Plaidophile

I feel like I've traveled through a time warp and seen the future of Beatmania, and my primitive monkey brain cannot comprehend it.

It is so much better than 6th Mix. It looks like everything's unlocked from the outset, it has very nice difficulty scaling, and a lot of music (on two discs, with the second disc containing many of the best songs from all previous mixes! although it's missing a bunch of ones that I already have in other forms anyway), so much that they have it classified into handy categories (including whether they're new to the mix, what level they are, name, and a few other things which are in Kanji so I can't understand them). It also has "rival mode" which appears to be related to the fact the arcade game has a PS2 memory card slot (which means it's of course useless in the US).

The music is definitely more on the dance and trance side of things, unlike previous mixes I've played which had a wider variety, but it's still a lot of fun. The second disc makes up for that, though, and also means I actually don't have to keep on collecting mixes.

Neill and Patrick tried playing it a bit but mostly they humored me while I played and they riffed on the music videos (which of course I wasn't looking at at all).

I'm very tempted to take this to Albuquerque on my upcoming vacation but I know better than that.

I think.