Games Like Dance Dance Revolution
Llanque Mazurek
About a half mile from my house, around 60 women gather for Zumba at a local community center every Saturday morning. The crowd includes adolescent girls and women of advanced age. Attire ranges from scantily clad to full cover, with head scarves. Our skin tones reflect nearly every shade, from deep chocolate brown to pinky-white. We all seriously love to dance.
I like to dance near the front of the gym, where the music is loudest, but behind someone who has better moves, so I can cop them. Last Saturday I positioned myself behind a beaming woman wearing a copper-colored head-wrap and bright red lipstick, whose arms and hips move like water. The first salsa blared from the speakers and we were off, the whole group rocking out in our individual ways while moving back and forth through the gym in perfect synchrony, like a school of fish.
After about four songs, I felt my heart start to loosen a little from its post-election clench. We were still here; my dancing buddies had not disappeared. I looked around and silently thanked each of these women (and the couple brave men who join us) for keeping me afloat during so many moments when I was close to sinking. And then I saw one of us slip off to the side and sit down on the floor, her face in her hands. She was tough looking, covered in tattoos, wearing barefoot shoes on stout legs. A stalwart regular. And she was weeping.
The below picture is a special dance pad controller that one would hook up to a console system (such as Wii, PlayStation, XBox, etc.). Using this special controller enables the user to play video games using his/her lower body instead of hands and fingers (like with the handheld controller). Some games like Dance Dance Revolution (also known as DDR) are generally better with using the dance pad controller instead of the handheld controller. Using this controller also helps the user get exercise and burn calories better than just using hands/fingers.
The only problem with the soft pad controllers is that they tend to wear out so they become unusable. Usually the user is directed to throw the dance pad in the trash. The only problem with that approach is that it ends up on a landfill with all the environmental problems that comes with it.
I found that the loveseat could fit a variety of other dolls that are slightly smaller than 18 inches. In other words, I think this loveseat is best suited for dolls from 14 inches-18 inches. Two Wilde Imagination dolls (Ellowyne Wilde and Lizette Dionne) try out the couch for themselves in the photo below.
A couple of days ago I wrote a post about how I lost 30 pounds playing video games. Today I wanted to review the video games and try to convince you that just about anyone can use them in order to do the same thing.
This game in particular is good for people with all sorts of dancing abilities. To play this you do need some rhythm, but there are four difficulties overall, making it very easy to start out slow and gain expertise. With DDR, practice definitely makes perfect. Please note that this game will not teach you how to dance. (Rats!)
Game play is very fun and there are several options you can choose from. You can pick songs and dance, participate in a competition, or even go along with one of their exercise routines. The different levels of difficulty make this more competitive and challenging. There are lots of songs to choose from and there are a variety of genres. As an added bonus, some of the songs play the music video while you dance.
This has the same scoring system than the other game and it picks up on your movements better, which is definitely to your advantage. There are more options and more ways to score, which makes it more enjoyable. There are more dud songs on this one than the last one, but some of the song choices are right from the top 40 and are really fun to dance to.
Obviously it sucked. One of the machines connected to me did nothing but suck the leaking juices out of the holes. I could feel chunks of my brain fusing together from the constant current of pain. My best friend was Cyclimorph, a kind of morphine I shot up that sounds more like a Transformer than a means of pain relief. But they don't give it to you that often, because it's a bit too much better than everything else, ever. Pills did nothing but waste glasses of water. Hospitals are allowed to carve you open and take things out from inside, but they aren't allowed to ignore an entirely medicinal joint apparently. And even suppositories didn't distract me from the pain.
What worked better than any IV was my friend's N64. I left my broken body to battle virtual agents by uploading myself into the matrix of Perfect Dark. I now have more muscle memories of the Carrington Institute than my first home. Games worked where drugs didn't, because games wrap your body in a Somebody Else's Problem field. They don't block the pain, but they let you put it on a shelf with taxes and voicemails and other shit you'll get around to when you're not eliminating an army of alien terrorists.
