CataList/MikeBuchanan

These have all been passed, without any mods (this means you, speed mods and So Deep), except as noted (i.e. for bag).

Singles:

• Every 9-footer I have except Max. (period) (Standard) (see rant below). You can correctly conclude that I have no BMR. The following are 10 footers.
• bag (1.5x)
• Sakura
• The Disney Rave 10s, which really don't count.

Solo:

• Every heavy 9-footer I have that was not auto-genned (there are about 16 of them). The following are autogenned, 10 feet, or non-heavy.
• i feel. . .
• Bye Bye Baby Balloon
• Bre\-/k Down
• Broken My Heart
• Fantasy
• Justify My Love
• Kakumei
• Matsuri Japan
• Rain of Sorrow
• Romance no Kamisama
• Sweet Sweet Love Magic
• Tsugaru

Doubles:

• Stay
• Little Boy
• Jam Jam Reggae
• Bye Bye Baby Balloon
• Yozora No Muko
• Afronova

Rant:

600 beats per minute is dumb. On Max. (standard), I can get a 100 combo, keeping my health bar full for most of the song. Then it gets to 600 beats per minute, and I miss almost every note. By going into the section healthy and flailing blindly, I've made it as far as planting the last hold before dying, but can't quite beat it.

Now, so far this is just a whiny rant. It's about to get scientific. There are, obviously, two opposed factors here: how long you have to respond to a note, and how long it takes you to respond to a note. We'll deal with them in order.

My experiments show that it takes about 1.8 seconds for a note to get from the bottom of the screen to the top at 150 beats per minute. It follows that it takes about half a second for a note to get from the bottom to the top at 600 bpm. So you have half a second to respond.

That response is moving a leg to the correct panel. We'll assume that you have to move your foot about a foot, and can move it at an average speed of 15 mph. It takes about 0.05 seconds. Sounds fine, right? You have nine tenths of the time available to you dedicated to processing. Not so.

First, there's the time it takes to get the impulse from brain to leg. I can't get Google to decide on the order of magnitude of this (speeds quoted range from 4 m/s to 60 m/s); we'll say it goes at 10 m/s and thus takes a full 0.2 seconds. Half of your time is gone.

Now it's just a question of reaction time. It's easy enough to find online tests of this (or just play the gunslinger game in Kirby's Adventure). Mine's around 0.25 seconds when I'm on top of my game. So under ideal conditions, it takes me a half second from photon hitting eye to leg being where it should be.

So, under ideal conditions, reading from the very bottom of the screen, playing at 600 bpm is theoretically possible. Barely.

Why do I need Konami original songs? Not for this kind of crap.

You could always C300 it, y'know. (We won't think any less of you for it, really.) Or run it at a lower speed to memorize. -- AndrewFarmer

I would think less of myself if I had to resort to cheating. --MikeBuchanan

• I've been playing DDR for a hecka long time (and I could in fact pass Max when I was at my best, though I'm out of shape now). I'm going to point out a factor you've completely ignored. One is not playing whack-a-mole with one's legs. The music has a rhythm, the arrows have a pattern, and when you runit over and over these patterns become familiar to your brain. If one was playing whack-a-mole with no sense of muscle memory, the song becomes insane (much as Paranoia Rebirth is, due to its notorious lack of a pattern). But practice makes permanent. I'm not suggesting you MEMORIZE the songs. I'm suggesting when you play it over and over, your brain does it subconsciously. Or at least mine does. Additionally, legs move a HELL of a lot faster when you use your entire body to play. Shifting your weight appropriately is the key. Try Maniac Doubles for a while and you'll see what I mean. --DuctTapeGuy

• In my opinion, a player of enough innate skill should be able to sight-read any song. None should require practice, memorization, or specific muscle memory. Perhaps that's not what Konami intended, but it's what I think the game should be. ~~~~. (Woops, thought this was a different wiki for a second there.) --MikeBuchanan