Patrick looked on as “Taka” was placed in the cop car. He watched as the car started to drive away into the distance. However, as the image faded to black, his attention was drawn back to his side of the screen and he looked at his Groove Gauge. It read “62%.” He had failed the song.
In the years that Patrick has played the DJ Simulation game series beatmania IIDX, he had never once attempted the song titled “GAMBOL” on the hardest difficulty, dubbed “Another.” He had heard all of the stories surrounding the song. GAMBOL had become notorious for having the worst timing in the history of beatmania IIDX. While the note chart looked like players of any skill level could pass it, the timing window for playing those notes was so short, players either got “Just Greats,” which meant the player played it perfectly, or “Bads,” which obviously meant the player screwed up, big-time. Even expert players, who could jackhammer the keys and scratch the turntable with the greatest of ease, have been utterly humiliated by GAMBOL’s deceptively easy-looking note chart.
Despite his failure, Patrick just laughed and shook his head as he entered his DJ Name for the high score. The stories were true. He was tired now. He had been playing for two hours and his ears were beginning to hurt from the rock-concert-level noise coming from all of the machines of the arcade. As he was walking to his car, Patrick began to think back to GAMBOL’s ambiguous music video, where some convict escapes interrogation and somehow gets caught by a man he shoots halfway through the video.
“What were those guys smoking when they came up with that?” he thought to himself.
As Patrick pulled out of the parking lot, he began to picture a rational story behind GAMBOL; a story about a ruthless convict named Taka and an upstanding police inspector named Slake…
THE END |