Cirque du Beast is a pack by Zaia, under the Serenade name.
It is the first in what would become the Cirque series, spawning a multitude of spinoff pack lines bearing the name.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia (as Serenade) |
| BPM | 144-240 |
| Songcount | 20 |
| Blocks | 8-17 (11-16 target) |
| Type | Mixed Stream |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | May 25, 2012 |
¶ Structure
Cirque du Beast was to be my first “true” pack, after the long period of incubation and growth that followed S21 Works. The songs featured were carefully selected so the pack could represent a sampler of artists and music types that were ITG meta at the time:
- 30MIN HARDER and Cyber Inductance by DJ Sharpnel were used, as longer form stamina was in vogue with the ongoing popularity of Archi's Disbalance 3
- Air War had a more video-gamey sound and fit a chart type that I myself needed (long burst 240 training)
- Aggressor was by S.S.H, another huge staple of the hard songs metagame, by way of the Tachyon series.
- Ascension to Heaven, Atmosphere, Belladonna, Cynthia and Protosphere were decently-paced songs with gentler sound design, starting my predilection for high speed music made with classical instruments
- At the Speed of Light, by Dimrain47, reflected the high popularity of songs like Infernoplex and other Newgrounds type songs by the artist. Including Hyperion Overdrive was an attempt to add a new potential artist to this genre
- Atmosphere represented something slower and longer but with a sound that wasn't distinctly trance. It also bore some pedigree, coming from the Mungyodance series (at the time)
- I'm Falling Away (8-Bit Mix) by m1dlet was included as a nod to the SPEEEDCOOOORE pack, which was also metagame content in early 2012 (Happy Feet was also stepping a lot of speedcore around this time, which boosted the genre's perceived presence)
- Isolation, by Nighthawk22, had decent popularity through Mad Matt's charts to the same song (Causality Violation) and to Corrosion (Subluminal)
- Joker was by Tatsh, the composer of popular Bemani song Xepher, and featured Hatsune Miku, the most famous Vocaloid
- Mr Pokeahole and Metea11 represented the growing presence of Guitar Hero customs in the ITG metagame that appeared with Tachyon Gamma and Tachyon Delta
- Nobody Said It Was Easy had a similar sound design to Vinyl
- Nous was a fairly standard jcore type song from a safe rhythm game-friendly music producer
- Superluminal was my breakout simfile, so it felt appropriate to feature this in the pack with lower difficulties to improve accessibility. Tranzport was a song with a similar simfile background (both from keyboard packs) and song structure
Simfiles featured a larger number of charts where I could manage them, and I attempted to fill out more of the lowers to improve accessibility.
The pack itself is comprised of a mixed set of charts- high stream, low stream, low speed, high speed and low-difficulty-no-tech type charts. The reason for this was to allow players to experience my simfiles across a broad spectrum of chart types and to see which ones were the most successful; a “spray and pray” type approach.]
The chart description field contains the stepartist name.
¶ Development
When I was planning it, Cirque du Beast was by far the most important pack for my stepartist career. It was the result of three years of training and grinding after the very poor feedback that S21Works received. Nothing Is Sound and Powerglove quietly released to virtually zero reception on r21freak and Dropbear Awareness Pack stayed within local circles only. If I wanted to feel success in this space, I needed to put more thorough planning into it.
I was now an active player and able to play the content I was writing, and this was a huge factor that determined the quality of the charts. I could now playtest them and find issues before release, which I took full advantage of. Since this was a pack first and foremost for my own development, the charts were designed around my playing level, which was level 14-16 and 175-200bpm. I sent betas out to a number of notable stamina players of the time and their score posts and videos helped considerably to boost the project's profile. Archi in particular was very proactive about this and recorded numerous videos.
Given the rapid changes that were taking place in my state of affairs, this felt like a prime opportunity to capitalize on the momentum and get something moving.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
The Cirque name is taken from the circus show “Cirque du Soleil”, which is French for “Circus of the Sun”. The philosophy of the pack is also derived from the show- Cirque du Soleil is a collection of dramatic, highly-choreographed performance art pieces that had a connecting thread that unified them to help share the key message of the show. I interpreted this as an apt metaphor through which to describe a simfile pack- if an individual simfile is an act, and the charts are the choreographed performances of each act, then the pack, the Cirque (the circus), is the unified collection of them, and the pack's theme could be the result of this collective effort.
