Open a browser and play. Dance pad, keyboard, or your thumbs. Nothing to install, no store, no waiting.
Screen recordings, nothing staged: sixteen versions in the carousel, a chart picked out of the grid, and the run itself — with the pause menu you use to jump back ten seconds instead of replaying the whole song.
Not a cut-down mobile version — it is the identical page, laid out for a thumb. The recording shows both touch layouts, the speed and offset controls, and the library the desktop is reading.
No sound on either clip — the music belongs to the songs, not to me.
One codebase, three ways to step. Navigation follows the arcade cabinet: blue moves, yellow confirms, red goes back — on the pad, the gamepad, the keyboard and touch.
The Gamepad API is polled once per frame, never by event — event latency is unpredictable, and in a rhythm game that is fatal. Remappable: DualSense, Xbox, and $30 generics.
Five keys in the pad's own geometry. Auto-calibration measures your device's latency against a metronome — measured, not guessed.
Vertical lane, swipe to browse, tap the centre item to pick. Installs as an app, runs full screen, and keeps songs on the device to play without a network.
From the 1999 cabinet to PHOENIX. Point it at your simfile collection and the whole history is one carousel — then drop your own songs in beside it.
Drop in an MP3 and a video link and the chart is generated by measurement, not by feel — the generator chases the statistics of 8,352 official charts, so a level 7 it writes moves like a level 7.
Touch gets its own choice, because a thumb is not a foot. They even run in opposite directions — and that isn't a style pick, it's physics.
Notes fall toward you, down a lane in perspective, and land on a line near your thumbs. If you've played Beatstar, your hands already know this one — you can start without learning anything.
Zones sit exactly where the panels sit on the floor, so the muscle memory carries over to a real pad. Here the notes rise — with the pad under your hand, a falling note would arrive right where your thumb is and vanish behind it at the one instant that decides the hit.
The brightness threshold drops as your combo climbs: at first only the note glows, by the end the whole lane emits. Miss, and it resets — the screen calms down with you.
Reading gets easy again exactly when you need it back. Four intensity levels, from none to full. Keep scrolling — this one is running off your scroll.
Every other game makes you replay three minutes to reach the eight bars you keep failing. Here you move inside the song — back or forward, as many times as you want, without ever leaving it. No restart, no menu, no waiting for the intro.
The run turns into practice and stops counting for a record, so drilling never pollutes your scores. Lockable in settings: with a queue behind you, turn it off, or one person owns the machine all afternoon.
Every jump becomes a single step. For anyone who can't jump — knees, back, recovering from something — and for anyone who simply can't shake the ceiling of the flat below at eleven at night.
It isn't a difficulty cut: the chart keeps its rhythm and its reading. Among simultaneous notes it keeps the hold, or failing that the one that asks for the least travel — keeping the first in the list would leave you bouncing corner to corner, worse than the original.
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