Dancing With Myself - On DDR Culture

Thanks to Waxy.org for pointing to an overlooked March 2004 Pitch.com story discussing scenes from America's Dance Dance Revolution arcade culture, as the article starts: "In the strange world of Kansas City's Dance Dance Revolutionaries, Wayne Giles didn't step so lightly." It goes on to describe Giles' transition "from social outcast to high roller in a crowd funded by allowances and minimum-wage paychecks", and his eventual "skimming... [of] more than a thousand dollars' worth of tokens [as an arcade tech]", before his exposure and return to local tournament play, arguing of DDR: "Lately it's all about speed. Whatever happened to playing for fun?"

Comments

What.. the.. hell.

[GigsVT]

Why do we care about some teenager who was scamming tokens from an arcade he worked at and playing DDR?

What's next, "When Valets Attack! (the change in your ashtray)".

Or maybe "Dressing Myself - On clothing shoplifting culture".

Pointless

[Dizzle]

This story isn't well written. Am I supposed to be convinced that it has a cult following simply because it was in King of the Hill, Lost in Translation, and a Skechers commercial? Holy cow, it MUST be successful! And I'm not sure where they were going with the description of how he was a goth. He was a goth... so what? What exactly is this story trying to do? If sympathy was the point, I'm not getting it. If it's to tell a story, it's done so poorly that I missed it. If there's another point... tell me please.

Oh, really?

[Inoshiro]

I've played DDR since 2000/2001, but only started to play it seriously since fal 2003. I'm into heavy mode, and can do a lot of songs people won't even attempt. I don't find freeze arrows lame. They require specific strategies and movements because you must switch your feet up in certain ways to satisfy them. It's not just the catch-all of "faster, more" that a lot of songs use at the heavy difficulty level.

I think what needs to happen is Konami putting in some more features, like an arcade performance/freestyle mode (since most of the videos you mention happened to be on standard mode, which isn't especially suited to freestyling), and things like speed modifiers (there's a hacked DDR Exteme plus near me that has normal, 110%, and 120% song speed options).

DDR's not dead, it's just the same game it was 4 years ago. It needs more new features to keep things interesting, because there are (as you acknowledge) physical limits to everything. I can do Max 300, though ;)