My love/hate/exercise relationship with DDR

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. It being the holidays and all, and with some of us being tied to the college year schedule, things have slowed down a bit. But I expect as people get bored again, they’ll come back here to rant about whatever video game or large corporation has them down.

In addition to picking up a few games that I shall have to review and seeing a few dvds that… I also shall have to review, there has been a new game that’s been taking up my time. It’s called Stepmania, and it’s the open source PC version of a game called Dance Dance Revolution.

About two months ago, I first read about Stepmania from a post on BoingBoing. I thought it was kind of neat that you could download a free version of DDR and import your own songs into it. I had seen DDR pads hooked up to PCs before, but I assumed that it was an emulator and illegal ROM.

I also have had a checkered history with DDR. For those of you who don’t know, DDR is a game where you play on a pad with Up, Down, Left, and Right. It’s like a normal controller, but instead of pressing a small controller with your thumb, you stamp down on that section of the pad. On your screen, arrows that correspond to these directions come flying up the screen, and when they match the static arrows at the top, you hit that direction. However, it’s not just matching, as a song is playing and the arrows roughly correspond to beats in that song: in effect, you are “dancing” by moving your feet in a certain pattern in time to music.

Well, my first exposure to DDR was at science fiction and anime conventions. You had both the giant guys flummoxing all over the place playing, but also the tiny Asian guys doing ridiculous dance moves while playing on a super hard difficulty. Basically it looked retarded. I’d watch the giant science fiction fans finish then walk down to the con suite to guzzle a coke and eat a bag of candy. “Those douchebags think that just because they moved their feet in a video game that it’s sufficient exercise.” I’d say to others around. And for the Asian guys… well, they obviously were going to be much more successful at dating than I was anyway, so I tried whatever I could to put them down mentally.

Flash forward a bit, and DDR pads start showing up in the homes of people I know. Guys like me were playing, and were pretty good at it. Still I resisted playing, content to watch them step out long complicated sequences that they had obviously played many times before and memorized. I did eventually try it in 2003 (almost exactly 3 years ago) when a friend of mine and I got drunk, picked the hardest song we could, and blared “Duel of the Fates” over top of the actual music. Needless to say, it wasn’t an accurate representation of how the game played. (Still, all that exercise made me metabolize that alcohol quicker and I became even more drunk.)

I’d still see the game at conventions and at people’s homes, and continued to mock it. One other problem was the music- it was still a relatively fresh Japanese import, so most of the songs were J-pop and bad techno. The annoying music, along with the limited selection that came with each game, didn’t yet endear it to me. (Oh, and the Katsucon where the loud DDR booth next to the Balticon booth made german board gaming difficult may have scared me in some way.)

So along comes this Boingboing post, talking about how cheap the pads are on Ebay WITH PC adapter, and free software, and ability to import tracks. It solved a lot of my complaints, and I had been looking for a way to exercise from the comfort of my apartment.

I bought one from Ebay, it arrived quickly, and I was off. After a brief issue with the USB adapter the setup came easily. I was able to download over 5 gigs worth of songs (!!!) from bittorrent, and I’ve been doing a workout on it almost every day since.

I play for at least half an hour a day, with occasional longer plays lasting over an hour (or one time with a friend after we figured out how to fix the pad for almost 3 hours straight.) I usually end out of breath and sore (both good things.) It has a lot of advantages over conventional exercise:
-I can listen to my music without having to worry about damaging my iPod.
-I receive positive reinforcement while exercising, as opposed to normal exercising which has to be done for a long, long time before receiving any kind of positive reinforcement.
-It’s a video game, and allows me to indulge my strongly competive nature.
-It’s a game, which is my thing, where as exercise is not.

Note however, that no matter what you might think, this will NOT make you a better dancer. I will mock you if you bust out these moves at an anime con rave. You may happen to be a good dancer who is also good at DDR and the two skills may be RELATED (reference: my early days as a ballet dancer, no I’m not posting any pictures of my sequined leotard) but DDR does not make you a good dancer.

Also note that while there are tons of songs available for download out there, most of them are still bad J-pop or Techno. The first pack I found for download contained “No One Knows My Plan” by TMBG, so that was a big score, but overall many are fairly generic. Also keep in mind that while the Dancing Monkeys program is a great idea for adding your own songs without a lot of legwork, it has about a 25% success rate in generating a file AT ALL (for me at least.) Even when it does, don’t expect anything genius to match up with the beats. It’s a good semi-random pattern DDR generator, but that’s about it. (I intend to get into the actual nuts and bolts of programming songs in beat by beat at some point, I’ll let you know how it goes.)

Overall though, I recommend it as both a fun game and a decent exercise program. I even enjoy going to other people’s houses and playing now (but am glad I have Stepmania… I couldn’t deal with that selection of songs daily!)