An illustrated guide to DDR

(Warning: this post consists mostly of text copied from Wikipedia and YouTube clips...)

Firstly, some background info :)

Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR (known as Dancing Stage in Europe) is a music video game series produced by Konami. It was first introduced to Japanese video arcades in 1998, after being shown at the Tokyo Game Show earlier that year. Since then, the game has gained significant popularity elsewhere in the world, including large portions of North America and Europe. As of 2005, over 90 official versions have been produced, including those for home video game consoles. The Dance Dance Revolution series is a subset of the larger Bemani series of music video games. Including the arcade release of SuperNOVA, there are exactly 950 songs released among all official arcade and console versions.

The game is played on a dance pad with four arrow panels: left, down, up, and right. These panels are pressed using the player's feet, in response to arrows that appear on the screen in front of the player. The arrows are synchronized to the general rhythm or beat of a chosen song, and success is dependent on the player's ability to time and position his or her steps accordingly.

Here's a photo of a typical DDR machine:

DDR is often criticized as being rigid and bearing little resemblance to actual dancing. Many players, in order to better focus on timing and pattern reading, will minimize any extraneous body movement during gameplay. These players are commonly referred to as "technical", "tech" or "perfect attack" (PA) players.

Two example clips of tech players:


Yeah... they probably have no life...

However, there are those who prefer style over accuracy, and may incorporate complex or flashy techniques into their play movements. Some dedicated "freestyle" players will even develop intricate dance routines to perform during a song. Technical players will often practice the most difficult songs for extended periods of time, while freestyle players will choose songs on lower difficulty levels, as to accommodate their desires for easier movement.

Two more examples...


..............

Anyway, why am blogging about DDR? I went to Plymouth with my mum last weekend to visit friends (drove all the way to there and back myself, survived too, woo!), and whilst there I was introduced to StepMania, a DDR simulator for PC played with a dance mat. Guess what, I got addicted straight away! So I bought a dance mat from eBbay and installed the game as soon as I came home!

Here's a clip of me making a fool of myself... :)

Yeah, I know, it's kind of rubbish compared to the ones above...

You may have recognised the song from that last video - Cartoon Heroes by Aqua. As a side effect of my new-found obsession, I'm also slightly addicted to Aqua now... Watch the music video for Cartoon Heroes and Barbie Girl if you have nothing better to do :)



Talking of obsessions, I've also been getting addicted to games from the Touhou series (Imperishable Night in particular) - all vertical scrolling shooters, firstly for the Japanese PC-98, then more recently, Windows. The Touhou games are best descibed as... "bullet hell"... as you can clearly see in this clip:


Scarily, all the Touhou games were written by just one guy, who did all the programming, art and music...

Lastly, a video of a guy playing DDR with only one leg...


Yeah, I'm weird...

Ud!

Are you an Ud!?

Take our questionnaire to find out…

1. Do you consider yourself to be an Ud!?
a) Yes
b) No
a) Yes

2. How many fingers do you have on your left hand?
1) 0-6
2) 7 or more
g) None or less

3. Do you like people with stupid laughs?
a) No
b) No
c) Joseph!!

4. How many Uds make a postman?
1) Yes
2) Sometimes
3) 3

5. Is cherryade good for your elephant?
la) Only with lipstick
di) Oops, sorry!
da) Only in autumn

I know... It's been a while...

Surprise surprise, time for another one of those crappy catch-up posts... So you want to know what's been happening in my life since Paris? You don't? Well tough, I'm telling you anyway...

September

• Frankie (my wife)'s birthday, we went drinking at the Riverbar in Vauxhall with lots of scary lawyers and management consultants :)
• Phil moved down to London for his PhD, had a birthday party which I attended.
• Taking Helen up to Cambridge, almost killing us on the way...
• Meeting up with people and reinstalling Windows for Sophie whilst in Cambridge...

October
I can't actually remember much from this month... Went up to Cambridge once or twice to see Helen...

November

• Went up to see Helen again, to be told that we are no longer together.
• Hane and Toby's halloween party
• Met up with Emmie once or twice, was taught to play the drums :)
• Got a shiny new laptop paid for by work (Dell XPS M1210, 12.1'', Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB hdd, GeForce Go 7400), I'm sure you all wanted to know the specs :) It's amazing, it actually runs Oblivion at 1280*800!)
• Met up with Sofija in Fulham for a long drinking session.
• About to become a house owner and landlord.

