• he/him

I occasionally write long posts but you should assume I'm talking out of my ass until proved otherwise. I do like writing shit sometimes.  

 

50/50 chance of suit pictures end up here or on the Art Directory account. Good luck.

 

Be 18+ or be gone you kids act fuckin' weird.

 

pfp by wackyanimal


 

I tag all of my posts complaining about stuff #complaining, feel free to muffle that if you'd like a more positive cohost experience.

 


 
Art and suit stuff: @PlumPanAD

 


 
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I do not think this is a hot take either, if you've put any real amount of time into both I think this is the only conclusion you can come to. I'm not really a longposter so I'm just going to bullet point my way through here real quick.

  • The user interface is just better. Even works with paws on. I like buttons too, but the average punter can operate a touch screen while plastered. Probably. If you know what you're after, it's way faster, and it's otherwise more responsive, intuitive (and I hate that word), and just overall better.

  • Sound is better too. This is a very low bar to clear, sound on modern DDR cabs isn't great, but it is cleared easily.

  • If you like old DDR, it's got more good old DDR songs than new DDR does. The shit people were bangin' out back in the day. Obviously there's no Konami licensed songs, but there's plenty of other stuff. Good stuff, just no anime music.

  • Pads are good. My experience is limited but I'm willing to bet a big five dollars that SMX pads will continue to feel good when given the Dave & Busters treatment for years than a DDR pad will. Plenty of DDR pads out there feel god awful because they're not carefully maintained.

  • Timing is better. Timing on modern arcade DDR sucks ass and I will not accept any arguments otherwise. You can make it work fine at home but on Actual Arcade Cabinets it's crap, has been since they swapped to PC hardware in X. High level players go to a lot of trouble to replicate the actually bad, but official timing of arcade cabinets and I think that's dumb.

  • You want a cab? You can buy one, directly from Step Revolution. They have multiple types of cabs even. Or you can just buy the stages and a monitor with the software running on it. It's not cheap, no, but compared to buying any DDR cab that was supposed to have an LCD in it, it sure is. And you can just go throw that on network, no fuckery.

  • You an op? You can run the cab properly, on network, without paying a cut to Step Revolution or dealing with weird private network fuckery. And the pads work better so you have less insufferable tank top wearing sweaty nerds asking about the sensors.

  • The company that sells the game does, probably, give a fuck about the people actually playing the game. I'm sure some of the devs at Konami care, but do you think Konami cares at all about the end user experience past it being enough to get mroe credits? Hell no. SR seems to actually want to make a game worth playing, both for old sticks in the mud such as yours truly as well as the typical drunk punter wanting to give it a go.

I still get if people want to play DDR, because it's DDR, that's fine. But it's not the better game, not by a long shot. And I think it's worth going out of one's way to play SMX instead, if you really care about such things.


Those are the major points, there's a few more minor ones from me.

Biggest downside? Not big weeb music representation in SMX. Not surprising, and I think DDR has just too much, but I'm a sucker for some old touhou classics and if they haven't already I think it'd be worth SMX going out and asking how much it'd cost to get a few. Especially if they didn't sign any exclusivity with Konami...

Center panel? I don't wanna hear it. It's fine. It works. The pads feel fine without the center indent, if anything I think it encourages LESS leg movement and a more ITG style of play. I do not like that style of play, but I accept it here. You can always move your legs more if you want. It's NOT difficult, just adapt! Yes I'm pulling that card! First time I ever played was in fursuit and I had no major problems with it. Yeah I missed a couple times, but it's a new thing. It's fine.

DDR from a pure technical level is a fucking joke, it is designed to still run on VERY old absolute potato hardware. I think the newest version may, I think, still be designed to target the hardware using an ATi HD 2400 GPU and similar spec/era CPU. Maybe, I think they finally deprecated that recently. The newer hardware either uses a sandy bridge era celeron + mobile radon 4000 series combo, or... well, the "ADE-6291". SMX runs on a damn android set top box, which isn't really much better, but they sure do a hell of a lot more with it. Did I mention the DDR software will still occasionally drop frames even on much more powerful hardware? Some of that may be driver oddities but, I think it's because the core software likely has not seen big updates since the early 2010s. The UI hasn't had a major overhaul since 2016.

To be fair I'm normally in camp "bad graphics are fine", and even the original DDR was nothing spectacular graphically, but I think in this context it shows a lack of interest or willing to invest anything past the bare minimum in development. They're going to keep shoving out whatever they've got as long as they can get away from it.

I also think the gimping the game without a network requirement that, on paper, requires a 30% cut of income, is fucking stupid. Just because it's normal and accepted doesn't make it not fucking stupid.

The aesthetic? I think it's alright, it takes a while to set in but I think they at least got something solid down that doesn't feel as... whatever ITG was. It's solid.

You want a nitpick? I wish there was a player option to set the pads to only light up the arrows when pressed and not that bright when they do. And put in lots of jungle music.

So, it's a better game. I won't be going out and buying one, because I've got a setup for playing DDR already, but SMX makes me actually want to go out and play.


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