From that moment my recovery wasn't an inspiring story of learning to walk again. It was a high score battle against my own able-bodied ghost. Which is way more compelling. "Inspirational" movie montages about overcoming injury are always set to music, and succeed in 60 seconds, because actually stumbling through it fucking sucks. You're standing on broken bits of yourself and expected to tell the difference between "KEEP GOING" pain and "STOP FUCK YOU'RE BREAKING IT" pain, and those are both the same feeling. Deciding to tough through agony sounds awesome, but in reality it's a decision you have to make at a hundred hertz every second you're still standing.
Dance Dance Revolution was a movie montage for real: three minutes of rapid movement, pumping adrenaline, thundering music, and absolutely nothing hurt! I'd be laid up later that night, but for those 180 seconds I was stomping around a body that still worked. Missing muscles were mere modifiers instead of trauma. And the music was way better than the sappy strings you get on television. "DYNAMITE RAVE" and "LOVE(HEART)SHINE" sound like someone worked out how to huff sugared neon.
Every hospital visit was an excuse to work my way back up the ranks. I cleared the first three difficulty levels on crutches before the bouncers even noticed what I was doing and made me stop. I had to hide my crutches before going in, becoming the exact opposite of a secret agent: hobbling up to the target, kneeling outside to fold, and then collapsing my specialized tools, wrapping them in my coat, and going in to be as loud and public as possible.
Soon, I could put my foot down. Which felt like shoving it into metal being boiled by lightning until the music started. Then the flashes of pain were just an extra beat in the music. I was up to four feet difficulty when a gang of scumbags in track suits tried to steal the money saving my spot in line. They relented when I revealed my hidden crutches, only to see me play and cry, "There's nathin' rang with his fuckin' leg!" It's not often a bunch of screaming track-suits accuse you of something positive. In fact, a cluster of track-suits crying that you've deceived them is usually the exact opposite of "your physical condition has improved in the recent past." And I danced right past them back to five feet.
I only ever got back up to six. I survived but would never clear "PARANOIA Survivor MAX" expert again, and that's not a bad trade. I still have to wear a brace to remind my left foot where the missing pieces used to hold it, but I'm still dancing, and thanks to the Kinect I can play Dance Central at home, instead of searching for a DDR armored platform that looks like it was built for a tap-dancing RoboCop.
Games are escapism, even from our own flesh. Palliative care should be standard for every doctor. Hospital beds should be fitted with Tetris. If someone's going to be stuck on his or her ass for a month, Candy Crush can improve the quality of life. Unfortunately most "gamified" apps are made by people who only heard that word at a funding meeting, which is why they're just to-do lists with dumber animations.
Games aren't louder than our own bodies; they're just more fun to listen to. Bodies only nag us. "I'm hungry!" "I'm thirsty!" "I'm being crushed under tons of collapsed rock!" Who wants to hear that? In the future they'll realize the first true cyborg was a kid ignoring his own bladder to finish a level. Games can push you clear through pain and fatigue, because bright colors and external beeps work way better than bullshit like "hopes and dreams." DDR helped me realize that.
Dance Dance Revolution has been met with critical acclaim for its originality and stamina in the video game market, as well as popularizing the use of videogames as a medium for fitness and exercise. There have been dozens of arcade-based releases across several countries and hundreds of home video game console releases, promoting a music library of original songs produced by Konami's in-house artists and an eclectic set of licensed music from many different genres. The game is also known for its passionate fanbase, as well as its growing competitive tournament scene. The DDR series has also inspired similar games such as Pump it Up by Andamiro and In the Groove by Roxor Games.
The core game involves the player stepping their feet to correspond with the arrows that appear on the screen and the beat of the song playing. During normal gameplay, arrows scroll upwards from the bottom of the screen and pass over a set of stationary arrows near the top (referred to as the "guide arrows" or "receptors", officially known as the Step Zone). When the scrolling arrows overlap the stationary ones, the player must step on the corresponding arrows on the dance platform, and the player has been given a judgment for their accuracy of every streaked note (From highest to lowest: Marvelous,[a] Perfect, Great, Good, Almost,[b] Miss[c]).
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