beatmania US version

Well, i know that i'm enjoying this game for the whole controller+beatmania experience of it. last year i had managed to get my hands on beatmania 6th and core for psx and played it only a little bit... the whole absence of the official controller kinda turned me off from the experience, which i totally didn't realize until i got said controller in this bundle. playing on the official controller is about 5x more fun than playing on a psx controller for sure.

i'm a little disappointed that the 5key songs don't have 7key charts... i'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have been too hard to fix, not to mention that it would've stretched gameplay a bit further. It really just feels sad that 5key was used as a crutch to get people into 7key and left all of those songs to wither never to be seen again (except maybe for 10key). surely the absence of alternate 5key difficulties truncated its life...

but i am glad that beatmania is as difficult a game as it is, otherwise there would be a significantly less amount of time put in to get to the end of 7key mode if they hadn't included all of the anothers. not to mention the mods that alter gameplay significantly like mirror and random. which led to an interesting hypothesis: if a person was raised on beatmania playing mirror, at what level of experience would they be able to play adequately without it?
i've noticed that most of the runs cater to a certain direction and lead me to wonder if its more "natural" for the hand to run in a certain direction. or if the consistent run direction is to create difficulty by running in the alternate direction.

i think this installment is only worth its dollar value as a bundle, because without the special controller, it would surely lose half of its fun. (that is if a 7key controller is not yet owned)

Jam it back in, in the dark.