Dance Dance Revolution
What is DDR?
Dance Dance Revolution, DDR for short, is a video game introduced for the first time in Japan in 1998 by Konami. This arcade game is a bit special - you use your feet to play the game.
A DDR player needs a dance mat or pad if he wants to play this game. On dance pad (or arcade's platform) you will find four arrows: left, down, up, right. At the beginning of a song player can see on the screen four stationary white arrows, which blink to the rhythm of the song played. After few instants, he can see colored arrows coming up the screen. When a colored arrow is just over the white arrow the player have to use his leg to confirm that arrow on the pad.
There aren't just single arrows to be confirmed. Soon you will find out that there are two arrows at once (called jumps). Another type of arrow is a hold or freeze. A player has to stand on the arrow to confirm it.
Speed of songs varies. It is given in Beats Per Minute (BPM). A song with 140BPM and more is considered as fast. Certain songs change BPM and certain songs actually freeze in time (scrolling of arrows actually). There's also a possibility to change speed of scrolling arrows.
There are several game modes: Single mode, Double mode (one player plays on two pads), Versus mode and Solo Mode (One player, playing on a pad with six arrows - UL, UR, L, D, U, R). There is also Nonstop mode and Challenge mode.
There are three (four or five) levels for each DDR game. Beginner, Light, Standard (Trick), Heavy(Maniac), Challenge (Oni). Challenge mode is quite new. The same name was used for a mode where you had to pass several songs in one go (with four lives for each song). Each song for each level has its own difficulty given in feet. The difficulty ranges from 1 to 12 feet (officially maximum is 10). 9-footers are called catas (from catastrophe). In certain DDR games you can see a graph of difficulty (a pentagon). There are five elements in the graph - voltage, chaos, air, stream and freeze. Voltage is a percentage of arrows per song (it's possible to have more than 100%. Songs with voltage like this are really difficult to pass.). Chaos is a percentage of arrows out of rhythm. Air is percentage of jumps in a song. Stream is a percentage of repetitions of arrow patterns and freeze is a percentage of freezes in a song. Each confirmation of arrow is rated differently how close to the confirmation was. Usually there is Perfect, Great, Good, Boo and Miss. In certain games (after unlocking) there is also Marvelous, which is better than Perfect. After few perfects and greats (and marvelous) you will get a combo. Anything worse then great will stop the combo.
After each stage a player gets his grade. The letter grades are from AAA to E. If the player managed to have a full combo with all perfects (almost) he would get AAA. If player has more than 90% of the song, he gets AA. E is considered as 'failed' (when you play versus mode and you get fail, the other player continues to play. At the end you will get E. In single mode you will get Failed, and you cannot finish your song.).
As you can see or you already found out principle of the game is simple. When you get better you can start to freestyle.Last Update 21:01 2004/12/05 S'Tsung