The recent console release of the 15th edition of the Beatmania IIDX series, DJ Troopers, has brought an onslaught of suprises on all ends on the “is this good or not” scale. On the sad side of things, the removal of the DJ Yoshitaka remix of I’m In Love Again (which some people, thought wasn’t that good anyway) left players wondering why this happened and why the song was being purged from IIDX history so quickly. Of course, conspiracy theories include possible rights issues with vocals and Konami realizing how low-quality it was. But if you wanna at least experience the song – from the one person who thinks he’s the only one who actually likes it – its on the DJ Taka album you know!

Anyway, the month of December has brought new challenges for IIDX players, the evil boss song of Empress entitled “Himiko” is no cakewalk (which has left English language fans spamming YouTube postings of the song with Blue Velvet quotes – substituting Heineken with Himiko, but not substituting “Pabst Blue Ribbon” with “Pass Blue Rain”. So many people thought this was going to be the hardest song in IIDX history after Mei with over 2200 notes. But, they were all wrong. Why you ask?

Konami had a nice big trick up their sleeve for DJ Troopers CS. The game includes new unlockable “alternate another charts” for some songs on the game – which makes almost every song gifted with one  a 12 (though there is a 10 and 11 on this difficulty). Another+, Black Another, Kuro, Spiral Anothers, Another2 – the fan-dubbed names don’t matter much – when how idiotic Mendes is on this new difficulty pretty much describes what you get on this.

Mendes was always the “boss” of DJ Troopers, the one more extra stage 12-block of the Military Splash extra stage system. The new chart, unlockable on the game, contains 2626 notes. I predict this will never be FC’d, ever. Though, we have evolved, there were several months between the first FC of Guitar Hero III’s Through the Fire and Flames and the recent FC of the DLC version of  The Devil Went Down to Georgia, then we know that anything is possible. But in the meantime, no.

Another head-scratcher, the unlock system has been considered to be one of the weirdest ones in history, with many players having issues figuring out how to trigger unlocks for elusive songs such as Pluto, The Last Striker, and the most infamous – the Ryu+Sampling Masters MEGA collab Vox Up - which has led to the most trouble. Triggers during gameplay cause these songs to show up in Military Splash #02 rather than one of the usual songs.

A person I interviewed on IRC declared it the 2nd worst unlock system ever, only 2nd to an infamous promotion involving the US version of DDR Extreme with Burger King,  which featured a code which unlocked Memories, a song already playable on the arcade version – occurring over two years since the release of the game.

Though of course, Konami’s US division has had a history of “screwing” with the North American audience, though we’ll leave that for another time.

In other news, please don’t get me started about Pluto’s another chart.