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I can't speak for Katamari, but assuming you have a PS2 dance pad...

http://www.stepmania.com/downl..., plus
http://stepmaniaonline.net/ind..., plus
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ..., equals

A near-equivalent, if not superior, DDR experience on your computer.

if it is a universal setting then you should ask the user for permission and write it to the global registry. Is it a user related setting then save it to the user profile. No if's, no buts.

Say one of my PC's users has created a template for a word processor, and I want to install it for all users. Is it recommended to store the template in the HKLM hive of the Windows registry?

Or say I have a video game that lets the user install levels. A level consists of a 10 KiB script, a 100 KiB background image, a 2000 KiB music recording in Vorbis format, and optionally a 20 KiB banner for the level select screen. If a user installs a level for himself, it would go in a dot folder in the home directory (or a folder inside %APPDATA% under Windows). But if a user installs a level for all users, is it really recommended to stash the script, background image, and music file in the registry?

It's just a list of platforms and their homebrewability. How about a list of games that are fun to play? Is there a Rockband clone that lets me play with my entire mp3 library?

If you really want the S&M of pulling a Through The Fire And Flames on your MP3 collection, then perhaps you should check out the game whose initials are S&M.

my 2 CPU quad core 3 GHz machine with 8 GB of DDR and dual SLI GeForce BGX 1024 MB 8800GTX is pretty screamin' fast.

Seriously, 8 GB of DDR? How long would it take you to play through that much DDR?

I can pretty much play anything I want on it and I can emulate consoles.

How do you copy console game cartridges into your PC to run them in an emulator?

When the console can emulate other consoles, let me know.

Wii owners can download emulated games at $5 to $10 a piece in Wii Shop Channel.

and what's more, I can play at 2560 x 1600 on my $1,000 monitor without spending $$$ for an HDTV plasma (much less Mitsubishi LaserVue) screen that can't do even half that resolution.

But how many people can play on your PC at once? I babysit, and I don't want to have to buy a separate PC per child.

Completely agree. Last year I lost some kilos with it, and my ab became much harder.

Also, my resistance and speed increased. And it is really fun!!!

And now I can play "8-feet" songs! :)

For PC, you have Stepmania, which is free, and much better than any of the PS2 versions.

http://www.stepmania.com/

There are also hundreds of free (legal) songs in Internet, ready to download.

I second this. It's especially good if you have to travel a lot. You can get a roll-up dance mat, put DDR or the open-source StepMania on your laptop, and then just do 20 minutes of DDR in the morning at your hotel.

Here's the educative games I suggest.

http://www.food-force.com/ Made by the U.N. Free, MacOS X or Windows. (sorry no Linux afaik) Probably the best one in my list for the 6-8 years old.

http://www.tqworld.com/ - Tranquility. After years and years, this game has something no other game offers. Well suited for the youngsters. Free, but not open source.

http://www.stopdisastersgame.org/ U.N. too. Free and web-based. Excellent. Probably best for 8 years old (older ones of your range). Surprisingly informative.

http://www.stepmania.com/ Not sure that ones counts as edutainment, but it sure is good for the children! Open source and available for all platforms.

http://www.openttd.org/ A railroad tycoon open source clone (gosh I'm getting old ;-). Suitable for your oldest ones?

For the curious ones, here's the other worthy (subjective) open source games I discovered with time. http://del.icio.us/Satri/game+opensource

Since everyone else just seems to tell you to get a console, I'd thought I'd actually list a few good PC games that are actually fun to play multiplayer on the same screen. Yes, they do exist. It's a great platform for the task, and if people started actually taking it seriously as such, we could probably see more games like this.

Worms Armageddon (already been mentioned a few times)

Heboris (great customizable two player Tetris game)
http://tetrisconcept.com/wiki/index.php?title=Heboris

Super Mario War (very fun party game where the goal is to stomp on the other player's heads)
http://smw.72dpiarmy.com/

Stepmania (DDR style game that can take all sorts of songs)
http://www.stepmania.com/

Atomic Bomberman (8 player Bomberman on the PC)

You Don't Know Jack (fun and wacky non-trivia game, huge series of them)

Also, try looking at the list of simultaneous player games at Home of the Underdogs. There are a LOT of games. (http://www.the-underdogs.info/multi.php?sort=SHS)

Does the research mention if the results are different depending on whether the computer has stepmania installed?

