehow throws me completely off for the rest of the run (My foot position is wrong) and saps my lifebar down to almost nothing. I have no clue what’s going on here. I can hit it fine slowed down even slightly, but I just don’t process it at full speed, or something. What’s frustrating is that at one point, I could mentally do it fine–my feet weren’t fast enough to consistently combo it, but I at least had the sequence of arrows correct. And now…I don’t know.

Spot 3 is another one where my feet simply refuse to step the correct sequence, though I at least have it down to a single incorrect arrow at this point–I tend to step the first four steps in the spot as up-down-up-down instead of the up-down-left-down that it should be. This particular mental block isn’t anything new though–I came to the conclusion that I had always been doing it wrong when I broke my combo either two or three consecutive times in the exact same spot each time. I’m trying to work on it anyway, though–as the first video link in this post shows, people can AAA the song. I may never get that good, but I’d like to at least fully combo the stupid thing at some point.

This entry doesn’t particularly have a point, other than to talk to myself about this, but if there are any other dance gamers who’ve gone through something like this, feel free to chime in.

Though honestly, another reason that I wanted to post this is that this marks the first time in emptyeye.com’s history that I have successfully posted some type of update at least once a day for an entire week. Essentially, either my life is getting more eventful, or I’m getting better at divvying up what I want to post when, but either way, this is a good thing (As it shows that I’m keeping the site very much alive, giving you something to look forward to and giving you more reasons to come back). I don’t think I can keep it up for a second week in a row though–this was more a fluke than anything else. In any event, not to worry, you’ll still get at least the Sunday Night “week X” posts, plus anything else I feel like posting throughout the week.

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