DJ MAX Clazziquai, PSP Rating Options

[E. Randy Dupre]

Writing this as I'm playing it. It's no secret that the first two DJ MAX Portable games are somwhere in my list of Greatest Ever Videogames and there was always a chance that I'd love this, even if it was shit.

Immediate thought: the fact that it's intended to be an introduction to the series is evident from the beginning. There's actually a training stage right at the beginning of Club Mode that walks you through the controls (well, the controls for the four-button mode, aka 4B). And the first stage proper in Club Mode? 2B! Two fucking buttons! There's no way that anybody could get confused with that, I'm sure, and it's to Pentavision's credit that they realised that they could probably do with widening the game's appeal by providing a smoother introduction to it.

English language is an option again, same as with DJMP2, even though it's a Korean release. They clearly know that they've got a big following of importers (and scabby ISO pirates) - there's also the option to switch it into Japanese.

Anyway, back to it.

This post has been edited by SniperDave: Apr 4 2010, 04:19 PM

[E. Randy Dupre]

Right. Lots of minor changes that won't mean anything to anybody who hasn't already sunk hours into either of the previous games.

The main mode this time around is Club Tour, which is effectively a new challenge mode, only with more choice so that you don't end up stuck at a brick wall with no means of progressing. You move up through the clubs, each housing a specific type of challenge. Some ask you to successfully complete three tracks in a row, some ask that you simply complete a nmber of tracks individually, others give you challenges similar to those in the old challenge modes - complete a track with only X number of breaks, or with a XXX hit combo, or by chaining Fever mode X number of times in a row.

What's grerat about this mode is that each club is host to a number of its type of challenge and you don't need to complete all of them to unlock the next club. Like I said before, this time aroound the game's all aout being friendly to its players.

There's also Arcade mode, which is the old 4B/5B/6B/8B modes under a new name - three tracks of your choosing in a row, with an overall score and percentage given at the end of the third. There doesn't appear to be a hidden fourth track for exceptional performance in the first three this time, although it might be that I've not hit the requirement for it yet.

Gameplay is much the same as in the previous games. There's a lot more usage of the analogue slider than previously, although it's easier to use - you can trigger it by holding it to one side, rather than having to twiddle it around all the time. When you get a one-beat hit on it (or a row of them), you can actually cheap out and spam the thing by whacking it from left to right quickly, with no rhythm, which seems like an oversight. I don't really like the increased requirement for it, because it's exceptionally difficult to let go of it at the correct time in longer notes - I'm consistently early or late at the moment.

Fever mode is now optional, giving you the choice of playing the game like DJMP1 or DJMP2, depending on what takes your fancy. That said, you'll want to turn it on for the Arcade and Freestyles mode because of the huge score and combo benefits it brings with it, and there are ceertain challenges in Club Tour that demand you have it turned on.

Videos are a lot clearer than previously and I'm pretty sure that they've been created specifically for this game, rather than coming across from the PC MMOG original.

One bit of weirdness is that a couple of the returning tracks have lost all their bass in the sound mix. Your Own Miracle suffers particularly badly. Thankfully, it is only a couple of them, and I can always play them in the other games if it bothers me that much (it doesn't).

On the whole, presentation is as polished as in the previous PSP games, if not more so. Which is saying something, given how sparkly they were. The only shoddy thing is there are *lots* of spelling and grammatical errors in the English translation, but fuck moaning about that - it's not like a Korean development team and a Korean publisher needed to put an English translation into their Korean game, and once you're past the tutorial you barely see any text anyway.

I'm sure that there were other things I wanted to say about this, but I'm equally sure that I'll be posting more about it by tomorrow anyway.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Promo vid:



Eep. Teaser for Black Square at the end!

[Willei]

Is this worth grabbing or should I wait for Black Square? Given that this is meant to be an intro to the series, is a lot of the music reused or anything like that?

And where did you get your copy? Play-Asia being pussy ass bitches when it comes to Sony tends to make it a hassle to get hold of games like this without resorting to eBay.

[E. Randy Dupre]

I got it off eBay, Willei - NCSX have it (both the LE and the regular edition) but I shopped around as I'm getting a bit fed up with their shipping costs.

I've read that there are 38 new tracks and 10 old ones. That might be wrong - it could be 38 in total, including the 10 returning ones - but either way, the majority are new. And the sound levels in the old tracks are remixed to bring different instruments to the fore, so that the note patterns are different than before (the same thing happened with the tracks that DJMP2 lifted from DJMP1).

I'd say it's worth buying, yeah. Most of the new tracks are as good as the old ones (although there's slightly less variety in musical genres covered, at least where the tracks I've unlocked so far are concerned). I'm really enjoying it, and as far as I can tell the reduced difficulty is more to do with the introduction of a greater level of choice in progression rather than a reduction in difficulty per se. If anything, the requirement for precision - the percentage score you get for each note hit - is back to being as harsh as it was in DJMP1, rather than the looser demands of DJMP2.