What about Stepmania

Konami, the producer of DDR, keeps a very close watch on the open source project StepMania (not GPL), which has enabled all players to play their copyrighted songs AND the copyrighted steps on their computer all for free. Konami is also trying to protect the concept of DDR, which they have a patent for. They already are suing one company who based their game off StepMania and so far nothing has happened but it it is still scheduled. Konami, however, never licensed the Japanese version of the game for North America (most DDRs, especially DDR Extremes at Namco arcades, are pirated in the US; you should ask the manager to let you see the CD in the arcade cabinet, it'll be a CDR). ITG (In the Groove), the commercial StepMania derivative, was made after 3 years of having no new DDR version come out beyond the fact that the Japanese versions are technically illegal in North America. The last legal one for US was made in 2000 and is very dated in that sense. Only last year did Konami make a new DDR version (in response to ITG) licensed for US, realising that DDR is still popular around the world, unlike in Japan where it is nearly dead.

Much like the guitar tab posting community, the so-called "DDR community" online has been copying the exact step patterns from the games for years and converting them into a plain-text format that can be used with a number of game simulators (including StepMania). These do take time and people are just nice enough to share. Different is that there's also music being copied which makes sites that host much more liable for copyright infringement, and they also feel the need to rip the graphics associated with each song (StepMania, with skins, can look near-perfectly the same as a real DDR game; the ripped graphics from the game further enhance this capability). Konami has got a few sites hosting dance steps and songs to shut down before and has threatened legal action.

Basically, Konami is fully aware of the "DDR community" and its activities (there have been other simulators threatened legal action in Japan by Konami as well), and it has been since about late 2002 when a fair number of step patterns, song recordings, and graphics were stolen from a beta testing machine (of the new version of the time) in an arcade in Japan, and then were subsequently converted to a format usable by StepMania. People were not supposed to be allowed to record at all at the beta testing, but apparently they did not check well enough. Now Konami never lets anyone come to beta test a machine without a full check to make sure they do not have any kind of recording device, including a cell phone that can do more than calls (which is every phone in Japan).

I think you are forgetting these hackers.

http://icculus.org/pyddr/
http://www.stepmania.com/

Hacker cred abound.

StepMania - Hey, DDR-clones are addictive, especially when they run on your iBook so you can play on the train while commuting to the university. My WASDPLÖÄ keyboard setup is feared (by everyone who tries to use it and isn't me).
Final Fantasy Tactics - Not so much a comfort game as one where you sit down and spend three hours in one battle because you are a sick person and want to have a fully trained calculator before the end of the first chapter. Once you're in the zone you don't even mind spending hours just letting your soldiers beat the crap out of each other. You also stop caring aout everything else, including getting something to eat - after all those soldiers aren't going to indirectly gather 1200 monk JPs by themselves! Also, I love bitching about the sequel.
Excessive Quake - A pure bloodbath of flying gibs and ridiculously overpowered weapons. Load this sucker, set the bots to "Hurt Me Plenty" and spend the next five minutes mowing down everything that moves. It's like a killing spree on steroids and equally stress-relieving.
Occasionally played:
Perfect Cherry Blossom - I have no idea what the in-game text is saying, but gameplay-wise it's just as evil as Ikaruga. I mean, look at that screenshot!

Er, wrong. It is still GPL, that just when you don't distribute it, the GPL's requirement to release code does not apply. You cannot, however, switch the code from GPL to closed source, even if you are the copyright holder. Once a code is GPLed once, it is GPLed for ever.
False. If I am the sole copyright holder of a work, I may choose to release it under any license I like. However, I cannot stop people from updating my previous GPLed versions to match the new versions. For example, In The Groove is a derivative of the GPLed StepMania project, but it is closed source because permission was obtained from all the StepMania copyright holders.

For starters, you could buy a DDR pad and hook it up to the computer then map the front/back/left/right arrows appropriately and perhaps use the corner arrows for particular talents associated with foot movement (like Charge for Warriors). Maybe use a second DDR pad mounted in front of you that you can hit with your hands to trigger other talents associated with hand movements. The only really tricky thing is figuring out how to implement mouse-look -- a handheld mouse might work or perhaps some gigantic adjustable resistance joystick.

