Let's do something that doesn't even approximate dancing

[davidn]

On the weekend we first met, Whitney and I were out at the now-dead (and rapidly expiring even at the time) Megabowl in Dundee. I had made an impression on her by climbing over two rows of seats in the cinema to sit beside her the night before, in the belief that you shouldn't let a guest to your group of friends be left on the end of a row, but since that moment I had failed to receive any and all signals that she had been giving in return. And that night at the bowling, I couldn't have helped the situation, because when she found out that I played Dance Dance Revolution she nearly went off me entirely.

Which makes the gift that she arranged for me with her parents even more of a surprise. This year, I received a Cobalt Flux pad a few days after we arrived back from California, after someone had sent it to Michigan by mistake, and it is completely enormous. After leaving university accommodation, where regularly playing it at the Union was probably the only thing that stopped me from becoming a nondescript heap of shambling chip fat, I hadn't played the game in years, but there's only one thing to do when you get an expensive metal dance pad - you start getting back into DDR again!

On starting up Stepmania, which I still had lying around, I was sort of horrified as to the sheer horrendousness of the music that I'd been responsible for putting into it - in stark contrast to my very metal-themed iTunes list, the soundtrack is mostly made up of manic J-pop songs which were named (and apparently recorded) by putting a stick of dynamite in a bag of fun-pack marshmallows. But somehow, like karaoke, they rapidly become acceptable to listen to again in the right (private) setting, and once you reach the stage where you're bouncing around to It's Raining Men (Almighty Mix), you don't give it a second thought.

As you might expect after five years, the days when I was at the top of the Union leaderboard are well behind me, and it's sort of unthinkable to me that I used to be able to do stages like this without ending up dead halfway through. Indeed, I attempted Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori Nori on Expert and only just managed to flail my way past it despite it only having a difficulty of 7 feet instead of the 9 that I was apparently able to do five years ago. But maybe, with practice, restarting this war between man and machine may be able to get me past MAX 300 yet. As long as it doesn't involve any minor conflicts between my head and the ceiling.

I'm going to have to start making DWIs again, now, too...

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

duuuuude, yes, excellent. XD I've been trying to get back into it! We will have to trade DWIs. ;)

[davidn]

I sort of got a bit distracted last night after talking about them, didn't I? But yes, I'll put mine up at some point - I wonder if they're still on bemanistyle.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ah yes! Yeah, I never even thought to upload mine anywhere, I wouldn't know where to start...

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

I was pretty hooked on Stepmania and DDR when I was around 15. For the longest time I didn't have a pad so I just played with a keyboard and had a lot of fun doing that. Then I got to crash and go from heavy to light when I got a pad.

At my peak I was passing most 8-footers on heavy easily enough.

Though as far as Max 300/Maxx Unlimited/The Legend of Max go I could never get beyond a D on standard.

Some of my other friends online have been picking the game up again as a form of exercise for the Winter and I think I might just get the pad from my parents' house and join them.

Boom Boom Dollar was the best song.

[davidn]

It's definitely a new experience to be exercising again - the most that I got before now was in my walking about twenty minutes a day on the rare occasions that I drag my corpse into the office. I've been trying to do at least a little a day, but am usually exhausted after just three songs - I think that my sight-reading has remained intact, but it's difficult to remember just how much of the game relies on your physical ability and not just being able to read them in time...

I used to play Stepmania on the keyboard because I used it as practice for reading arrows for the harder songs in the arcade, but I never got into the ridiculous 15/16-foot-rated keyboard-only songs.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

I just did bring the old red octane pad out of my bedroom closet at my parents' house and gave it a go. I'm struggling now just to do songs on standard and become exhausted after like 2 songs. I wonder how I'd play in an otherwise empty arcade with a friend for like 4 hours straight and not die.

I also seem to be a lot more self conscious, I'm very reluctant to jump up and down and shake the living room even when the upstairs neighbors are out and i'm the only person in the entire building.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I had always longed to play more DDR, but never found a place to play it at. Such is the disadvantage of living in the country. I'm good at the game in spirit, anyway.

[davidn]

Yes, I only played it so regularly in university because the student union was our usual venue in the evenings, and it was just there. When I lived to the southwest of Boston, there was one at the cinema that was more or less on the way back from work for me, but I never bothered making the journey. But now I have no excuse!

[kjorteo]

I never really got into DDR, for two reasons. One, my brain is just not equipped to translate the blizzard of incoming arrows and directions on even a moderately challenging stage (let alone one of the actual hard ones) into which button I'm supposed to step on even half as fast as they actually arrive. Instead, it seemed to always default back to the "go instantly snowblind, think 'Bwuh!?' just in time to miss them all and lose horribly" strategy. Two, the last time anyone tried to rope me into it was years ago, when I was still horribly out of shape. I've solved one of those problems since then, and my parents have taken it upon themselves to invite me back to their house for a Stepmania rematch one of these days, but I suspect the other problem still lingers. I'll probably just stick to something less insane, like the still-upcoming half-marathon with my father.

[davidn]

I wonder if your keyboard playing might have helped in some way with the translation of arrows to movement - I used to see only a deluge of arrows on the harder songs when I first started out, but like sheet music, you quickly learn to sight-read the individual arrows and the patterns (and this with only four "notes" to worry about). Of course, you still have to translate that mental plan into actual movement, and after not playing for five years, I had forgotten just how exhausting that could be. I can still read the arrows on the "stages like this" example above, but physically being able to get through it is something that I will have to gradually work towards again.

And when's that, next month?

