So, yeah. I'm liking ITG2 a lot..

Some great steps and really good songs make me happy. KeeL's new additions are all top notch. I've always had great respect for his material, and some of the new stuff is especially good. The freeze-rolls are a lot of fun, despite Robotix making my calf muscles want to rip themselves out of my skin.

Great steps in this version. Many of them are actually quite fun now and have more variety than the original's formula of "turn left and step, step, step." The difficulties are still a little inconsistent, but I can forgive that. We Know What To Do's Expert steps are just ungodly fun.

The UI is slightly improved; the fonts are much better -- a lot easier to read, and not fuzzy. The colors are also much nicer.

The new Marathon courses are ridiculously EVIL. Foy, you are an evil, evil man. The new Survival mode is an interesting take on the Oni-style of gameplay, and is deceptively difficult.

Yes, it's glitchy as hell, still. When Nekura and I were at Illusionz yesterday, we witnessed two crashes when memory cards were used. One was in the middle of a song - it core dumped and rebooted. The second was after the song and required unplugging the machine completely to get it to recover.

Another nifty little glitch was when Nekura and I had failed a Survival course, it tried to start the next song, and then instantly failed. It should have failed as soon as the previous song ended. These glitches (and others) were leading us to wonder if this was truly a final build or not.

At this point, until my opinion is swayed otherwise, I'm quite happy with ITG2 and am pretty excited to go back to the arcade to play it some more. It's just that damn fun.

Here's some more Flickr'ed screen shots for your viewing pleasure. The bluriness was from my phone's camera being smudged.