Also, it looks from that vid that Black Square will unlock even harder modes in Classiquai.

I think the main reason this is being treated as an intro is because of the tie-in with Classiquai: get a name group supporting your game (even though I doubt they're a name to anybody outside of the game's home territory) and you'll need to make sure that the game is welcoming to that group's fanbase.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Yeah, it's absolutely worth buying. I was up until 2:30 this morning with it, afer deciding, at 1:00, to have a quick play before bed.

It's not the cakewalk that it's been painted as elsewhere. The third club - so, about the sixth challenge - has a 6B track in its playlist, and I'm now at the point in Club Tour where 4B tracks are rare and 5B, 6B and 4BFX ones are common. That, plus the accuracy requirement for passing some of the challenges is getting strict to the point where I'm having to work at it to get through.

4BFX, btw, controls like regular 4B - left and right on the d-pad, plus triangle and circle, plus analogue slider - but adds in the two shoulder buttons. It's like a slightly cut down version of 8B from the earlier games, and it can really fuck with your head. I'm generally okay with it until I miss a note, then it all goes to hell as I try and settle back into the swing of it.

Cool to see that at least one of the returning tracks - JBG - has an entirely new video to go with it. One thing I meant to metion earlier is that the quality of the videos is even higher than previously, with most that I've seen so far being fully animated. There's obviously a pride in the vids, too, because the 4B version of First Kiss - which sems to be this game's theme song, despite not being the intro tune and, as far as I know, having nothing to do with Classiquai - sees the Gear window drop out entirely during the song's middle eighth and the animation take up the entire screen.

I suppose the only reason you might not want to get it is that it's one of an insane number of decent games that are out atm, and you might not get as much time to play it as it deserves. I've just come home to find that both LBP and Thunderforce VI have arrived while I was out, for example. It's defeinitely worth getting as a game in its own right, though.

[E. Randy Dupre]

The Fever meter works differently now. Whereas previously, kicking it in would see the speed of the gear increase (and increasse again and again if you combo'd Fever bars together), the gear now stays at a constant speed regardless. So there's no risk in firing it up. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

It'd not be a bg thing if it weren't for the fact that I've unlocked another effector - think of them as buffs, if you're reading this and haven't played the game before - called 'Auto Fever x 5'. It boots Fever into play automatically whenever the bar is filled, up to a possible combo string of five in a row.

Because Fever affects your score - when you've got x 2 Fever, notes are worth double points, when it's x 3 they're worth three times the base amount, etc - this means that it's pointless playing with Fever turned off, be that automatic or manual. I suppose the one thing that it does have going for it is that sometimes you don't want Fever kicking in as soon as the meter's filled - when there's a quiet moment in a song, for example - and so manual is always going to gain you higher scores on certain tracks.

Outside of that, I'm still loving this. The soundtrack is, on the whole, superb.

Seriously, PSP-owning GHZ massive, you should buy this asap.

[Willei]

Arrgh, I definitely have to buy this. The problem is it's going to shaft any other games I have lined up for the next three months if I get it now! If I leave it too late it'll be hard to get hold of like the first two games have become.

I'm not sure if I approve of auto fever. There are a few songs where you can just keep whacking away at fever and not worry about it, but most of the time you've got to wait until the previous one is about to run out - otherwise you screw yourself by kicking one off at a relatively quiet section of a song.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Auto fever is a daft compromise, but I've got used to it now. Just switch it on and forget about it, play it like the first PSP game rather than the second.

I'm starting to struggle in Club Tour now. You've got a rank that improves as you win challenges, but also gets worse if you attempt them and lose, and entry into challenges is controlled by rank. So what's happening now is my rank's of a sufficient level to get into the new club that I've unlocked, so I'm having to take on the increasingly difficult challenges. But then I fail them and find myself locked out of repeat attempts because my rank's got worse due to that failure.

It's not frustrating, though. There are three types of club: one asks you to complete certain tracks, one gives you a number of tracks to complete in a single session and th third is like Extreme Mode from DJMP2, where you have to fulfil certain criteria. This third type gives you different songs to try again with if you fail, so there's always the chance that next time around you'll get something that you don't have as much trouble with.

Although I'm having difficulty completing *any* 5B tracks with 95%+ accuracy.

If there's one annoying thing with the game, it's that you still can't save your position in Freestyle mode, so if you're going for a huge combo (which was necessary for unlocks in the previous game, but may not be here) you'll have to rely on the PSP's sleep mode.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Okay, possibly my last post on this.

