Hello, and welcome to a new little series of blogs I’m going to be doing where I highlight and talk about songs, mechanics and little tidbits features in rhythm games that I either really like or find interesting. This might or might not be a daily thing, we’ll see, but I’ll try to do it often, because it's fun to ramble about extreme obsessions and hyperfixations i possess, and I have no bearing on what people around here know about rhythm games so it'd be fun to share some knowledge. And we start off with the infamous song GAMBOL by Slake, one of the first songs to appear in the beatmania IIDX series.
The song is based around 90s big beat music with loud drums, a deep bassline and heavy guitar riffs, soundtracking a movie where IIDX staff members play cops rushing to catch a criminal on the streets, with VJ GYO playing all the production roles, considering it to be his best “sports-oriented” movie at the time. It’s a good song - a bit dated perhaps but a fun tune for beginners to play due to it’s fairly easy chart… or, it would be if, much like the police forces of the world, the song wasn’t broken in-game.
Most normal songs in IIDX have fair timing windows, with a 16 millisecond window for flashing GREATs, a 33 millisecond window for GREATs, a 116 millsecond window for GOODs, and a 250 millisecond window for BAD notes. Anything past that number is a POOR.1 For some reason, GAMBOL’s timing windows are MUCH smaller, taking away half of the GREAT timing and extending out the GOOD timing, making it harder to get GREATS and leaving you with just half of the timing window of a flashing GREAT.2 You can see in that footage linked above the poor player struggling to get anything but GOOD judgements…
A version of the chart without these reduced timing windows was later introduced in the 12th version of the game (HAPPY SKY), but outside of an engine change slightly extending the timing out in the 19th game (LINCLE), this original chart has remained in the game as is and you can still play it today. In fact, for a couple of games, they decided to make it worse!
An “another” version of the chart was introduced in the home version of the 11th game (IIDX RED) which, just for funsies, features even worse timings, essentially turning the chart into either hitting a frame perfect flashing GREAT or missing the note, with no inbetween. It has one of the highest difficulty ratings in the game3, and it has never been crossed over to the arcade version.
Also, also just for fun, apparantly, there’s a cheat code in the home version of the 15th game (DJ TROOPERS) that lets you use both GAMBOL’s original timing and the super fucked up timing on ANY song! Simply press the Select button over songs in the song list that start with G, J, and H for the original timing, or pick G, J and A for the fuck you timing.
That’s all for now on Rhythm Game Highlights! I’ll talk about more songs soon!
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Sourced from iidx.com.
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Sourced from this zenius-i-vanisher thread, which also talks some more about songs with weird timing changes in IIDX if you're interested!
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At the time of IIDX RED's release, the highest number on the difficulty scale was an 8+, or a flashing 8. Today this is the equivalent of a 12 rated chart, the current highest number on the difficulty scale.
