There are good news and bad news:
Good news is, the game is actually a LOT harder than I thought. The difficulty of the song goes from a scale of 1 to 15 (currently the highest number), and after finally downloading all the songs in the song list (there are hours with less traffic when I can download at 200KB/s), I discover that I can’t even play most songs ranked difficulty 6. The main reason, of course, is that I’m terribly out of practice playing Beatmania and so I naturally suck, but then, it brings us to the…
Bad news, which is I’m running problems into hitting multiple keys at the same time in the first place. See, maybe you don’t realize it, but your keyboard is not meant to take in more than two simultaneous inputs. Back in the days when my brother and I share the same keyboard to play 2 player fighting games, we realized that when some keys are held down, others would not respond at all (thus I used to cheat by pounding on some keys and effectively freezing my brother’s inputs). There are some vital inputs that the game fail to accept… most of the 3 key combinations on the default control would have you miss one or two keys, and four key inputs are simply impossible. You can, of course, arrange the timing lightly so that some keystrokes come immediately after the other and still score perfect on all keys (since the grading is quite lenient), but in more difficult songs I’m just a little too preoccupied to remember which combination won’t register.
Some instances compounds the problem. O2Jam has hold keys that are similar to the ones in KeyboardMania, and when a key is held down you’re bound to miss some of the other keys. So long story short, this game will probably have to sell a special controller in order for it to work properly for the PC… and judging from the size of the company and all, it’s probably not gonna happen.
Oh well. It’s been a great distraction… but it’ll be staying as a mere distraction. Too bad, I was thinking about actually paying in the future too =_=