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On The Evolution Of Dance Dance Revolution
Thanks to Gaming-Age for its feature discussing the continued popularity of Konami's Dance Dance Revolution series, which starts out by noting "the DDR series now has had nearly 50 different releases, all territories figured in", and interviews Konami's Yasumi Takase about the possibility of being able to use any music CD in a DDR game ("Having access to your personal music CDs is great, but coming up with your own step data for these songs is not so easy unless you are an expert player"), before talking to female DDR player 'Lyra' about her views of female players ("We do tend to have a lot more guy players than girls, the only girls we ever get are people who either try it out once, or sluts who are trying to get a guy.") Elsewhere, DDRFreak points to an academic essay on the history of DDR (PDF link), produced for Stanford University's History Of Computer Game Design class.
That's exactly the opposite I see. While there are a surprising amount of guys (surprising to me at least, most guys I know have no rythym at all,) the players I do see are predominantely female. I'd say like 70%.
:-/
We've got a DDR machine or two at every arcade in the area (South Florida) and they are always booming with people. There's usually a line, though many are just spectators. You don't see anything like that for the racers, shooters, or fighters in the arcades. Actually, I'm seeing fewer and fewers racers, shooters, and fighters all together
Why not just analyze the music and create step data based on certain beats, patterns, etc... Don't they do this sort of thing in visualizations already? Granted, it won't be as good as hand created step data, since you can make it harder or easier depending on your preference. But then, you could just fine tune the data by editing it yourself.
DDR is a pretty cool game (especially to watch) except it can get very annoying after a while. Case in point, I was at the CPL in Dallas and they had a DDR2 machine set up close by. Not many people were playing it so it sat at the title screen with some annoying dj announcer guy repeating D-D-R over and over again. It is pretty cool to watch some of those guys dance, nut no matter how good any DDR player is I can't imagine they are better than this guy.
I say the next development in DDR should be realism! Possible enhancmements include:
-Stick-o-matic floor to simulate drink spillings
-Automatic overpriced watered-down drink vending machine
-The Claustrophobinator(tm), a modification that brings down a heated padded wall to simulate crowd proximity
-Long bathroom lines