The word “Cirque” itself was also an extremely important factor in its use. At the time, many popular pack franchises benefited from being part of a franchise- the Tachyon series, the SPEEEDCOOOORE series, the Disbalance series and the countless tech packs that were titled [stepartist]+[sims]+[iteration]. The franchise branding helped consolidate the packs themselves into one overarching theme, which would help to sharpen their community penetration. For example: If I said “Tachyon”, nearly everyone knew the Tachyon footspeed series. If I say “mute Sims”, that too conveys a lot of information in a short span of time. The reputation behind the name alone did the majority of the brand dissemination. It was therefore critical that I had to cultivate a similar branding of my own.
The second factor in “Cirque” was the literal spelling of the word. At the time (Q2 2012), there were four critical pack lines in the hard songs zeitgeist: Disbalance 3, Dragonforce, SPEEEDCOOOORE and Tachyon Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta. What stood out to me about them was that they were grouped around certain areas of the alphabet. Disbalance and Dragonforce around D, and Speedcore and Tachyon around S/T. I wanted to capitalize on these high-value alphabetical real-estate zones by placing my pack somewhere near them. This would reduce songwheel scrolling between folders and take advantage of songwheel proximity, especially on machines that had songwheel timers.
The third factor was the relative exoticness and unusual spelling of the word “Cirque”. It starts with a C, yet is pronounced with an “S” sound, it has a “Q” in the middle, and two silent letters at the end, ending with a vowel. It is quite literally an unusual word to read, and this was a crtical factor that needed to be taken into consideration. It also mattered that the word did not have any clear definitions that could be associated with it, which would allow my brand to use the word with a “clear slate" and no immediately associable meanings attached to it (unless you knew about Cirque du Soleil, which was a pretty famous show). I compared this to famous European car manufacturers, such as Ferrari and Lamborghini. Those brands also take after exotic-looking European words (names in this case), and because of that, the words themselves had no existing meaning that they had to detach themselves from. With this in mind, I could freely use the word and have total control over the meaning I wanted to assign to it.
If I was going to go with “Cirque”, then it would have to be “Cirque du Something”, since it was going to be a franchise. The “Something" could change with each pack. There was a series by Gazebo that followed a similar naming convention- Gazebo de Awesome/Brute/Cool/Dumpstream. I cannot recall if his pack's names had any influence on mine. The mental image I frequently had when working on this pack was that of a big circus tent of high level ITG players all playing hard stuff. Their sets would have been the “acts” of the show. “Beasting” was a verb of the time period that referred to one's performance on a song. If they feel they did well, they “beasted”, and if you were good, you were a “beast”. The mental image I therefore kept having was that of a circus of beasts playing hard charts… perhaps they could have been playing my charts?
The Circus of Beasts… Cirque du Beast… The place where all the elite players hung out and performed…
And that's how the Cirque name came to be locked in. It ticked all the boxes I considered important at the time.
¶ Graphics
I did unique graphics for each chart, as this was the pack I was putting a maximal effort in on, but I wasn't very experienced with this and with my tools, so there was only so much I could do between each simfile. I did the graphics similarly to how I'd done Powerglove, and again relied heavily on this PhotoShop brush set to add visual details to my backgrounds, but I think I used it too much. There was also some questionable composition of the song titles and artist names, and the use of color was also quite interesting. Some of the banners use colors the backgrounds don't, and I don't have much of an explanation for why they came out like that. I think it was a matter of trying to make them interesting, at the risk of making them boring and dull (the irony being that they would have come out better if I'd just done something simple instead of trying to experiment so much).
The pack fallback/banner uses a Neon Genesis Evangelion artwork that I'd loved for many years. I had it as my desktop wallpaper for a long time and wanted to use this image as a reference to that. The bottom of the fallback features my Serenade signature, as well as a small Megaman Battle Network 3 image of the Serenade Navi from the game.
30MIN HARDER's art features Gogeta, a fusion of Dragon Ball Z characters Goku and Vegeta through a ritual that is canonically only meant to last for 30 minutes before they de-fuse.
Atmosphere's art features Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Cyber Inductance's graphics feature the Dragon Ball Z character Imperfect Cell - it is meant to be a reference to how Androids 17 and 18 are “inducted” into his body when they are absorbed by him.
Defender's graphics reference Optimus Prime defending the Earth from the Decepticons. The banner displays runes similar to those that can be seen in the Michael Bay Transformers films.
Isolation's graphics are a Pokémon artwork, which feature a trainer engaging Giratina in battle. The graphics reference the solitude of the Pokémon games' player character when they go on their Pokémon journey alone.
"Nous" roughly means “intelligence” or “intellect”, and the art used for Nous is supposed to look like a network of brain neurons.
