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| I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread. :( by Jhoh Clbbl O_____O 11/18/2007, 9:56am PST | ||||
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| I've been playing the final level of Elite Beat Agents on hard for about two days now and I've gotten really close to the end (maybe the final number group), but that was just one time. I figure if I play it enough, at some point I have to beat it. It could be some time in the future, I don't know yet.
The first day was just learning the patterns. All the numbers come at you and you have to tap them, usually in time to the song (but with this super hard difficulty, which is actually more like a step ABOVE hard, sometimes they just add a ton more numbers to hit than the song's tune would provide). It's not random, so the numbers and bunches of numbers that you got to tap always show up in the same place at the same time, so at this difficulty level it's just a matter of learning and memorizing the location and timing of these numbers. However, at the end, the difficulty ramps itself up to change the rules beyond the previous levels on hard, and the success meter will start falling so fast that you have to do perfectly just to tread water. If you miss a couple, you can retain and do perfectly with the success meter hovering right near the bottom and then just suddenly fail in between the time it takes for numbers to even show up because you fucked up earlier. At the very very beginning, I'd see the giant lines of numbers they'd be expecting me to hit, and after having done this on normal difficulty, I'd be like LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING TO ME, LOOK WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO THIS SONG as if they had kicked a giant hole in the song laughing in my fat fuckin FACE by having extra numbers in the level. On the second day I played it for a couple straight hours of listening to their house cover of "Jumpin Jack Flash" over and over and over for hours. After the first hour or so, I eventually started zoning out and basically sleepwalked through the first verse (the verse in this game's case being one of the parts of the song that they separate with a cutscene) with a perfect score. When you do this you get a score multiplier of x123, I know this because I ended up doing this several times. I was able to start doing this regularly, even with the unbelievably complicated and bizarre layouts that they throw at you in this level. I started getting to the end where they throw about 20 numbers on the screen in seemingly sensible patterns but near the end they exchange a couple of numbers that you have to hit in what looks more to be "the wrong order," and you have to hit all of these numbers beginning to end in about 4 seconds. I failed in every way that is possible to fail (and even some ways that are essentially impossible O_O). I made sure to do the "review" after failing where it does an instant replay of your last 10 seconds to show what you did and you can try to observe what you could do correctly, which sort of helped. Eventually I was failing even on the first verse or fucking up in places that I had done perfectly a hundred times before. Once or twice I lost right at the beginning. Sometimes I fucked up in the middle of the first or second verse and was almost dead, but maintained my shitty success meter by doing perfectly for the rest of the verse, only to lose in the second or third verse by missing one fucking number. I would notice the flurry of numbers right before the end of the second verse could save any shitty success meter, no matter how low it was and how your agents would be all tired and be like I'M NOT DANCING ANYMORE, WE'RE FINISHED, then I'd finish that flurry to end part 2 and they'd all pop up again with renewed life out of nowhere and I'd put the meter into the YES and get the happy cutscene. I started questioning if 7 really does come before 8.......... or do we only perceive it in that way? The game doesn't let you take time to contemplate this, and if you try to hit the 8 before the 7 it will correct you by putting a giant X and a buzzer and destroying your score multiplier and fucking up the success meter and throwing all of the agents to the ground as they go UGH, as if they game were actually trying to throw up on you because you're such a fuckin piece a traysh. I started to question the very nature of a touch screen. Am I really touching the screen or is my stylus coinciding with the numbers on cue? Eventually my DS holding arm started to feel disconnected from my body and felt like a fuckin desk lamp arm, just hanging there to suspend a DS in the air in front of my face, with my left hand flapping all over slapping numbers. I realized that you should try not to hit the numbers too hard or your stylus might slide off the screen. Sometimes I would occasionally glance up real quick to see the babysitter from mission 1 dancing with the taxi guy, and I'd think maybe if I win this she'll be impressed and go out with me, she sure has some nice TITAYS HELL YEAH DAWG. After a few hours, I realized that the red afro dude after the second verse cutscene isn't sticking his tongue out as he says HEY LET'S DANCE BABE, I was just seeing the side of the inside of his mouth which they had colored red. It's not his tongue. At this point, the revelation of this was Anyway, I guess I'm going to keep working at it. :( |
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