Nicky Boom Boom's Nerdcore Astrotypes
Dance Dance Revolution: Exploring the Mutable Signs through
Irritating Euro-Pop
Fallen Saturn has rhythm?
It was1997, and Uranus had just been joined by Jupiter in Aquarius. With Uranus in its dignity, conjunct to the bounty of innovative wisdom inherent in Jupiter, it seemed to be time for an exciting technological marvel to be unveiled. However, the Aquarian conjunction was co-ruled by Saturn, which was Fallen in Aries. Combined with the new arrival of Pluto in Sagittarius, which kicked a can of lighter fluid into Saturn's fiery Fall, we had a recipe for a really loud, gaudy technological advancement.
Thus, Bemani took the video game industry by storm.
Bemani is a branch of Konami which was responsible for the huge influx of rhythm games that flooded arcades and game centers worldwide at this time. Their first success was a title called Beatmania, which put players into the role of a virtual DJ.
In Beatmania, you're given five keys and a turntable. Notes scroll from the top of the screen to the bottom, at the tempo of whichever song you've selected. When the notes - in this case, denoted by records - reach a designated area at the bottom of the screen, you tap the corresponding keys in the proper sequence, thereby playing the song. If you miss too many notes, your life bar depletes, and you die. Just like a real DJ!
Now, if you've ever seen one of these games in the arcade, you know the result of this Arien-Sag fire squeezed through Aquarius design. Other arcade games keep their volume to a dull roar, loud enough for players to enjoy the experience without disturbing the rest of the scene. Not so with Bemani games. They command your attention, with Eurobeat and J-Pop tunes blasting at a deafening level. Neon lights and shiny bric-a-brac flash as cartoon wombats try to kill in the background. If you start to lose too much health, the AI gently encourages you to try your best by way of flashing red skulls screaming "DANGER!!! DANGER!!!" as the smarmy Engrish-speaking announcer taunts you with cries of "You're sweatin', huh?!"
For those who don't know, Saturn in Aries is a position ripe for dictatorial designs - Saddam Hussein had this in his natal chart, f'r instance. Saturn denotes position in the world, the structure of society you've been placed in and must navigate through. But Aries doesn't want to bother with that shit - Aries believes that society should conform to his childish whims, regardless of how these rules effect others.
Now, these are games where you are supposed to be making music. When you think of making music, free-form artistic expression springs to mind. But in this setting, you CANNOT diverge from the musical pattern in question, or else you fucking die.
In addition, the structure of these games is such that it allows for a challenger to try and take you down - you battle for dominance through musical aptitude, in the coliseum that is the arcade. How Saturn in Aries is that?
Dance Dance Revolution and The Mutable Cross
The template set by Beatmania may be characterized by Fallen Saturn, but the experience of playing rhythm games shares more with the Mutable signs of the zodiac. This applies to just about all the rhythm games I've played: Beatmania IIDX, Guitar Freaks, Guitar Hero, Drummania, Pop n' Music, Pump It Up, In the Groove, Ouendan, Gitaroo Man, Dance Freaks, you name it. I'll be focusing on my favorite of the lot, Dance Dance Revolution.
Dance Dance Revolution (which I shall heretofore refer to as DDR,) follows the same basic format as Beatmania - there are four note positions, represented by arrows which face up, down, left, and right, and scroll from the bottom of the screen to the top. However, instead of keys at your hands, they're at your feet, forcing you to step, jump, and dance to the music.
This represented a bastion of hope to rotund gamers like myself, who used the game as a vehicle to sort-of kind-of almost physical fitness.
"You mean I can lose weight...and I don't have to stop playing video games?!"
And hell, it works. If you can hang with a high enough skill level in the game, it becomes a challenging cardio set, although the songs only usually last for about two minutes. These short-but-intense bursts of exertion are characteristic of the energy shared between the Gemini-Sagittarius opposition.
"When I shut my eyes, I only see arrows."
Gemini is all about fast interchange of ideas into action. It is also about versatility, variety, and adaptability through cleverness. DDR has all of these qualities.
