New compy delays

Haha whew back from the dead.

I didn't post for like a month and haven't played DDR in like a week. I don't intend to actually post very much about what I do in the blog which I guess is missing the point of blogging...

But! The updates are as follows.

I got a new computer which makes this awesome and everything. Though the newness threw me off my DDR'ing as I was to busy playing with my toys to actually do any DDR. Plus I had to get some old files from my old PC brought over here and that was annoying mostly due to the fact that the old PC had no monitor. The said files were the 6 gigs of DDR music I have for stepmania.

When I installed Stepmania again I went ahead and put a theme on it. Which is basically a skin for how it looks and works. It's pretty cool looking :D

Back up and running now. I intend to make good on my promise to keep this up and get those 5000 songs knocked down by February. only 4279 to go eeep!

Broke 500

Woohoo I'm at 513 songs. It's going quite well. When I started I could do level 7 songs and usually get A's, now I can do level 9 and get A's, while they still wipe me out I have become quite good at them, I'm finding the level 7 songs aren't enough of a workout so my average song rating is 8. I almost never get lower than a A on anything and I often AA things. I am yet to AAA anything but I've been close.

Blisters and Monitors

So I haven't been dancing the past couple of days due to a massive deep blister. I can barely see it but I can feel that it is there. It hurt quite a lot. I feel better now though my foot still hurts a little.

On a more interesting note I got a heart rate monitor for my birthday. What it does is basically tells how much energy you are using by monitoring your heart rate. DDR for the playstation has a work out mode and I was always curious how accurate it was. I had my suspicions that it may be giving more calories than what actually happened. My average calories burned on the playstation was 35 a song. Last night I did 8 songs and my average was 30 calories. This proves that it is roughly correct. DDR is as good of a workout as I thought. So when I play a 21 song set I burn 630 calories. Thats not to bad.

Custom Songs

I found a way to increase the amount of songs I have woohoo. Stepmania allows you to create your own songs. Now when I first found this out I was psyched! After I tried to make one however I became much less psyched... See you have to figure out the bpm's yourself. If they are off then your song won't sync up with the arrows. So I tried with Andrew W.K's ready to die and I clocked it's bpm at roughly 180.00. So then I tried to assign the steps and you can record the song as it plays. To my dismay no matter how I altered the bpm it never synced up.

Fast forward to last week when I did a little research into how other people make step files. I got a link to a program that analyzes songs and gives you the bpm. Andrew WK's Ready to Die is in fact 187.20 bpm.

So with the proper BPM in place it's now easy to just grab the bpm and hit record on the song to lay out some simple steps. The steps aren't fantastic as they are basically a rough draft but from my experience they are still a lot of fun and they don't have any of the configuration I hate.

As a side note yesterday I twister both my ankles by slipping off the dance pad twice. My right ankle got better in a few minutes but my left still feels a little off. Not enough to keep me from dancing though

Socks

Been a fun couple of weeks so for. It's been going very well. I'm up to 222 dances which is 4.5% of my goal. in 4.3% of the time. So I'm a little bit ahead of my goal.

One of my biggest concerns when playing DDR are my socks. I think about it when I put them on in the morning and right before I play DDR. If my socks are to thin the dance pad hurts my feet to much. If my socks are not on properly then the bloody seams give my blisters. Ya thats right socks give me blisters. If they are too thick my feet sweat to much and it isn't comfortable. I don't wear shoes because I find it's like playing the piano with mittens on. You can't feel anything!. I don't play barefoot because I am quite certain I would shred my feet into tiny bits. If I am wearing a bad sock in the morning or if I can't get a seam to move properly I will remove the offending sock. This raises another problem as fresh socks provide less traction. So I find my newly fitted foot slips a lot more than my other one. This is less disconcerting if I change both socks as it is an equal problem. I have been contemplating buying a large amount of new socks chosen just for there DRR abilities.

Ya I bet you don't put so much thought into your sock choices do you?

Technique

I want to start this post by saying I used a Dance Pad to play stepmania. Now as a huge fan of DDR imagine my joy when I discovered stepmania the bounty of free songs to download. The endless joys of user made content. Now imagine my horror after downloading a pack of some of my favorite video game songs and when I went to play them they should all be given feet ratings of 15+. At first I was amazed that there were people who were that skilled to not only be able to dance this difficulty but to enjoy it. After a little research however I found that these songs were never intended to be put under someone's feet but in fact were meant for someone's fingers. I could not believe it, there were sad little cretins out there who stared at the monitor not more than 2 feet away with an avid fixation as they diddle their keyboards four directional keys.

I mean what is the point of that? Go play guitar hero or something. Getting off your feet and onto your butt you remove a huge element of the game play.

There are 2 very large parts to playing DDR. They work together of course. The first is the ability to hear the music and act accordingly. You must be able to anticipate the flow of the song and how the arrows match up. The second is being able to read the arrows and is incredibly important for positioning. If you come out of a series of arrows wrong you could wind up facing backwards. A lot of times I believe this is intentionally done and can be a lot of fun if done on purpose but getting disorientated does not bode well when you don't mean to. So if you play with the keyboard you don't have to worry about positioning you just read a little ahead so you know what is coming. When your on the pad you have to worry about feet placement hold arrows are a huge challenge because they will paralyze one of your feet making you do odd contortions to get the arrows. Momentum is another issue. Being a big guy I have to keep my body swinging properly so that I can get an arrow and not fly off the pad. When I play I must absorb the entire screen of arrows and my body has to figure out the right dance pattern so not only can I read the arrows but get them as well.