I'm struggling quite badly now. Still need to jump another seven or eight ranks before I can enter the final club in the penultimate area (which I think makes it the penultimate club, in fact - at least, that's how it looks from the ingame unlocks list), but I'm not making any progress. And even if I do, it's a mission/challenge club, which may well mean it provides its own brick wall.

Hope that somebody gets around to utting a full unlocks list up on Gamefaqs soon. I've got 40 of the tracks opened, so I'm hoping that the last few are accessed through Arcade mode - if they're through Club Tour, I might never see them (I've *still* not unlocked everything in the previous two games, btw).

Something I forgot to mention about Arcade mode is that, this time, it's just three songs. it was four previously, with the hidden fifth if you did well enough on the others. Three's a bit too short, imo.

Still not many decent gameplay or MV vids up on YouTube, but I have found these, which show off some of the tracks and videos. All demonstrate just how much more effort Pentavision put into this series than Konami do with beatmania:

Come to Me:


First Kiss:


Creator:


Hard to Start:


I love Hard to Start, but the beats in that middle section are hellish.

Fate:


Superb fun to play, Fate.

Also, Dark Envy, which I suspected might have been something NB Rangers-related (for NB Rangers brilliance, see ]here and here) but wasn't sure about until I finally watched the vid without playing the game:



NB Rangers *needs* to be turned into a proper animated film, or have a game of its own, or something. It's awesome.

Found this, too: NB Rangers promo shoot for the game. Excellent.

This post has been edited by E. Randy Dupre: Nov 12 2008, 10:18 PM

[Willei]

NO CHANGE
0 DAYS


IRL NB Rangers probably locked up game of the year for this I think.

I've playing for this for the last couple of days off the memory stick while waiting for my copy to arrive... where it'll probably stay since the improved loading times, not having to hear the PSP drive screeching away, and extra battery life are too much to give away. I heard they put some kind of copy protection on the game to stop it playing on custom firmware, but it doesn't seem to have done much good.

This is definitely a good start to the series for anyone not into rhythm games yet. The tutorial tells you everything you need to know in fine Engrish and two button mode cuts out of lot of the early confusion you could have with this type of game. I found 4FX a great way to get used to using the should buttons which I'd never taken to previously. Hell, I never even unlocked that mode in DJMP2 and have no idea what the requirements are.

As a veteran, I'm pretty annoyed by how the game is structured this time around. The clubs make you play all the different button modes (I have a dislike for 5 and find 4 pretty tedious). I don't think you unlock anything just playing the arcade mode so you're stuck with club mode. Later on, no matter how good at the game you are you're going to have to grind to get to the final club. I must have lost no more than five challenges in my game and I'm stuck with a rank that isn't high enough to progress and I've beaten everyone I'm allowed to challenge. Since you rank up less for replaying missions and I am a long way from the next set (I've done all of C class in the penultimate club) I'm just going to have to grind it out. Damn those Koreans!

I am very impressed with the videos this time around though. While the old ones looked like especially crap flash videos from 1998, these look like MONEY. The Clazziquai branding probably helps a lot with that one. For the record I think auto fever is a load of bollocks, partly because of the reasons I stated earlier, but mosty because it charges slower in auto mode. Probably useful for specific songs which have enough notes for it not to be a problem or in challenges which don't have a score or fever requirement. I don't think I'll ever bother with it again. I do like the new positioning for the fever bar though, it's less distracting the way it is now. I love how gear is no longer linked to stat bonuses so I can have one that looks good without worrying about how it's affecting my score. I was stuck with the goofy NB Ranger one in DJMP2 because of the hefty fever bonus it gives you.

All things considered, it's more DJ MAX and that can only be a good thing. As usual it's biggest problem is that it's shafting all my free time again!

[E. Randy Dupre]

I lied about that being my last post in this thread.

The second bit of the LE package arrived today:

 DSCF0816.JPG ( 45.74K ) Number of downloads: 4


Shame about it being a bit bashed at the bottom Wonder if I can iron that out.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Thought I might as well mention this here, too. I bought the DJ MAX Technika soundtrack the other day - the LE verrsion, with remix CD, stickers and other assorted bits of funky tat. And, for the second timee, I'm a bit annoyed by a Pentavision LE - the inlay on my version of Clazziquai was all bent and battered, and now the lyrics book for this soundtrack looks like it's been folded in half. Oh, and the box for the soundtrack claims that it includes a poster, but there's fuck all like that in my copy.

Anyway. Still waiting for Black Square to get an official release date. As far as Clazziquai's concerned, I've got to admit that I've become bored with the grind required to boost my rank in Club Tour mode and, as a result, have left it to one side. The lack of unlockable discs (or unlockable *anything*) in the arcade mode makes playing it feel like a bit of a waste of time. I mean, there's not even a high score table for it. So I'm waiting on Black Square to open up the harder songs and modes in this, too.