So, as most of my friends know... (my xfire hours counter too) I play a fair amount of Stepmania. I recently tried the new release: Stepmania 4 Alpha, Supposedly an upgrade based on the 4.0 CVS betas. It offers the new(ish) Stepmania Online functions, along with all the peppy, shiny colors we've come to expect.... From a new children's game on the Wii. As far as gameplay goes, its pretty much the same thing. Menus are changed around a bit, and everything is in a different font. I wasnt able to find a window mode either... which kinda bugged me.

They've somewhat thrown out the old difficulty system, and grading; Instead, we've got Easy (green), Medium (Yellow), Hard (Red), and I believe Challenge (blue). Instead of AA's you'll recieve a grade of SS (super star)... and if you fail, the game menu still registers it as a "D" It seemed to throw out the old -Excellent Excellent- *etc Systems... Which made it much much easier to get Fantastic!'s. Toasty system still works though~

If you're upgrading from 3.9... Alpha is really a nice change; Options are various... but you'll have to get used to quite a few changes. There is a major leap from 3.9 to 4. I'm not quite sure if theyve made any changes as far as X-fire in-game stuff goes... scroll lock x still wont work, and i didnt even bother trying to manually sync it.

If you're considering switching your 4.0 CVS for Alpha... I'd suggest checking out some screenshots yourself. Most of the changes are Asthetics, but there are tiny tweeks to the game itself. I, personally wont be switching, until they come out with something less fluffy.

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A few added notes:
It seemed like Alpha threw out the ranking system on your previous scores. There was no "Machine record# 1" box flashing when i scored an SS

Difficulty settings must be adjusted inside the game itself. There is no longer a menu that allows you to set it prior to starting.

Loading menus seemed a little bit more lengthy....

In this wonderful edition of "Learn 2 B Less of a FGT" Im gonna give you a quick tutorial on BBC (Bulletin Board Coding)

Its wonderfully easy, and im going to teach you some of the most basic things, so you can impress your mom. :3

The basic format:

BBCode Parameters are marked by the use of "brackets" ( [ ) ( ] )
These brackets are commonplace, and mark the coding field.
In the brackets, you put words or shortcuts that alter fields of text between them.

Bracket fields are triggered when one is entered into an allowable space. Anything on Xfire that says "BBCode is allowed" is an Allowable Space. In order to do that you simply type ["your command here"]

The next thing you would have to do is add text. Say you wanted to make your font Green you would put ["Color command"] This is my text... it is supposed to be green

The final part to a command sequence is the "end Param" This is offeset by the use of a forward slash in front of the command line. Therefore, if you wanted to end the use of green color on your text you would type: ["color command"] This is my text... it is supposed to be green [/"color command"]

In BBCode an incomplete parameter field will result in its faiure. so be sure to close your Parameter.


Color:
In order to change the color of words inbetween a Parameter of BBCode all you have to do is add a command to your brackets! The command for color is Color=

Putting that together with brackets you get:
[color=]

however in order to use this form of coding you would have to put your choice of color (or a hexagonal color key) after the equals sign.

there are many colors to choose from:

Blue
Green
Red

The possibilities are endless if you use hex keys!

now for a close up on how color is created:
["color=blue] your text would go here [/color"]

You would simply remove the quotation marks (" at the beginning and end of the param...