It just seems like you're playing half the game by playing with a keyboard. Not to mention the health benefits. There is nothing like being 3/4 a way through a song having your legs burning and sweat dripping down your face killing yourself to keep your 350 step combo and to finish that sucker. Then you breath hard take a big drink of water as it goes to a D rating than flips back to a AA.

By the way I play Angelic style. (no fancy moves spins or anything I just hit the arrows)

My DDR Past

Alright. This is feeling good. I've been playing DDR for a long time but only recently got back into it within the last couple months.

I used to play a lot back in high school. I was introduced to DDR when I was 16 at my sisters 19th birthday. Me and my brother talked the fellow who brought it over into letting us borrow it for a bit. That night after the party me and my brother played until exhaustion. The next day our legs were so sore we skipped school because we could barely walk.

So we decided that we wanted to have our own copy of the game and we went out and picked DDR MAX up (We were playing DDR Konamimix) as well as 2 plastic dance pads. After 6 months and going through 6 plastic dance pads we decided to invest in a metal dance pad. We went online and just bought the first one off e-bay it was around $150 (oops should have done some looking around). It worked by having a plastic panel with metal on the bottom suspended over another piece of metal and it was supported/separated by a foam outline underneath. This eventually caused problems. First me and my brother are both quite heavy and we eventually started cracking the panels. The second issue was that underneath the metal on the bottom through sweat and spills eventually started rusting. After about a year and a half the panels finally had it and split.

So I went through a lot of trouble and money to build my own panels out of plexiglass and I tapped aluminum foil to the bottom. They worked very well until one day the pad just quit. No explanation no nothing it just up and died. This left us DDR less for a long time until I went and did some research for a new dance pad. It was between a red octane metal dance pad and a cobalt flux metal dance pad.

I went with the Cobalt flux ($300). It is awesome it works with a different system than most dance pads meaning it will last for an extremely long time. It has a layer of metal on the bottom that is activated when it completes a circuit. The ingenious part is the layer on top is a concave piece of metal so to activate you have to flatten the bubble. Giving it a lot more tensile strength and it is shatter proof. To keep the metal from getting dented and such there is then a piece of polymer over top. The only part I think is a little dumb is that the panels have cracks between them allowing dirt to get in. The dirt than gets mashed to the bottom panel resulting in a need to scrub it every couple months. Not a big deal though it's still awesome.

This went very well until I left for college. I was afraid I might bother the neighbors to much by all the jumping around and no one likes a big 270lbs man stomping around so I put my dance pad away for a long time.

I busted it out every once in a while but I got tired of playing the same songs over and over again. I had 4 DDR games: Max, Max2, Extreme, Supernova. Each of those games had around 60 songs probably 30% where shared between them. I had about 10-20 songs on each that fit my skill level and I enjoyed playing so I had roughly 50 songs I liked across 4 games. This made it annoying to play because I would get bored and want to play another song but it was on another Disc and I didn't want to switch. Also my playstation2 would randomly corrupt the memory and I would lose my save files on the games and lose my songs.

So then one day I was at the college and I was playing a game of DOTA with some of my friends when I heard a DDR song in the room. I went looking for the source and someone was playing DDR on their computer with the keyboard. I wasn't overly impressed but I talked to him a little and then I promptly forgot all about it. Fast forward a year or so and I am sitting in Ottawa with nothing to do. I then remember this thing called stepmania that that guy was playing. I decided to have a look. I start poking my nose around and I realize this is exactly like DDR it's awesome. You have to provide your own songs but still you can find every DDR song. I was so pumped to play except my Dance pad was in London...

So when I finished in Ottawa I came back to London and installed Stepmania on my PC... only problem was my Dance pad was only set up for PS2. No problem I'll find a cable that converts PS2 controllers 2 usb. I found one and to my dismay it treated the arrows like a joystick... so pressing 2 at once was impossible (quite a problem for DDR) I then also noticed that it lagged... So this thing sucked and wasn't going to let me play.

I went on Cobalt flux's site to see if they could answer my problem. When I bought the dance pad it came with a PS2 control box only. I now found that they came with a new control box that included every sort of game port (usb xbox playstation gamecube). So I bought one. I was afraid it might lag like the other one but no it worked wonderfully and I have been playing off and on since.

I decided to do these 5000 dances because I love DDR and I want to get a tad more fit. I never have fun with cardio workout but DDR does it for me. I'm excited to test my physical mettle and get this going.

Thanks for reading :D

5000 Dances

Who: Me an overweight nerd who loves DDR.
What: To do 5000 DDR songs in under a year.
Why: I love DDR and I want to get more fit.
Where: My Office where my Dance pad resides.
When: from February 13 2009 to before February 13 2010