Superluminal's graphics are a screenshot taken from Stargate (1994) during the wormhole sequence. On that note, Tranzport literally displays the wormhole sequence as a foreground video midway through the song.
¶ Songlist
Cirque du Beast contains 20 songs.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30MIN Harder | Dj Sharpnel | 171 | Title and artist incorrectly styled |
| Aggressor | S.S.H. | 158 | Stolen graphics. Same graphics as used in Dropbear Awareness Pack |
| Ascension to Heaven | Xi | 240 | Artist incorrectly styled. Correct is “xi” |
| At the Speed of Light | Dimrain47 | 200 | |
| Atmosphere | Cosmo Nova | 162 | |
| Belladonna | Momo | 144 | |
| Cyber Induction | DJ Sharpnel | 200 | Incorrect title. Correct is “Cyber Inductance” |
| Cynthia | MaxXx65535 | 191 | |
| Defender | Mr Pokeahole | 187 | |
| Genesis | Metea11 | 160 | |
| Hyperion Overdrive | EliteFerrex | 180 | |
| I'm Falling Away (8 Bit Mix) | M1dlet | 170 | Artist incorrectly styled. Correct is “m1dlet” |
| Isolation | NightHawk22 | 240 | |
| Joker -Vocaloid version | Tatsh ft. Hatsune Miku | 172 | |
| Nobody Said It Was Easy | Evil Activities | 170 | |
| Nous. | T+Pazolite | 185 | Artist incorrectly styled. Correct is “t+pazolite" |
| Protosphere | CosmoVibe | 184 | |
| Superluminal | S2TB Recording | 180 | Title and artist incorrect: Correct title is “Super Luminal” and artist is “mch” |
| Tranzport | Arkitech | 176 | Contains a short foreground video midway through the song |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Reception to the pack was generally positive, if a little muted. Since the pack only appealed to the stamina demographic, which was still a minority in those days, and since I was still a relative newcomer to the community, it was understandable that outside of the people I'd been directly interacting with, they might not have known about or been interested in the pack. That said, I was off to an earnest, healthy start and wasn't anything to be shameful of.
@@: Hyperion Overdrive - EliteFerrex - 14 - 93.56
Archi: Cynthia- 99.77 (15-footer)
Archi: Protosphere- 99.54 (16-footer)
B1uEM4oM4o: Cirque du Beast - Tranzport - 96.07%
Bran: Crystal Castles - Air War (16) - 96.77
Freyja: Atmosphere (FA+) - 13, 39 FEC
Freyja: ITG - At The Speed of Light - 1st Stamina 14!!
Happy Feet-Nous 100% (14 Footer #29)
¶ Trivia
- The fallback banner for Cirque du Beast depicts Evangelion Unit-01 in its berserk state. Whenever this occurred, one of two songs would play. One was called “The Beast II” and the other was called “Normal Blood”.
- To save you a bit of time, they are both the same song. Normal Blood is a faster version of it (The Beast II FB!??!?!?)
- Although Cyber Inductance has the correct artist name in the chart metadata now, the graphics display “Sharpnelsoundz"
- The artist of Protosphere, CosmoVibe, is the producer alias of Stargroup, the stepartist of the infamous Death Piano chart on FFR
- A number of the songs featured in this pack have received modern resteps:
- 30MIN HARDER (Rebuild of Sharpnel, 2018)
- Aggressor (Saitama's Ultimate Weapon, 2021, Saitama's Starter Weapon, 2021)
- Ascension to Heaven (Cirque du Lykan, 2014, Theoretical xi Pack, by Levitas, TBA)
- Atmosphere (StaminaRPG 6, 2022)
- Cyber Inductance (Rebuild of Sharpnel, 2018)
- Nous. (content, by Levitas, TBA)
- Super Luminal (Tachyon Conent - The Next Quantization, TBA)
- Superluminal's background art is recycled for use 8 years later with Runengon (fof, Unreleased)
- Tranzport's bg inverts its colors after the Stargate wormhole sequence effect
- Genesis featured an experimental mechanic in which the Edit chart was recommended to be played on 0.9x rate
- The sequel was planned to be titled “Cirque du Brute” and was intended to release in November 2012, six months after Beast's release.
- The
Readme.txtfile writes “Cirque du Beast 1” - This concept was scrapped because I would have run out of suitable words very quickly
- Cirque du Veyron briefly held the name before I started exploring the car name concept
- The sequel essentially became Cirque du Lykan and the content was moved into that
- There is a .txt songlist of Brute and will add it here when I can find it
- The