LogFAQs > #950548386

#28. Dance Dance Revolution (Arcade, 1998)



For a while, DDR would've been way higher up my list. It was probably pushing number 1 for a chunk of my life. There's a few reasons why it's fallen, some I'll get into later, but a major reason is just that I'm older and not in the same great shape I was 20 years ago. When I used to run and go on bike rides, I could play DDR all day. Now? I'll play one or two sets, and I gotta sit down because my old man body can't handle it anymore. It's still fun, but that reality of needing to tone it down is a big mood.

DDR ended up being a big part of my life through high school and college year. I first played it at 2000 in the mall arcade, and it quickly became the main game I played there, as I mentioned in the Street Fighter 3 writeup. When everyone else in high school got into the game, we all had home versions and would play at each others houses. I ended up becoming the guy who was really good at DDR in my high school. Everything about it, I was obsessed with.

DDR was the first game I ever entered a tournament for, and also the first game I ever won anything in. The first few tournaments didn't go that well, because despite being the best in my school, there were much better people in the general area. One tourney was ran on 5th Mix, a version not at my local arcade. The qualifying/seeding song was The Cube, which wasn't on any version I had access to, and Stepmania wasnt really a thing yet. So, I found a copy of the song on Kazaa or whatever, and looked up the stepchart on DDRFreak to try and practice. Unfortunately, I never did figure out how this stepchart synced up to the song, so I never truly practiced it. See, The Cube was also used as a song in Beatmania IIDX, and the DDR version was shortened by removing the middle section, and the mp3 I found was the IIDX version.

After I moved halfway across the state to start college, I went to a tournament and noticed a couple familiar faces from those high school tournaments. It turns out they had also started at the same college. The next Monday, I went to my chemistry lecture, and realized two of them shared a class with me. There were multiple reasons here to hang out more, so 5 of us at that tournament became a good group of friends. We also kind of ran the Michigan State DDR scene for about 2003-2006, with our group winning pretty much every tourney in the area (except the one that attracted a bunch of out of state players). I continued taking a bunch of classes with those guys, playing other video games with them, even rooming with one at a point. Some of them are still good friends to this day. (I may get more into this on future writeups!)

I also ran a DDR tourney once. Well, the easy part of it. I had a friend high up in the University Activities organization, and she helped get the venue space on campus and equipment, and they did all the promotion. I got the rules together so we could run two concurrent tournaments, one for strong players and one for casual players, and I ran brackets and stuff.

Eventually, I started playing DDR a little bit less and less. It was kind of expensive to keep going to the arcade as much as I was. The arcade also hadn't upgraded past Extreme, (Supernova was out, and In the Groove was a big thing too) so most of the time I was trying to work towards AAAs on songs I played hundreds of times. It got a little discouraging to think, I have to get 300 perfects and 0 greats on this song to make an improvement on my score and then get 299 perfects and 1 great multiple times. And like I said, I played other video games with that group of friends, so we changed our habits a bit over time. DDR became more of a casual game, and I think I'm fine with it there now.

Here, have some songs that I like

Boom Boom Dollar (2nd Mix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8S3pwezmVM

Captain Jack (3rd Mix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARAj0aAMfxc

La Senorita Virtual (3rd Mix CS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZmkMv5rsRE

Insertion (5th Mix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXHVgV20ZqY

Sexy Planet (From Nonstop Megamix) (7th Mix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkLLoiuB_I0

PARANOiA (kskst Mix) (DDR X3 vs 2nd Mix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfeBiyHU_po

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