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Dance Dance Revolution Spawns TV Show
lfescalante writes to mention a unique synergistic melding of television and gaming: A Dance Dance Revolution TV show. From the article: "Dance Revolution, said all parties involved, is a live-action television series based on Konami's extremely popular video game franchise Dance Dance Revolution. Notes published by DIC and Konami describe this series as one in which 'tweens' and teens bring their freshest moves to this sensational new dance competition where teams of dancers display their innovative routines."
The audience can watch and jump around too, that's a nice first step. The really cool part would be to get some feedback (via Eyetoy and an internet connection). Then the viewers can judge player's performances or the judges on the show could judge players at home... or something like that. The technology's all there, just waiting for the ideas to catch up.
more of the same on Twitter.
DDR is not about getting up, its about making money. And if they can make money with a TV show then who cares if you move or not.
Even if you don't like DDR (like me) I suggest checking it out briefly, if only for the distinctive artwork.
PS. I am not affiliated with the comic, DDR, or the secret service. Especially not DDR.
I think Konami is desperately trying to save the franchise they've been ignoring for too long. It all ended back in 2002, when KCEJ made the last DDR mix - DDR Extreme. After that, there wouldn't be any mixes anymore - DDR was quite effectively dead in Japan. Konami of America has been churning out some (rather mediocre) home versions of DDR. Of course, you can't really target the hardcore players at home - but when you have more machines upgraded with bootlegs to DDR Extreme than there are tru DDR US-mixes, it should probably ring a bell in your head. I think that (whether Konami wanted it or not) In The Groove will be the future in dancing games - unless Konami will get their court case through, which'll probably return us to the same stagnated situation that we had before ITG came about.
Konami already screwed up pretty much. At least here in Europe. Our last good arcade mix came about in late 2000-2001, which was the Euromix 2. It was loosely based on DDR MAX2 (theme-wise) and song-wise there's quite a bit of DDR Extreme songs there, as well as pretty many songs spanning DDR-wise. Unlike DDR Extreme, which had 240+ songs, Euromix 2 had only 65 songs to play and a set of nonstop courses - no oni courses either.
Then came the dawn about, when Konami announced they will be making a new arcade mix, only for Europe! It was too good to be true - we've had been playing Euromix 2 for over 3 years, with only a set of two machines in the whole country. Not only that, Konami promised (the usual) that it would be better, bigger and feature more songs. As the day of the release came, and a company that had nationwide "arcades" here bought up to the hype and bought three cabinets, came the moment of truth - sadly. The new cabinets were quite frankly put, shit. The pads were pretty much unusable, because you would have to stomp hard to the game to register anything at all - I won't go into freeze arrows. As Konami said, it would only be temporary and it would disappear after use - but it didn't, not anywhere in Europe.
Not only were the pads bad, but the songlist as well - we got the fresh and new updated theme looks what DDR Extreme US, DDR Festival (JP) and DS Fusion bought to the home, with upgraded hardware. But the songlist? How Konami hyped it up to have a bigger songlist is beyond me, because whenever I try to make 49 songs look bigger than 65 songs, I fail, but that might just be me.
I wonder if Konami is listening too much (well, they asked DDRUK for their suggestions to the songlist...) to the DDR community - to me, it looks like they're concentrating too much in going along with the trend that dancing games are 'hip' and 'cool', where they put alot of licensed songs, and completely forget about the people actually playing the game regularily. Following trends like that has it's obvious downsides - mainly because trends are things that pass away over time, whereas the player community will play much longer. Hell, Machine dancing is an officially registered sport in Norway, where Positive Games has annually arranged European Championship tourneys twice, with something over 50 people come from all over Europe to compete in (I must admit that I was the one who drove through Sweden and a bit of Norway all the way from Finland to get there) - so there's a lot of potential there.
The Norwegians who are quite avid dancing game players, got tired over Konami not doing for the players who had been playing for years, made a deal with RoXoR Games in bringing In The Groove to Europe, which proved to be quite a success. Of course - Konami is thinking of releasing DDR SuperNova to Europe, which they've hinted that they'll put some 300+ songs into, but I think it's too late for them now. They screwed up pretty big, which made a lot of people move to ITG.
Of course, people may debut about the difficulty in ITG - is it ridiculous or not - but the fact remains - people
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
Think about it .. it's a win/win situation.
.. hell we'd pack the area with 500+ people just to watch and cheer the contestants on, and in a 10k attended convention filled with people with ZERO attention span, that's a feat. They'd flip, spin, handstand, breakdance .. hell I even saw one couple tango across both pads (seen a few couples on video on the internet do this as well).
.. arcade owners happy, Konami happy, TV producers happy.
It IS entertaining. I've been the Head of Electronic Gaming for a local fan-run Anime convention http://www.a-kon.com/ for the last 10 years, and the DDRcade has been a part of it for the last 6. Kids will spend literally HOURS on the machines playing and practicing, and we've had tournaments for both technical skill (perfect attack, i.e. 'dancing' the songs with the fewest mistakes on the highest difficulty) and creative ability (freestyle, basically 'showing your moves' whilst still managing to clear the song at a low difficulty).
Now this may sound like nothing big, but I'm telling you that as a judge, it's mind-boggling. I decided to become at least a bit proficent in the game when the arcade was integrated into my console gaming/PC LAN gaming umbrella, and watching these guys/girls/kids/adults do some amazing stunts was honestly entertaining
On the other hand, interest in the game has definitely been in the decline. One of the owners of a few DDR machines also runs an arcade, and he makes as much money on the machine over the course of a year as he does in the one weekend of the convention. So this will possibly re-establish the interest in DDR