Sept. 19th DDR A20PLUS Score Report
I forgot what it was like to play on stock pads today. Playing on unmodified pads at my local D&B for my first session there in about a month, I forgot how much extra effort I need to put in to accomplish the same physical tasks as I would at the DDR cab at the out-of-town Round 1.
I only played for about 90 minutes, and I wasn’t nearly as score-productive as I was on Sunday, but I got a good lesson in timing on A20PLUS and in putting in the effort to turn my body. Double-stepping is harder on stock pads: the foot has to lift higher above protruding screws and deeper into recessed pads to register a step. And although in isolation that sounds like complaining over a few extra millimeters of foot travel, over the long run, it adds up to significantly higher energy expenditure and a lower maximum footspeed at which you can maintain good timing.
Coping with this wasn’t trivial. I had moments where I was tilting and getting frustrated with myself. I wasn’t happy about it. Nevertheless, I persisted, and after an emotionally turbulent middle of the session, I came around and ended the session on a high note… with a bit of knee discomfort as a cue to let it rest.
Level-14 PFC #69 (nice): Love Shine Wonderful Mix CSP
I swear it’s a coincidence I got a song called “Love Shine” as my 69th PFC :^)
3.0x. In A20PLUS, there’s no DT adjustment, but I was able to grab on to the window since the song is synced close to on-time.
I think it was a help that I knew the song prior and got some day-of chart study with it, in addition to having prior practiced the chart’s lowers and coming away with a PFC on the Single Expert 11 in a previous session. The CSP 14 is a mixed bag of patterns, but the rhythms are manageable and the footspeed requirement is moderate. Its 14.35 rating on the 3icecream tierlist makes sense to me.
Flags Abound…
Besides this one new PFC, I came close on several others. It was a little upsetting to flag so many different charts, but I should cut myself some slack on the grounds that the pad mechanics, not to mention the sound environment, were radically different to what I had on Sunday as earlier noted. Scoring is tougher at D&B - the cab volume is lower, background music is playing, and occasionally, small children will yell while using the roller coaster sim next to the machine. It’s hard to focus. Other high scores can be found in the score export at the bottom.
Level-13 SDP PFC #1: Space Helmet ESP
SDP’ing a 13 has been on my bucket list for a while. I wrote it down as something I wanted to accomplish after SDP’ing a 12 back in 2022, but it never really clicked until now that I would finally get it.
I found myself, in the last sets of the session, fatigued from overexertion and tilted that the left side was not behaving as I expected, so I switched over to the right side to get some lower-level scores in. Coming off a 10p/1g run on Stoic (EXTREME version) ESP 13, I felt confident I could SDP my first 13 tonight, and so I gave Space Helmet (the “usual suspect” when developing level-13 score ceilings), double-stepped my way through most of the crossovers for MA consistency, and sweated a moment when at the end, I saw that my pacemaker was +140 but I’d forgotten what my prior PB was (999,770, a 23-Perfect PFC; getting a Perfect subtracts 10 points from the maximum score of 1,000,000), and so I popped off when I read the score display of “999,910”, and I felt I had redeemed myself for the session.
3icecream Export
And that’s it, really, for today’s session. It’s not as jaw-dropping as last time, but I’m in better position for more level-14 PFC’s later this week. Until next time o/