Dropbear Awareness Pack is a mixed stream/speed/casual simfile pack intended to be an Australian community simfile pack made by active members of the Australian ITG community.
It was primarily organized through the Revolution-Street forums (a popular Sydney-based forum for Australian DDR and ITG enthusiasts that was the de-facto national community hub, that is now defunct and was not properly archived)
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | B1uEM4oM4o, Darqs, GenoMaxX, Greentea, Jayce, JEDI, TJB, Xythar, Zaia (as Serenade Snow) |
| BPM | 49-240 |
| Songcount | 31 |
| Blocks | 1-16 (9-14 target) |
| Type | Mixed |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | November 04, 2011 |
¶ Structure
Dropbear Awareness Pack is structured like a typical ITG customs pack. However, the chart structure is inconsistent- some songs contain full Novice-Expert difficulties, whilst some only contain Expert. The pack has a mixed genre of music types, given its multi-author contributions.
It was my job as the pack director to try to keep the pack focused in direction and scope, but as I was inexperienced, a lot of the pack's technical shortcomings went unaddressed and, in retrospect, I ended up micromanaging more of the pack than I should have.
The description fields of the charts contain the respective stepartists' names.
¶ Development
The pack's development was managed exclusively on the Revolution-Street forums during the latter half of 2011. Our community, though relatively small, was tight-knit and we made efforts to travel interstate to meet up and hang out. We had a fair number of players, but didn't really have a pack that we could call ours, so I proposed a project to help make that happen, since I knew we had a number of stepartists of varying degrees of prestige (most notably Jayce, who was a notable figure in the international community with his Gay4Gimmix series and low-tech projects doing well).
It was an open-invite pack, but Jayce I specifically reached out to, since he rarely posted on Rev-St and wouldn't have known about the project, and he graciously submitted one simfile. I carried most of the pack, since even during this time, I was a prolific stepartist and stepped a lot of songs. I also added difficulties to single charts to help fill the pack out more.
I can't recall too much else about the production otherwise, especially as the records of its development are now all gone. I recall wanting the pack to have good music/chart/difficulty variety to appeal to a broad range of players, but ended up predominantly being stream-focused.
It was never intended to be internationally released, and was only distributed on Rev-St itself.
I was able to find an archived page of the pack subforum about 9 months before the pack came out; my best assumption is that the pack was actually in development for over a year, because nearly all of the songnames listed here didn't make it into the final pack:
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
A “Dropbear” is a fictitious sub-species of Koala that is carnivorous (real Koalas are herbivores) and is said to drop out of tree branches onto unsuspecting humans and attack them. It is a fairly well-known mythological creature in Australian folklore and has been referenced a number of times in popular media.
The general pack structure was inspired by contemporary variety-style custom simfile packs of the time, which had no strict pack type or format, and which were often a stepartist's previously-released singles collated into a single folder for easy distribution.
¶ Graphics
The pack has two banners; the pack banner and an individual simfiles fallback banner. I designed the pack banner, and JEDI designed the simfiles banner
There are a number of “stolen” graphics in this pack, which belonged to simfiles in other packs that I simply took for my own charts. These included: Aggressor (I believe it was taken from Cloud's version of the chart), Be Princess (Fabulously Fresh Flock of Fantastic Files F5), Cross Time (Dark Chancellors Pack), Gigadelic (Reach Originals), Hypnosis (I couldn't find a source for this one, but the stepartist name seems to be somebody by the alias “Invader 300”. Original chart the image is from is dated around August 2004) and Monolith -Renaissance Mix- (I sourced the simfile from the Groovestats Customs page and that chart is credited to a “DJ Ridder”).