Right, now I've nearly caught up... Maybe I'll go into more details for this weekend :) So yesterday, after a busy morning of house viewings, I made my way up to Cambridge for the baby concert, but only after a quick coffee with Wei and dinner at Clowns with Helen, mmm pasta... :) The concert was basically a Beethovenfest: Coriolan Overture, Triple Concerto and Symphony No. 3 'Eroica'. It went on for considerably longer than I predicted, so Helen had to rush off at the end for her King's party, while I went to Trinity bar with orchestra friends before making our way to the real party venue - Mark's house. It was somewhat crazy, Simon made lots of random cocktails such as the 'pink eroica' and 'yellow triple concerto', and since I was standing right next to him, I managed to sample every single one of them, at a rate of one every 5 mins or so... So yeah, I got very drunk very quickly, and spend the next 4 hours drinking water... At least I was sensible... :) At some point I also managed to find myself on a sofa, underneath Emmy, Helen, Mihai and Dave, it looked slightly dodgy and was somewhat painful...


Chris also passed out, again, and had various stuff put on him similar to stuffonmycat.com... we were slightly cruel....


Not sure what time the party actually finished, but Helen and I shared a taxi to escape the scary people at 4:30am; I had Emmy's house all to myself :D I didn't actually go to bed until 7:30am though... don't ask me why...

Four hours later I was awake again, with a mild hangover. Mangaed to find my way to Newnham to meet Hannah, spent an hour in her room doing absolutely nothing before we decided to head into town, where we had ostrich burgers and walked around centre of Cambridge entirely aimlessly, it was fun :) Eventually we got bored so she ran away, and I found Phil who was just about to go back to London. We bought 11 hot and spicy chicken wings at the station, ate some of those on the train and spent the rest of the journey playing Metal Slug 3 on my laptop, it was great :) The rest of the chicken wings were demolished on the train from King's Cross to London Bridge, where I poked Phil goodbye and came home.

In other news, I'm now about halfway through Season 4 of Frasier. Slowly getting there... :)

Really ought to sleep now, before the sun rises again... But I shall leave you three random links, to make up for the absence of blogging :)

You're So Wrong - got a moral dilemma? Find your answer here.

RallyTrophy - Scalectrix fun!

Jackson Pollock - Not entirely sure what this is about... but it looks fun :)

Good night all, be good.

Bunnies!

Click here for something to make you laugh.

In other news, I've been to Paris with Helen for the weekend! It was amazing, we did so much! I also managed to leave my feet behind, possibly... I shall attempt to get all the photos online sometime tomorrow :) If you want details, probably best to look at Helen's blog.

Mooooooooo.

Sound matters

Which speakers should I get...

Logitech Z-4...


or the Creative I-Trigue 3600?


Cast your vote now.

Well, you don't have to, you can always go do something more fun... like shopping...

Exciting Prom!

Hurrah! I have internet at home again, after surviving over 5 weeks without... silly companies... OK it's not really working yet, as I'm only connected at 160kbps when it really should be 8Mbps, but still, better than nothing... :)

Anyway, back to the title. After a boring day at work on Wednesday, I ran away early for my second prom this year. I knew the music would be good, but had no idea that I would bump into SO MANY old friends... Met up with Hok (CYM/LSSO friend, also Cambridge compsci) at South Kensington station. Catching up whilst walking to the Royal Albert Hall, where we met David BW, another CYM/LSSO/Cambridge friend. After getting our queue ticket we relocated to the Imperial Union Bar, where we bumped into old LSSO friend Leo, who I hadn't seen for 3 years. Few minutes later old school friends Alex and Oscar appeared! Hadn't seen them for 4 years... Soon followed by another group of CYM/LSSO people: Ollie, Hannah, Luan, Sarah S, and Sarah K who I randomly met at a post concert party in Cambridge last year... So yeah, we had fun catching up with each other, and drinking too, obviously. 6:30pm, we found our way back to the queue, where we bumped into Hugh, who's another Cambridge compsci, who also seemed to know most of the group... Another LSSO person Josh appeared at some point too... and I also managed to spot Helen's JAGS friends Alex and Camilla...

Anyway, the music. Budapest Festival Orchestra was conducted by the maestro Iván Fischer. The concert began with Dohnányi's Symphonic Minutes, which I was expecting to be very modern at the time. Turned out that Dohnányi was an early 20th century Hungarian composer, and his Symphonic Minutes was far from the kind of music I would classify as 'modern'; very much an orchestra showpiece in five movements, full of gorgeous folk melodies as well as exhilarating moments. I'll definitely be looking for a recording of this. Continuing the Hungarian theme, Bartók's third piano concerto followed, with the American pianist Garrick Ohlsson. This was my main reason for coming to this prom, as it was one of the favourite concertos I had played in my youth orchestra (LSSO), and I had been wanting to see it performed for years. Exciting fact: the pianist who played this piece with us in 2002, György Sándor, studied piano with Bartók himself, and actually PREMIERED the piece back in 1946! Isn't that exciting :D Yes, he was rather old when he played with us, 90 in fact, he even had a heart attack while we were touring France... But still, he was amazing, and came back to play with us two months later after surviving the heart attack. Anyway, back to this prom. I'm feeling little lazy now, so I shall copy a bit of the review by the Daily Telegraph :)

The American Garrick Ohlsson ... brought a light, lithe touch to Bartók's piano writing, though still found the spaciousness for the slow movement's disturbing chorale and the muscle for the finale's bounding rhythms. Muscle was only one aspect of Fischer and the orchestra's performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring after the interval. Though it had impact and energy aplenty, it reminded us what a magnificently melodious piece this is, and right from the opening bassoon solo, Fischer lovingly caressed all the folk-derived tunes as they appeared.

