by the way: i had to write this post twice, i got owned by the oldest and most classic of blog blunders :<

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u47DAksxaa8

Wachenröder (1998)

One of the few games stylized by Range Murata

one of the good reasons to get a saturn, if guardian heroes and radiant silvergun weren't enough

watch dennou coil

Tamayura is both a fond memory of a forum i used to post in around 14 years ago, where "serious and boring like Tamayura" was an inside joke we'd tell each other

It's also a great bemani song

>open amiami front page
>see tons of really cute, nice figures
>huh, i wonder what that's from
>check
>it's from some gachashit
>get annoyed
>repeat 5000 times every day i open the front page

i'm so sick of gachafags and gachashit, oh my god. And I used to think love live and kancolle were bad enough already.

Reminder you should get a sega saturn, and quite possibly a white one.

It's the best series of commercials ever made for a console and games and even has a bit of a bittersweet ending to it...

Still though, get a Saturn¹, you get to play a couple of the best games TREASURE ever made, some of the best arcade ports from the era, since the idea of "having an arcade system that's the same as our home console to make porting much easier" was pioneered by the ST-V (the Sega Titan Video, which was the Saturn arcade equivalent) before the Naomi/Dreamcast thing ever happened.
Even neo-geo ports are oddly REMARKABLY GOOD on saturn.
You get to play the originals of a lot of games that became more popular when they got remakes waaaaaaaaaaaay down the line like Soul Sackers, Baroque, and the Panzer Dragoon games.

I probably personally like it more than the ps1 at this point, like i do most sega consoles, and i love the ps1 also. But Guardian Heroes and Burning Rangers make up 60% of my body, and the rest is me wanting to play Wachenroder and D2 asap.

Anyways, grab one and go play Silhouette Mirage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc3AK8k90xw

¹considering that the Saturn core works on the MiSTER, if you just want to play the games as accurately as possible, both from this and other consoles, you'll probably save money in the long run just by using an FPGA to emulate. If you care about accuracy, that is, which you absolutely should. Yes, you should get a CRT also. I don't care if it's heavy, just buy one.

So, it is the last sunday of the year.

The only reason i'm excited for new year's eve is because 2024 will finally be fucking over, even though i'm not certain 2025 promises much difference. But that's not reason enough to not move forward with hope.
Well, i'm also excited for new year's because i get to sleep in the arcade (wondering why no arcadeposting pictures lately? oh, you'll see) with all the new stuff

i think we left a belgian beer inna fridge there since last year's eve. mmhm.

Anyways, that's not really the point. You just get the presumably last music post of the year. and i think i'm gonna close it with yet another Bemani album, since it has been much of the theme for my posts these past few months, and because it is a very, very good album.

Today you get Hiroshi Watanabe's Beat Indication
Yes, i had anticipated wanting to talk about him when i made that big ass post about nouvo nude and its short but interesting history. I finally get to do so, and before the end of the year, even!

Hiroshi Watanabe needs little introduction, especially if you're a 5key fan. He's more known by his aliases in those games: QUADRA, DJ FX, NITE SYSTEM. Other noteworthy aliases are DJ Mazinger, DJ ODDBALL and Crunky Boy.
This is his only real bemani album, but he does have other songs (very very very very very few) but it's one of the best albums from that era.
I do think that beatmania kind of peaked in a sort of way during its 5key era in the 90s, musically speaking, and while it did change with 7keys into something else more modern and in line with the early 2000s, it became much more musically different as time went on. I mean, we're at version 32 right now (thirty two), it's a series that's been going strong for more than 30 years at this point, it had to change several times. The fact each version is called a "Style" really makes sense in that regard..

But before styles, you had mixes. Same with beatmania III (5key and a rarely used pedal), it did not outlive bm2, and it was pretty much its own thing, very closely related to 5key.
The other bemani games, while they did share a lot of artists, kind of operate in their own separate enclaves for a lot of things.
And, like other artists, watanabe only worked for 4key and only on a few IIDX versions, last of which was for Resort Anthem (ver.18) after a 10 year disappearance (his prior one being 3rd style)! The one i discovered this game with, although the first i played was Lincle. i used to be in high school back in the day, preparing my final exams. First thing i did after beating those is spend a couple weeks in Rimini and just visit all the arcades by the coast, which at the time were hundreds. Nowadays, you're lucky to find a few.
This was 12 years ago. How time flies.

But i digress, as usual.
Anyways, this album has full versions of a lot of his 5key songs. It's a real good old-school techno, the REAL good stuff. You get to notice how different his music sounds like depending on the alias he releases it under.

It's one of my absolute favorites, and i'm not alone in this, i can assure you that.
I hope it becomes one of your favorites also. It's a very fun but very relazing, meditative album. LIFE GOES ON is my favorite of his from this album.

Of note is that the game versions are much different, and within those games, the Anothers are different also.
Oh, if you ever wondered why max difficulty in IIDX used to be called "ANOTHER" is because back in the day, Another charts were the same song but with a different arrangement or extra keysounds or mixing, hence, another version. Then as the game went on, the name just stuck. If you're familiar with DJMAX, it's exactly the same as RD (redesign) charts. same song, a bit different arrangement and difficulty. Basically, alternative versions. This is kinda still true with some songs being much different in-game than in album versions, but it's much more rare now, sadly.
So, this is just one more version of those songs. The album versions are arguably just another version, but these ones are really, really good.

He's still making music! And all his stuff is absolutely gorgeous, and many of it is still at the very least tangentially bemani-related, since he collabs with other artists, labels or projects tied to it in one form or another. Shmup arranges for the m2 ports, songs for the Diverse System albums, and even, a good while ago, a remix of Super Highway (the Nouvo Nude one!) that is one of the best downtempo songs i've ever heard, and well... you could just check his twitter and whatnot. That's for another day.

For a final bit of trivia, his dad (Takayoshi Watanabe) made music for bemani too! Pop'n music specifically: 3, mickey tunes, and pop'n stage, the dance pad version of pop'n music. He's worked with his son outside bemani too, which i find really heartwarming somehow.
Surprisingly enough, this isn't the only time this happened, since READY TO ROCKIT BLUES, by SLAKE was also composed by the titular artist and his father. Who knew!

I kind of didn't have a real post ready for this, so i just decided to infodump a bunch of cool stuff that was relevant to the album somehow and interesting for the readers. I'll probably talk about Hiroshi Watanabe again at some point.

For now, you get the album, and, well, maybe a freebie too.
Have a splendid rest of your Sunday.

And your freebie is: my personal rip of King of Super Highway! No scans because the POS scanner broke, maybe i'll give out an append pack with them down the line when i replace it.

It's the Nouvo Nude album with ONLY remixes, different versions, redesigns, and originals of Super Highway, one of the songs they composed for 5key. One of such remixes is, of course, super highway (HIROSHI WATANABE Remix).
It's a completely re-imagining of the track as a downtempo, ambient, soothing 8 minute experience. One of the best he ever made. It's different from but as good or potentially better as the original song depending on your tastes, and has enough new ideas that it gets quite difficult to hear the original song contained within. It's not even a remix. Unlike Ryu*'s remix, which is MEGA ASS and definitely the weakest track on the album.
Stylistically, it reminds me of Shu Okuyama's BLOCKS remix from V-RARE 14, but that's just a teaser for another day.