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...