True. I have recently bought a game, more or less the first time in well over a year. It's an independent title, or at least the publisher isn't a soulless megacorporation. I found the game (the Mac version of Escape Velocity Nova) when my IBM Compatible's system drive went the way of the eight-figure disgnostic code (PowerMax users might know what I'm talking about) and I was stuck with just my iBook for a couple days. Since reinstalling Gentoo Linux involves long periods of waiting I decided to hunt for Mac games to play while waiting for the next unstable package's compilation to unexpectedly fail. The EV Nova demo hooked me with a great plot string (of which there are six and I happened to stumble across the most involving one right away) - I bought the game just to finish that one string. Okay, and for the other ones and for the plugin support, but the Vell-os string alone was worth the thirty US bucks to me.

I don't care much about big titles anymore. Firstly, most are Win-only and booting into Windows isn't really worth the hassle (plus, the Windows Setup CD seems to dislike my hardware)* and secondly, independent games tend to be more interesting - either due to more innovation or just because they don't rush their product out the door to meet that pre-christmas deadline.
Between StepMania (OSS for the win!), EV Nova and the Jets'n'Guns demo (soon to be bought) my iBook has become the gaming machine. The only thing that contests Apple's utter domination of my gaming life is the fact that ePSXe and Dosbox run better on the IBM.


* Yes, I know about Cedega. But still, for some games there isn't much you can do besides booting into Windows.

Actually, this year has been my best year for gaming so far. My StepMania habit has resulted in the removal of at least four inches of unwanted girth around my midriff. Also, I don't get tempted to play it all night, unlike certain other memorable games from times past.

cya,
john

As a matter of fact, StepMania recently had the StepMix contest; only songs and stepfiles that could be legally redistributed were allowed.

Such moral dilemma; should I sit here and continue being screwed over, or should I go down to their level and sue them for interrupting my excercise schedule, and reducing my estimated lifespan by 5 years?

• PUMP (DDR w/ Center and Diagnoal based Pad)
• TechnoMotion (DDR w/ Normal and Diagonal based pad)
• Pop'n (A bongo style game)
• IIDX (A DJ/scratching game)
• Para Para Paradise (A hand motion game)
• Guitar Hero (A guitar based game)
• And anything else somebody makes a theme for

Try http://www.stepmania.com/Stepmania for the computer. If you get a converter for your dance pads (I've heard you can get them at Radio Shack), you can have any style of music on DDR that you want! For songs, try http://www.ddruk.com/DDRUK and http://www.bemanistyle.com/Bemani Style.

Anyhow, I also vote for "Dance Dance Revolution" and its ilk (see StepMania if your platform is a computer, not a console). If you haven't played before, then it's a toss-up as to whether you or your GF is going to be the better player, so the whole skill disparity thing may not be an issue. Even if you're a relatively experienced player, it's possible for two to play at widely different skill levels. And then, ultimately, it doesn't matter who wins: you mostly play to beat your personal best.

On top of all that, it's a great way to get exercise. Be entertained and get fit at the same time. Get experienced enough that the soft mats don't cut it for you anymore, and upgrade to the hard platforms. Get good enough that you can go for half an hour on the hardest levels and work up such a drenching sweat that you both need to shower afterwards.

DDR: a healthy addiction.

Get http://www.stepmania.com/ and get a USB ddr pad. Totally worth it.

Have you been to a video arcade lately? They are still around and are full of games you can't play easily at home. Most of them have hardware that is specialized for the game

I assume that by this you mean custom controllers. Apart from redemption games (those that spit tickets), the most popular game by far at arcades I've been to is Dance Dance Revolution and other games using the same cabinet. That form factor is so old that controllers for Konami's DDR brand console games and for PC-based clones are anywhere from $20 to $200 depending on quality. Which games were you talking about?

or have large systems linked together so a number of people can all play together interactively.

You've never been to a LAN party?

You can see the movie now, not in six months when it comes out on DVD and all your friends have already seen it.

Tell that to people in Europe, who had to wait nine months for their PSP, and by then, the system's killer app had already been cloned for another system.

I buy myself an Xbox (200$), PS2 (180$), and a GameCube (120$). That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount

You don't need to spend $500 on the latest video card to play current games. You can get a more than capable video card for under $100.

