Asteroid (3rd Mix)

Music, steps and graphics by Shuriken (Cosmo Kastemaa)

E-mail
  infracyan@gmail.com

Website (not up yet, stay tuned)
  http://shuri.no-ip.org/

Older and pretty much dead website
  http://shurikenproject.no-ip.org/?c=music&p=a_shuriken


Asteroid is a 163 BPM trance-ish track with a solid 4/4 beat. It starts off in a
triplet rhythm, with the bass and drum rolls in the background. A pattern of
African sangban drums is introduced, and grows more prominent as the beat kicks
in. A synthetic, soft and flute-like instrument begins playing the main melody,
and a sharper synth sound is layered on top of it while the beat evolves and
the intensity of the music increases. The track then descends into a repetitive
sawtooth synth pattern, soon accompanied by a piano and a TB-303 synthesizer
sound. A pause follows, during which the instruments slowly fade out while
buzzing sound effects lead into the second part of the track. An intense 4/4
section, this time in normal 16ths rhythm, begins. A simple melody played by an
overdriven sine wave synth is introduced. As the melody is strengthened by a
filtered sawtooth synth, the bass drum speeds up from playing 4ths to 8ths, and
finally up to 16ths right before the end of the track.

I participated in Bemanistyle's OSC 5 (ITG division) with an earlier version of
Asteroid (the first mix of the track, with different steps) and ranked 16th of
27 - better than I had expected from my first simfile competition! :)

This version, however, is quite different; a few parts of the music have been
slightly modified, the song title in the banner and background graphics looks
different, and the steps are almost completely rewritten. The Beginner, Light
and Standard charts are 100% new, and the Heavy and Challenge charts are mostly
new, but are similar to the old steps in a few parts that I liked. I believe all
changes have been for the better and I'd like to thank all the judges and public
reviewers of OSC for their constructive and useful criticism and commentary.

No double steps included as I don't have a lot of experience with double, and
I prefer submitting no double steps than submitting awful ones.


Steps:

Novice - 3
Pretty basic steps, although not the easiest Novice steps out there since this
is a 3.

Easy - 4
Mostly 4th patterns, although some 8ths in between them appear at the end.

Medium - 8
Uses a noticeably larger amount of 12ths in order to go with the rhythm better,
and the end part has many 8th patterns and a few 16ths show up too. Also
features some crossovers and a few hands.

Hard - 10
More 12th stream and more crossovers. 16ths are more abundant in the end, and
a few mines appear here and there.

Expert - 12
The 12th patterns are more intensive and have even more crossovers at relatively
high speeds. There are some 24th bursts that require very fast stepping, tricky
hands, many quick step-jumps and a vast amount of mines too. The end consists of
16th streams and Pandemonium-like step-step-jumping.