By and large the framerate didn’t BOTHER me, personally, but then, I don’t normally play at Oni difficulty, so I probably didn’t experience the worst of it. Considering the fact that the Bemani franchise has been running out of steam for a while, so I think they’re not investing much talent into the games anymore, frankly.

Agreed on all counts. Frankly, I still love the product PERSONALLY, but I can’t look at it and say “Wow, this is great” anymore because I have TEN of this same game, to different extents, and most of my rhythm game time is spent with Rock Band. I’d love for Konami to do something with the game to bring me running back, but at this point, I don’t think their heart is in it (or much else that doesn’t contain a Belmont or Solid Snake) anymore.

That doesn’t excuse promising a song on the package and not putting it on the disc, but the songs aren’t just 100% not delivered.

Also, I have to ask what your thoughts are on the framerate in this game. After four games in the Ultramix series and three more on the 360, you’d think the team would have resolved that by now.

But I have to concur it’s a “fan game.” The community has been going nuts over it, though, because it features a lot of independent talent and a few IIDX artists. In fact, DM Ashura is a huge fan of Bemani and was recently able to score a tune in Beatmania IIDX 16 EMPRESS in Japan – a pretty huge honor, really. The game is honestly pieced together very well, but its animations are way too distracting (I play on the hardest difficulties at a minimum of 2.5X speed, which is why the framerate further hinders me) and if you go to disable the animations, it puts up another general animation(?). I kind of feel Universe 3 received the most effort, but Konami just seemingly hasn’t realized music game fans no longer have to eat up whatever it throws out to the U.S. market. We have a number of choices among today’s consoles from many different companies and unless it evolves its games or moves on, we’ll just get average to above-par DDR games (or complete garbage like Beat’N Groovy and Rock Revolution) every year.