We do have representatives from the real-time strategy crowd and the FPS crowd, but what of the musir rythm games, platformers, party games (Mario Party on a computer would be considerably more constrained!), J-RPGs, etc?

*Rhythm games - How about stepmania?
*J-RPGs - Final Fantasy XI should keep you busy until Phantasy Star goes online.
*Platformers - I recommend the excellent Psychonauts.
*Party games - I wouldn't wish Mario Party on my worst enemy, but when my friends come over we sit down in front of the TV and play a few dozen rounds of Mashed.

I should mention I've never had to patch Super Mario Sunshine. When I bought it in 2002, it worked bug free!

Consoles certainly win out there, I hate patching. Although, if things aren't kept under control, we might see consoles slipping into patch fever.

Trust me, in the long run you'll probably want a cheap PC instead, with this installed.
But hey, 20 buck's a good deal.

You could try to leverage some of that Christian music into a video game. Grab StepMania and make some simfiles with music by ZOEgirl and other popular Christian artists.

I'm not the first to think of Dance Dance Resurrection.

How the HELL is a pedometer going to measure how many steps I take when my upper body hardly moves at all, and if my pelvis is moving, it's twisting, not vertical? I'd think I'd be doing about five times as many steps as it'd be measuring, unless they strap it to my ankle, in which case the thing will break first song I do.

I can do some 7- and 8-feet songs -- that means it's been assigned a difficulty of eight out of ten.

If they want to know how many steps and which songs we were doing -- and scores and such -- then they should hack on an open-source equivalent. There's also an official version of DDR, but who knows how hackable/loggable it will be. Of course, they have to buy the kids computers now, but DDR is hardly using a PS2 to its full potential, so you can probably find/build a low-end computer for it.

Got a PC?

even has a linux port.

Actually, you can get a decent clone. http://www.stepmania.com/stepmania/

By "outings", I meant: "An excursion, typically a pleasure trip. A walk outdoors".

Oh, you meant something closer to this. Now I get it.

I guess one can always play a game of baseball, tennis, hopscotch, etc, without breaching copyright.

In non-summer weather? Indoor tennis courts cost a lot of money to rent, and exclusive rights to land are the only exclusive right that is more sacred than copyright to a copyright advocate. Modern electronic hopscotch games are copyrighted, but I'm glad that at least one is permissively licensed.

You could've saved yourself a few bucks... Stepmania http://www.stepmania.com./

Check out Stepmania. It's an open source DDR clone, runs under windows, and can import third party songs and patterns (there are *cough* allegedly *cough* lots of these available on various file sharing networks).

Without wishing to sound like flamebait, Stepmania is head and shoulders above most homegrown software - it's much better than most commercial stuff. I'm not a huge DDR fan, but I was incredibly impressed by how well this was put together. Best of all - it's available for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.

Just add a USB to Playstation adapter, and you can plug a playstation dance mat into your PC and get going...

Every revolution has ended up eating its children; i can't see why the Open Source Revolution should be different.

Because Dance Dance Revolution is now available as open source.

I prefer a high resolution over a large screen (which is a major benefit of PCs, very high resolutions are supported)

How are you going to crowd four people around a 17" monitor, even if you are running it at 1600 pixels across? And with a 17" monitor, how are you going to play a game like StepMania where you're standing on a controller whose center is four feet away from the monitor?

I'm sorry, but I actually have more than one computer per person in my house

Many people reading this don't have that kind of money, you insensitive clod! How do you suggest that they avoid the problem of "sorry, we went with another candidate" when looking for a better source of income in order to buy a decent computer for each kid?

Most of the 2 player games I own are racing games and it's really annoying playing a game with a split screen even on a 57" TV.

Some older racing games such as Super Off Road aren't split screen; they're still screen covering the whole track. A lot of multiplayer games use a relatively still screen; these include Bomberman, Smash Bros., any other fighting game, sport sims, etc. Even some split-screen games are designed to look good in a split screen, often using side-by-side vertically-oriented playfields. These include Tetris, Puyo, Bust-A-Move, Tetris Attack, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and the like.

And the majority of PS2 games I have would benefit from a mouse and keyboard.

Then buy your adapter.