[kjorteo]

February 20. I'm a little nervous because the training for it has been going... not as well as I had hoped. Standard problems for how impossible it is to fit "slower runs over more stupidly long distances"-style workouts into my schedule (I liked the high intensity/short time "kill yourself in a 20-minute time attack" mode specifically because I actually had the time to do it!) aside, I've managed to skip the last four running days in a row for one stupid reason or another--it's always something new and different but it's always something. First I was just to slammed with too much weaving to have the time that day, then it was too cold outside and both treadmills in the weight room were simultaneously broken, then I had to do grocery shopping that day, then I was sick. After having exercised regularly for a little over two years, now, my outlook has changed to the point where it seriously bothers me to miss a workout, so naturally I'm looking to break this streak and get back into it just as soon as humanly possible. If I'm feeling even remotely not-dying (still having a bit of a cough is fine, I'll just power through it) I'll make the next one, but we'll see.

[wolfekko.livejournal.com]

Driving While Intoxicated? You naughty bunny, you! :P

[davidn]

I've never heard it called that, I thought it was DUI in this country!

[wolfekko.livejournal.com]

It can be either, depending on where you are.

What did you mean by it? :P

[davidn]

A .dwi file is a Stepmania chart made up to go along with a song... I hadn't known exactly why it was called that either until I looked it up just now, but it was the format used by an earlier DDR game, <a href="http://dwi.ddruk.com/index.php>Dance With Intensity</a>.

[whinknee.livejournal.com]

This just shows how much I love you. Plus, I don't mind the DDR as much when you are doing it alone in our basement instead of embarrassingly in public.

[davidn]

I do it really well in public!

[whinknee.livejournal.com]

Embarrassing for me . . . not you.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Look at how many people remember this game XD

I, too, was also a DDR fanatic back in the day. I think the primary reason that I modded my Playstation1 was so that I could buy the, like, hundreds of DDR games that came out for that system.

I eventually caved and bought a really nice (before they started doing Guitar Hero) RedOctane Dance Mat that had this firm cushion underneath it, kinda like a gymnasium mat, and I believe I still have it -- oh wait, I "lent it" to my cousins. Well, it's still around, in any capacity - but since I never got a PS2 or an adapter for it, I never used it once the system became obsolete.

One of my Pinball friends has a DDR machine at their home. Like, the full arcade machine. (They also have a dozen pinball machines in their basement.) I helped them learn some moves, and in return, they post video of me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLgbTP7om0Q) failing against one of the other Pinball members at the playoffs :P

[davidn]

It helps to be friends with a complete bunch of furries :) I hadn't realized that there had been such a correlation when I first started out, but if there's anything that shows a near-exclusive relationship, this comment thread is it. Indeed, I remember meeting a couple of other anthropomorphically inclined people through the game room - it otherwise wasn't exactly a subject that came up in real life.

I remember Red Octane being the other primary pad that could be used for advanced play, when I was first researching this stuff in 2003 or so - I'd never tried any of the home ones apart from getting a plastic mat out at a family friend's house and being mortified at failing an easy song because it was impossible to place my feet correctly, so I was pleased that this one was quite so effective.

And that's a most impressive video, though it makes me glad that my own efforts were before the opportunity to spread them on Youtube :) My reputation was only realized when someone new came into the university chatroom and suggested we all meet up at the union, saying something along the lines of "you don't have to drink to have fun":

<campbell> you can just go watch that mental case who does the dancing machine
<David> Er... that would be me, campbell.

I can't quite read the game title - did Canada get the genuine DDR series? Europe was given an alternative series called Dancing Stage Euromix, which had different (and - by some strange definition of the word - arguably "better" songs for beginners, more along the lines of what you'd find on a karaoke machine).

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I remember that at some point Konami was releasing "official English" versions of DDR, but the song selection was totally inferior to the Japanese versions which had already been imported (and the Japanese ones used a lot of English songs anyhow). Like, now there's "official" DDR on the Wii and 360, from what I've seen, but I don't know how good the song selection is.

(Which reminds me that I saw a Toys R Us near me that had DDR2 with a pad for the 360 for $10. Damn, I wonder if they still have any copies about...)

If memory serves me correctly, I believe this was a "DDR Extreme" machine, Japanese I think - though I was told that the game itself consists of a ROM Chip and DVD, so they could swap it out for another unit with a little time - and I have a feeling many arcades did, too, those machines are heavy!

[kjorteo]

Also, clearly the only solution to un-J-Popping your collection is to make more metal DWIs, but then again, if DragonForce was hard in Guitar Hero....

Edit:

[davidn]

Yes, the metal ones that do exist are generally at a ludicrous level like that, where they're meant to be played on the keyboard only. (At least, I assume they are. I'd like to see anyone prove me wrong with that one.) And they feel somehow out of place!

I've been played around with The Sage, The Fool, The Sinner; though, that works quite well.

[kjorteo]

No, I think you're right--most of them are actually literally impossible (as opposed to just... Atlus impossible) in real life, due to things like double-arrow series that happen several times faster than it is even physically possible to jump. Maybe if you're a professional tap dancer or something, but probably not even then.

[davidn]

Keyboard play pretty much changes the game into Guitar Hero (although there was a game more popular with the rhythm game crowd at the time, Beatmania, which it was probably more intended to feel like) - I never really saw the appeal of doing those, or really got into Guitar Hero, for that matter.

I'm actually interested in that Somewhere Out In Space version, though, because I couldn't help noticing that there's complete silence during one part of the introduction, just before Piet Sielck's star appearance of going "Hwaauh!" - it's not a CD skip or anything because you can still hear the end of the bell effect, but the guitar that's meant to be there isn't. I wonder where that came from.

[kjorteo]

Well, now, that's... interesting. I don't know either! I know alternate versions of songs sometimes... exist, on account of that whole experience I had with how The Wicker Man would drive me absolutely hear-tearingly insane from the mystery of how there would sometimes be the extra "thy will be done!" in the chorus.