As far as speed goes, the music is usually pretty fast-paced, and the durations of playtime are brief. The song selection runs the gamut from ska to J-Pop to Eurobeat to techno remixes of classical scores; there is a wealth of variety. Though there are only four keys used to play the game, the varying arrangements and tempo changes one is expected to follow definitely call for a degree of adaptability, and fast interchange of idea into action via twin feet. Gemini in action.
Dancing? In my DDR? It's more likely than you think...
Likewise, the game has ample Sagittarian qualities. Sagittarius, Gemini's opposite, is not concerned with speed or adaptability, but with mastery of one thing through the forces of vision and enthusiasm. Because of this earnest enthusiasm, Sag tends to be loud, colorful, and fantastical.
While I've not known anyone to experience seizures from a bout of DDR, I wouldn't write off the possibility - like most avatars of Japanese culture, DDR is stuffed to the brim with loud, flashing, Sagittarian madness. Regardless of the speed or genre of music, it all tends to be poppy and outlandish - larger than life and, often, charmingly obnoxious. While your eyes and ears are bursting from overstimulation, you're trying hard to just keep doing this ONE thing over and over again. Also falling into Sag's realm, fans of the game often become obsessive converts, rallying away at songs until they have them fully memorized. I've seen people who know a song so well that they can play it facing backwards, or with the arrows completely turned off.
Accordingly, there are two different ways to play (outside of "ineptly.") The first is the aforementioned Sagittarian path - ardent dedication to the path of DDR to the point where you have to modify the highest levels of play so that they'll be somewhat of a challenge. These players usually only know a small set of show-off songs, but they know those songs through-and-through. If asked why they don't try a song outside of their skillset, they'll refuse to play it because, to them, it sucks and is unworthy of effort. Sagittarius likes what it likes, and it doesn't like anything else.
The problem with the Sag player is this: when you play DDR correctly, it doesn't look anything like dancing. It's a kind of spastic thrashing of the legs that doesn't quite look artistic, even in its most elegant refinement. In fact, many Sag players won't even try to dance; they often rest their hands on the rear restraining bar so they can flail their feet in the most efficient way possible.
In contrast, there's the Gemini player, who has a good enough base knowledge to play most of the songs in the game, and who likes to switch it up. These are the players - the few, the proud - who can reconcile the worlds of dance and DDR. These are the guys who can actually dance on the pads and make it look good - the naturals, who never felt the need to put a ton of effort into this. After all, Gemini is the master of games, and DDR is just another game.
The Gemini players are doing it right because they draw the bigger crowds of non-players, impressed with flashy moves - they really make the game look fun and natural. But the Sag players are the ones who garner crowds of fellow players, hanging on their every step to see if they can really get another perfect score on MAX 300.
Perfect Timing, Transcended
On another level, the Virgo-Pisces axis is extremely important to the DDR player.
Virgo is a sign steeped in perfectionist, OCD tendencies. When dealing with this framework handed down from Saturn in Aries, (and when dealing in any musical framework, really) timing is very important. It takes people a while to get the hang of how much Virgo they need to throw into this game - of just how much timing is involved in stepping at the correct time, at the correct place, in the correct way to set up for the next sequence of steps.
However, once you get the hang of this process, you really start to tune out. You can just go on autopilot, daydream, space out, and have accidentally a completed an entire song while your brain was out to lunch.
Oftentimes, players discover this ability under extreme duress. You'll be desperately trying to pass a song that you've failed three times already that day. Here comes that really hard sequence of arrows, the one you can never quite pick apart - you have no hope of consciously discerning all those steps, of commanding your feet to hit everything in that precise order. And in that moment where you unfocus and prepare for the worst, that's when you go into a trance state, where your feet seem to act of their own accord, where you finally blow through that super-difficult section of the song.
It's also worth noting that Pisces rules the feet. Since Pisces rules our interface with the game, it would seem logical that a high-level skill in the game would be of a Piscean nature. Yes? Yes.
Next time you sidle up to a DDR pad, take a look down. There are four arrows, respectively pointing North, East, South, and West. They're letting you know that you're about to be pulled in four different directions, and that if you want to win, it's going to take a lot of compromises with your normal way of doing things.
Welcome to your Mutable Grand Cross - that'll be four tokens.
And now...!
Thank you for that, Japan. Thank you.
Copyright 2007, Nerdcore Astrotypes
No comments:
Post a Comment