That all depends on the game, I can plug a few hundred joysticks into the computer if I wanted to (USB) but unless the game supports 100+ joysticks it's not going to work.

That's the problem. Even with USB hubs being multitaps, very few PC titles support four player simultaneous play on one screen. Most titles that do support such a mode of play are console exclusives, and I take it you know how stuck-up the publishers are about emulation.

most newer programs require XMS

For those newer programs that do not work correctly with the EMS adapter, you can use the Boom PS Joy Converter, which provides one DDR slot. A list of other recommended adapters is available here.

(background for mods: EMS is both a PC memory expansion standard from the DOS days that predated XMS and a manufacturer of PlayStation to PC controller adapters. DDR is both a PC memory interface and a video game that uses a specialized PlayStation controller.)

I am a 24-year-old man. I play the four-panel dance game in the arcade and on my PS1. I even make my own simfiles for the the open-source PC version. I am not sexually attracted to other men. How is this possible?

As much as I like free - I haven't seen any of them produce quality games like Half-Life 2, etc et al.

I prefer to keep my non-game computing and my commercial video games in separate cubes, thank you very much. I would play a commercial game on a Treacherous Computing platform provided it could run side-by-side with a non-Treacherous platform, either in separate memory spaces or in separate machines. Besides, have you even played some of the better Free games, such as StepMania or TOD?

And, at least for the near future, MS Office is the industry standard

Well it's a good thing only the most expensive version of Microsoft Office supports digital restrictions management of .doc files. This means that companies won't be distributing information in DRM .doc format to the public, many of whom use the Works Suite edition of Word or the student edition of Office, and OpenOffice.org will still open files in non-DRM .doc format even more reliably than other versions of Microsoft Word do.

• Pay them to do something. Scan in all the old public documents at the courthouse.
• Interview retired people and publish the results on a website to teach life lessons and life stories.
• Have them put together a program to teach Stepmania to the elderly.

For as much flak as some (unnamed) software companies get on /. for not being original, it's interesting to note that a full 1/3 of the games on Sourceforge to reach 1,000,000 downloads is a complete knockoff of Dance Dance Revolution and clones. Screenshot:

http://www.stepmania.com/stepmania/images/screens/ cvs%20linux/tn/linux20030729-1.jpg.html

Free. I got it from a friend. He got it from a Via representative

OK, so perhaps the Via box is for people with connections to Via representatives, and the modded console is for everyone else. How much would such a Via box cost at retail?

I don't like sitting still watching a tv for long periods of time without getting up and moving around.

Which is why you mod a console, so that you can run a Dance Dance Revolution clone on it. With StepMania you can get up and move.

For Linux, there's MythTV and Freevo. They're both free, and I've heard good things about both of them.

I'm planning to get a mini-ITX form-factor computer and install Linux and one of the above to use as a media box. I'd also like to put some games and possibly Stepmania on it. That would be a nice setup.

Anyone care to share any personal experiences with MythTV or Freevo?

Better yet, if you want a physical game to help rehabilitate type 2s, try Konami's Dance Dance Revolution on the PS1 or PS2, or the free PC version.

Does it work with dance pads, for playing StepMania?

You mean content-consumption games, which are usually single-player or at best cooperative. There do exist games whose goal isn't to "beat" the game (that is, consume all the game's content). See also tackle football sims, tetramino games, WarioWare multiplayer, fighting games, dance sims, or any game that goes back to the good old days when a game's goal was to beat your old score or to beat the other player.

I thought I'd toss in a quick mention to my personal favorite, StepMania. It's reached a level of maturity such that there is a group that's turning this into an actual arcade game .

There aren't many other OSS gaming projects that can claim that. (Though, they're doing the same with this one. They've got one of these at the Mall of America, even.)

Yay Open-source turned viable business model! (Well, as viable as the arcade scene is these days...)

Unfortunately, this is very true. Because of the lack of songs on both DDR MAX and DDR MAX 2 I am leaning more towards the open source Step Mania to suit my DDR needs.

Tell Friend 3 that Konami made seven sequels to DDR, called 2nd Mix through Extreme (8th Mix), and that thanks to simulators, four-panel dancing has everything to do with your motherboard. But given that the popular simulator runs fine on an older SDRAM system with a TNT2 video card, DDR SDRAM isn't that necessary if all she wants to do is dance.