So yeah, the Rite of Spring was fun :) Huge orchestra too! 8 horns and 8 double basses, and two contra-bassoons weren't bad at all. Last time I heard the piece in full was at a prom 3 years ago - Berliner Philharmoniker with Simon Rattle - the performance famed for its bassoon/mobile phone duet at the start... I wasn't too keen on the piece back then, but it's definitely growing on me :)

The audience went crazy by the end, and Fischer responded by asking the audience what we wanted to hear. Hundreds of suggestions were shouted at once, everything ranging from JS Bach to probably Spice Girls... I don't think he was seriously letting the audience decide though... Time to go back to the Hungarian theme as Brahm's Hungarian Dance No. 6 was played, which Hannah couldn't stop dancing to :) And just as we thought it was the end, a double bass player discreetly made his way to the front of stage where he was joined by one violist and one of the first violins with exciting moustache. The string trio played more exciting Hungarian dance music before the orchestra disappeared, accompanied by thundering applause.

As we were walking out, we also bumped into old LSSO friend Danyal, who's also at Cambridge now... Adam the old old LSSO flautist was also spotted. A trip to High Street Kensington with Hok and Ollie to find cash and/or food before we returned to the Imperial Bar to join the others for more drinks, until it was too late to get our last trains... which was clever... so Ollie, Luan, Sarah S and I had fun getting buses home.

All in all a great evening, definitely one of the best proms I've been to, and only spotted 16 people... :) In case you are interested, have a video of some random performance of the Bartók third piano concerto, second movement :) Isn't YouTube useful :)



Christoph von Dohnányi, grandson of the composer Dohnányi, will be conducting Prom 56 next Saturday, which is the next one I'm planning on going to. Fascinating, no? :)

Reel Big Fish

Remember that RBF album I ordered recently? "Our Live Album Is Better Than Your Live Album". It's awesome!! Two CDs and one DVD all for just $20 + $7 shipping; and as Helen discovered on Sunday, it's actually signed by the band members too!



So yeah, that was an exciting discovery :) I guess I can forgive them for cracking the CD case too...

On a related note, Helen and I are going to see them live again next Friday! For the third time, woo! :D

Have some random RBF music videos :)

Sell Out


She Has A Girlfriend Now


Where Have You Been

more naruto

Right, I've finally finished with the first 107 episodes, back to watching Brainiac until I can get more episodes... A lot of people say that Naruto is somewhat childish, which is true to some extent, but there are plenty of serious messages too - brought me close to tears on several occasions; it can be hard to persuade people that though, especially when stuff like this comes up...


So what else have I been up to, apart from burning my own hands? Last night was the first Prom I went to, with Helen - Jonathan Harvey, Mozart and Schumann. Turned out to be not particularly popular so the queue was pleasantly short, and free food/drink from the IC ChemEng's BBQ too :D

P.S. People are drinking at work! My boss started pouring wine for people at 3pm because things were getting stressful... so now people are drunk AND stressed... Hehe, one more reason to love my job :)

Naruto update

Hmm, I'm really getting through Naruto faster than I should... Episode 89 was the last one I watched this morning... at this rate I'll be out of stuff to watch by tomorrow... (Only have 1-107 and 179-195 downloaded, and can't get anymore at the moment as we STILL don't have internet at home!!)

Ah well, at least it'll give me some motivation for shouting at PlusNet...

Totally changing the topic, it would appear that touching the nozzle on a hot air gun that's spitting out air at 500 degrees with your finger isn't the best of ideas...

Naruto

If you remember from my last post, this was what CD Baby told me:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

Well, so much for the satin pillow and gold-lined box, the CD arrived yesterday in bubble wrap, with a crack on the back... Ah well, it's the content that matters anyway. And in case you are interested, the album is called "Our Live Album is Better Than Your Live Album" :)

In other news, I've started watching Naruto on my laptop on the way to/from work since Wednesday, and it's awesome! 195 episodes to watch so far, thought I could get through 4 episodes a day, but somehow I managed 21 episodes in the first two days...

Things I've learnt about being a ninja: it's all about deception; and ninjas only exist as tools.

Have a random Naruto picture :)