Guitar Man

A 120 BPM Banya Production piece, "Guitar Man" debuted in Pump It Up NX2. It disappeared for a time during Prime before returning in a later release, and it now lives in the PHOENIX songlist. Beyond the music itself, it tends to be remembered for its zombie-extermination BGA: not the most polished animation in the game, and it reuses a few bank scenes, but the pacing still suits the track's drive.

The Single spread runs from a Normal at S3 up to the dreaded S20. The Hard chart launched as an S9 and stayed there through Prime 2, but XX knocked it down two whole levels to S7. The real headliner is the S20: its opening is packed with 32nd-note drills that, converted to 16ths, work out to a blistering 240 BPM. At the time that was a drill speed you couldn't find even above level 18, so many players wrote it off as underrated. In practice the difficulty swings hard with how well you handle drills, and there's also a stretch of 32nd-note hold-note bursts that strains the life gauge. It was bumped from S18 to S20 in XX and remains a heavily skill-dependent chart.

On the Double side, today's D19 is actually a toned-down version of an older D20, and within its level it reads as fairly easy: there are barely any 32nd-note drills, and some hold-note bursts are simplified down to single long notes. The D10 and D13 charts were both removed in PHOENIX. A separate chapter belongs to a deleted pre-NX2 D20 "Another Nightmare": a wildly overrated chart on par with Gun Rock's D24, which by the song's own lore was submitted by mistake and then heavily nerfed into the D19. Its real difficulty sat around a high 24, and even a 25 rating wouldn't have looked out of place.