¶ Songlist
Dropbear Awareness Pack contains 31 songs.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Stepartist | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation | Trivium | 117-145 | Serenade Snow | the .txt states it has stolen graphics but the simfile only uses a fallback |
| Aggressor | S.S.H. | 158 | Serenade Snow | stolen graphics |
| Alcohol | Delaction | 145 | TJB | |
| Be Careful | S.S.H. | 240 | Serenade Snow | |
| Be Princess | DJ Sharpnel | 49-190 | GenoMaxX | stolen graphics |
| Blazing | Banya | 158 | Serenade Snow | |
| Cross Time | Brandy | 80-160 | Serenade Snow | stolen graphics |
| Ego | Helblinde | 89-178 | Serenade Snow | |
| Evangelize (Radio EDIT) | syatten + 140 | 140 | Darqs | |
| Gigadelic | teranoid feat. MC Natsack | 87-173 | Serenade Snow | stolen graphics |
| Hitohira no Hanabira | Stereopony | 140 | B1uEM4oM4o | |
| Hypnosis | Banya | 90-180 | Serenade Snow | stolen graphics |
| I Just Had Sex | Lonely Island | 168 | Greentea | |
| I'LL MAKE A MAN OUT OF YOU | Mulan | 113 | Serenade Snow | has video bg and a .lrc file |
| Isolation | Nighthawk22 | 200 | Serenade Snow | |
| Juggernaut | Quattro | 240 | Serenade Snow | |
| Last Friday Night | Katy Perry | 126 | Greentea | |
| Love Again | Acid=Stone Valley feat.Ma15 | 180 | B1uEM4oM4o | |
| Love Hangover | Jason Derulo | 130 | B1uEM4oM4o | |
| Monolith -Renaissance Mix- | Affinity feat. dj Amuro | 196 | Serenade Snow | stolen graphics |
| Mr. Taxi | SNSD | 122 | B1uEM4oM4o | |
| No Tengo Amigos | Genitallica | 194 | Serenade Snow | |
| Palette | Yuyoyuppe feat. Megurine Luka | 180 | X. Ythar | |
| Run Devil Run | SNSD | 130 | Serenade Snow | multiple images bg |
| The Scales of Struggle | Mr Pokeahole | 200 | Serenade Snow | |
| Till Tears Overflow (radio edit) | Nana (Sevencolors) ft. Hatsune Miku | 135 | X. Ythar | |
| Tobuscus Dubstep | xAlexSx | 144 | Jayce | |
| Unlimited Spark! -Stardust Mix- | t+pazolite | 185 | Serenade Snow | |
| Vortex Infinitum | Shin Hae Chul & N.EX.T. | 172 | Serenade Snow | |
| Whip My Hair | Willow | 163 | JEDI | |
| Woo Boost | Rusko | 140 | JEDI |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
This pack released to a mildly positive reception on Revolution Street, though since there weren't many ITGs in Australia, not many people could play it. The general quality of the pack was never really criticized, but only a handful of the simfiles were ever actually played by anyone. The bulk of the critique was levied towards the management of the project, in which some were displeased with the micromanagement of their work and changes made to their charts without permission.
DARQs: I'll Make a Man out of you (Serenade Snow) 99.15% DARQs Open ITG
DARQs: Vortex Infinitum (Serenade Snow) 98.92% DARQs Open ITG
FreakyDDR: FreakyDDR | Evangelize - 95.45
FreakyDDR: Palette - Yuyoyuppe feat. Megurine Luka 92.XX% aka Shit house.
SerenadeSnow: Snȱw - Be Careful* 76.89
¶ Trivia
- The pack's folder name is written as “Drop Bear Awareness Pack”, as opposed to “Dropbear Awareness Pack” (which is how the banners write it and is the actual name of the pack). Both are acceptable, though “Drop Bear” is likely the more correct spelling.
- The folder names credit “Serenade”, but the simfile info fields themselves credit “Serenade Snow”, my full alias at the time
- “Xythar” is credited as “X. Ythar” in the simfile info fields
- "B1uEM4oM4o" is pronounced “Blue Mao-Mao”
- Charts often had multiple authors, but the author credit is given to the one who submitted the song and the “original chart”, irrespective of whether that chart ended up being the Expert or not
- Almost nothing in this pack is synced correctly. Charts were anywhere up to 60ms offsync
- A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation has the oldest published usage of two-letter tech notation codes in my simfilography. The simfile indicates “fs" for footswitches and “ha” for hands in its description field
- There's also a code simply called “no”, though this is likely a typo meant to say “no hands” or “no ha”
- Ego Death is the first Helblinde song I listened to, and the first one I stepped. I became aware of this song through an album that a local friend was producing- Ruffbeatz 001 vs Deadly Experiments #4, that featured him. It is because this occurred that I later re-investigated Helblinde in 2013 whilst searching for songs to step for Cirque du Lykan, which later resulted in the Helblinde pack series
- In No Tengo Amigos, a drawing of a penis can be seen on the fence of the background art
- Run Devil Run has a slideshow of bg images of every SNSD member. Hwaiting!
- Tobuscus Dubstep contains a graphic showing the length of the song, as themes at the time it was made didn't display this information
- This was also something Jayce consistently did across all of his simfile banners