I've spent many years on the periphery of the Bemani scene and I'm a little surprised to hear people down on Chris about the cab thing. The non-Asian Bemani scene spent the whole of the 2010s cracking arcade releases and playing them on their PC and if you've been around long enough you might remember that DDR Extreme basically only existed as bootlegs outside of Japan. Chris's complaints of Konami's neglect are true. Even once modern games started showing up in Round1, players in the US were locked out of various features and as far as I know the US is still the only region that hasn't gotten DDR A3.
I mean, it made sense at the time given official AC versions in America were non-existent between X2 and 2014, and anything after DDR X3/IIDX Lincle required online connectivity to even boot up. Technically, you could probably call the DDR gold cab, Sound Voltex, and beatmania IIDX machines (not counting the special models) at Round1 "bootlegs" in a sense because they aren't supposed to be played outside of Japan (the warning screens still say for use in Japan only); Round1 probably found some loophole to get them legally imported as a Japan-based company, at the cost of being locked out of various features meant for Japan (e.g. PASELI, premium mode stuff)
I get why the Japanese scene is skeptical of it, but I don't know why anyone else would care. I'm not entirely clear if his cab is allowing him to play without paying - it sounds like he's VPNing to a legit network so he's probably paying for his credits somehow, instead of using a cracked version of the game. If that's the case the "illegal" issue of this seems petty and I'm more sympathetic to the locals who will never top the regional scoreboards.
It is a legal version VPNed to an arcade in Indonesia, and someone else besides him owns the cab to begin with.
The things that bothers me is that he lied about it being legit for a long time (going so far to fake arcade ambient noise to hide the fact), and that he is very privileged to live close to a Round1 and other people's personal cabs where this isn't really a problem for him anyway, yet he's whining about "muh access for everyone" while screwing the Indonesian players and telling other people who call him out to shut up.
The "woe is me, the closest machine is too far away for me, konami doesn't care about us uwu" excuse can be applied to any other niche game with niche popularity, or hell even if you live in the countryside in Japan. And like these same people that are like "lol play ITG/SMX" when those are even more harder to find unless you know the right people or are lucky to live near a place that has one? Yet I don't go wow I guess the people who make SMX don't care about players in XYZ area because there's no machines nearby.
I don't agree with Konami's policy of no private cabs, but it's their rules, and he fucked around and got caught.
Hahahahahaha, what a spoiled motherfucker. Oh no, you can't play a few songs!!!!! I have never heard such a tragedy before in my whole life, surely the end of the world is here. It's too bad StepMania literally doesn't exist because it doesn't let you splatter your faggot records across arcade machines worldwide.
The thing is, he was posting other non-DDR stuff during this time on Twitter, and I'm sure he's active on a lot of other related Discords, how he could have not seen the fact that this event was going on for like the past two months? If he really couldn't have access to Round1 or couldn't bother to grind Dance Around/Dance Rush/gold cab, he could've just paid someone to unlock it for him via e-amusement card code swapping or temporarily borrowing his card physically. (Quite a few people did that during the events during the pandemic when all the arcades were shut down in America.) Frankly, he'd probably MFC them all in like a day anyway, so he's just pouting that he can't get his perfect WRs
now.
The dedicated controller pre-order exclusive DLC is totally stupid I agree, but that's not specifically a US problem, that's a "everyone outside of Japan" problem. Also it's implied it'll be released for everyone at a later date anyway, so suck it up like the rest of us. You know how balls slow Konami is when it comes to releasing exclusive content to everyone else.
Unless there's some licensing bullshit that Konami is not disclosing there is no reason why white cabs can't be updated to A3. They are just pc's running Windows XP, I think with just a hard drive swap or update it could be done.
It's Windows 7.
I get the feeling it's some new normie popular song licenses that they want to release in sync with the US version release that are being stuck in contract limbo, or the songs they want keep falling through.
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