I wasn't going to say anything, but it keeps getting brought up and I don't feel any better about it after yesterday, so.
As a long time rhythm game player, everything about the StepMania Showcase feels like a slap in the face.
Rhythm games have an incredibly long and rich history in Japan. The most storied franchises had their start in the 1990s and
are still going today. It's an incredible genre with huge diversity, with not only Konami (who
still develop rhythm games despite having abandoned seemingly everything else) holding the torch but Sega, Taito, Capcom, Bandai Namco, Andamiro, and many others consistently contributing new titles every year. There is no shortage of truly innovative products that could have been featured.
After all this, after the entire genre and its player base has fought long and hard to reach some sort of recognition outside of Japan, what did we get? A fan-produced simulator of DDR that no doubt is popular simply because you can download it and any content any random person created for free.
Fan-made offshoots like StepMania would never have even existed if not for the pioneers of the genre creating the gameplay design it shamelessly rips off in the first place. And now everyone who watched AGDQ thinks rhythm games are little more than robots performing 1500 APM input spams of little variety or imagination rather than fully fleshed out, approachable,
accessible experiences.
It's as if they decided to have a fighting game showcase and instead of Street Fighter, they decided to showcase Mugen.
If you watched the StepMania Showcase and thought it interesting but not for you, please,
please consider giving the many rhythm games on the market a try for yourself. The PS Vita (and by extension, the PS TV) has an incredible wealth of music titles, with
Superbeat: XONiC and
Persona 4 Dancing All Night having hit just within the four months alone to join classics like
DJMAX Technika Tune. Sega has been busy too, having released
Project DIVA on PS3/Vita and
Project Mirai on 3DS as a result of fan demand. Square Enix has also published the lauded
Theatrhythm series, based on Final Fantasy music and soon to expand to cover music from other series, on 3DS as well. And this isn't just a recent trend; going backwards, you can find rhythm hits on any platform, from Gitaroo Man to Elite Beat Agents.
If you're lucky enough to live near a
Round1 (with locations in California, Texas, Illinois, Washington State, and Massachusetts) you can also play an amazing variety of imported Japanese arcades such as beatmania IIDX (still considered by many to be the pinnacle of the rhythm game genre), pop'n music, Sound Voltex, Guitar Freaks and DrumMania, Groove Coaster, CROSSxBEATS, Taiko no Tatsujin, and tons more. And the coming months,
Dave & Buster's will bring back Dance Dance Revolution, which has continued to iterate and refine its formula despite the previous North American distributor's complete mishandling of the franchise.
There are a huge amount of rhythm games out there. If you were intrigued and think you might enjoy them but were put off by the difficulty of things shown off at AGDQ, please know that the genre doesn't just cater to that sort of gameplay. Please give the games a shot for yourself; I love the genre, and the last thing I want is for people to think it totally inaccessible if you haven't been playing them for years already.