January 24, 2004

Why Aren't You Playing DDR Max 2?
To whet your appetite, here's some Dance Dance Revolution Videos. It's also excellent exercise. Here: have a listen. Later on you can audition for the inevitable movie. If not you can always Click Buttons And Dance Like Oobi. You shake whole body.
posted by forksclovetofu 20 years ago
  • I'm an idiot on that first link. My bad.
  • Oh god, I love DDR. I got pretty good with it on my soft mat and home and was pretty decent in the arcades (mat and arcade feel totally different). At any rate a lesson for those playing DDR. Do not play on a hard floor with a soft mat and no shoes. If you do get a soft mat get a hard plastic cover from redoctane.com for it so as not to mess up your feet. I messed mine up and pretty much had to stop using my feet for a few months for the join pain to go away. It's still hella fun. The pain probably wouldn't have happened if it weren't for my 2 hours a day habit for a few months. But hell, when I get addicted....
  • It's probably good fun, but my university union's "recreation center" (pool & bowling) has one of these and is that thing annoying to listen or what!!
  • I adore DDR. I also own no games consoles, let alone a mat, and life in a small room with creeky floors in very quiet graduate dorm. I have played only a few times at a friend's house, and I am terrible, since I have trouble telling left from right. That said, I've been getting my rhythmic fix, if not much exercise, from the keyboard version: Flash Flash Revolution. (Warning: excessive play may cause carpal tunnel syndrom and a complete lack of productivity.) But about the whole exercise thing - I've been thinking that dance dance would be great to be marketed as an exercise system. I'm not a console game person, and would be hard pressed to buy a whole playstation for just playing DDR - but a mat that could be plugged into my PC? That would be so worth it. (Of course, my downstairs neighbour might not agree)
  • jb: Check it out. Send me a thank you card when you slim down, eh?
  • I'm a total DDR addict, at least when it comes to at-home gametime. I had the Disney remixes and one of the Konamix discs and a soft mat on a nice soft carpet. Never had joint trouble, did wear a patch through the carpet though. Left my CDs in California when I came back to NZ for some unknown reason and I've been gutted since discovering how much Playstation games are here compared to the US.
  • I am not playing DDR Max 2 because I am too busy playing DDR Ultramix, which is the only isotope of the game that is available for Xbox. So much fun! My wife and I bought it sort of on a whim, went home and took turns playing until we could barely stand up and the very next day went out and bought a second dance pad so we could play at the same time. It's even a pretty good aerobic workout, play for an hour or so and your furnace really gets going. I sure am glad we live on the ground floor these days. Our ex-downstairs neighbor, old Mrs. Crustybritches, with the growth on her tongue and the chip on her shoulder, might have been somewhat impatient with Dance Dance Revolution. I'll tell you, though: we don't look like the folks in the videos. I can play allright, mostly, but it is a hilariously graceless operation more akin to Humpty Hump playing feet-only speed-Twister than any sort of "dancing".
  • Man, DDR is great. The kind where you actually dance wears you out, though; I spend most of my arrow-stomping time on StepMania, which is a pretty faithful reproduction of the arcade machine on your computer. AFAIK, it's available for Linux, Windows, and OS X, and you can download stepfiles from places like here and here. You can hook up your own set of USB pads if you want, but if you're like me, you'll probably just want to use the keys on the keyboard (what my friends and I affectionately call "Type Type Revolution"). It can still get pretty intense.
  • pmdboi, you rock. I totally plan on getting a converter for my PSX mat and setting up StepMania on my Freevo machine. Woo!
  • These beat games are fascinating. I remember watching a friend of mine -- extreme gamehead (writes them for a living, plays them the rest of the time), totally nonathletic, hardly danced even at his own wedding and even then it was ballroom style -- absolutely cutting his groove thing loose with Samba De Amigo. His wife said that he hadn't put the maracas down for two weeks.
  • I know a girl who absolutely wrecked her ankles playing DDR over a period of months. I had some aches and pains but I'm not that committed - I still don't look like I'm dancing at all. Here in NZ it's mostly popular with the teenage Japanese/Chinese immigrants and wow, they're really good.
  • Part of the game is learning to hit the pad lightly with your feet... If it's "Stomp Stomp Revolution" you're playing, you WILL mess up your ankles and knees. Also getting a nice pad via Red Octane seems like it would help... I haven't taken this step yet, as I've only been putting in my two to three hour a day fix trying to beat all of the tracks on light mode, but I may have to shortly. Just starting to dabble in standard and seeing that it's about to ramp up in difficulty exponentially. Even on light the unlocked Afronova is hella hard. And dirtdirt, I almost bought an XBox solely for the online DDR capability, but backed off because the rumour was that no one was online. And anyway the song selection was nowhere near as cool as the PS2... /shelled out over 300 bucks just to dance like an idiot.
  • Afronova [...] the first song to run at 200 BPM or more Good lord. That's as fast as a track off any Slayer album. Makes my ancient headbanging neck hurt just to think about it. Learning to "tread lightly" (not to be confused with the ethical offroaders' mantra) is important in many sports and activities beyond DDR. I used to have a running coach who spent a good bit of time correcting my Godzilla-like tread; indeed, using a gentler gait has helped me battle the shin-splint demon. In taiji it's called the "cat walk," as in stepping like a cat (though when I do it, it's more Desperation Lee than Bruce Lee). It has been a difficult lesson for me.
  • goetter: The sixth video down on your left here is of an Asian gentleman getting every step perfect on Afronova at it's highest difficulty level. Scary stuff. Right click and save. Slow download, but worth your while. It actually feels much harder than this guy makes it look, but I really wish I had one of those bars. The little bit at the end blows my mind.