Dancing

So I've been working on my dancing skills. You know, the ability to bust out such old favorites as the lawnmower and the shopping cart, and if I'm really lucky: the Robot.

Actually that' not at all what I'm talking about. The kind of dancing I'm talking about involves 4 arrows, a metal bar, original music, and enough whiny young adults to make a disco club owner cringe....after he's milked them of all of their money of course.

I play DDR. Except in my case it's called ITG. If you have no idea what those acronyms stand for you should probably just close out of the browser as fast as possible...or if you're particularly brave I suppose you can continue on to the next paragraph.

There's a HUGE difference between DDR and ITG. DDR or Dance Dance Revolution was created by Konami in 1999. It started in Japan, came to the US soon after, and became an arcade hit for several years thereafter. There are even Cracked articles about it, so you know it must have some comedic value. (It's a little below Robert Brockway's infamous insults but a little above anything written by Cody). It produced 8 iterations all based on the same premise. Arrows come up on the stream and you step on the corresponding arrow on the dance pad at the same time. Now I know that probably sounds pretty pedestrian. You're basically glorifying walking without going anywhere. In some parts of the US (hint: the parts that aren't full of obese people) people call such devices treadmills.

Unfortunately for me, Konami got smart and started instituting a SCORING system. OCD people, health nuts, and overly competitive people such as myself everywhere suddenly decided that scores made the game MEAN something. Instead of playing the game for fun, which would have soon resulted in a collective agreement to ban Konami from ever trying to enter US soil again (Seriously GUITAR GAMES? THAT'LL NEVER WORK.), Konami turned a very small core of people into addicts. We waste copious amounts of money each week in an effort to get better at the game.

Unfortunately for Konami, they got lazy. They stopped producing new games, which shattered the ILLUSION that they were actually introducing new content, when in actuality they were just reusing the same songs over and over again, and by shattering this illusion they let someone else get a foothold in the market. This someone else was a group of young guys who probably still got carded for alcohol and cigarettes, and yet they somehow managed to turn out a better product than Konami ever had with about 30 cents worth of funding and a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between music and the sound of an asthmatic breathing.

When Konami realized they were getting beaten out by a group of teenagers/20 somethings (one of whom wrote step patterns to songs drunk, high and ANGRY). They did the only thing a bunch of Japanese businessmen could do in the situation. They sued.

Long story short, it's 5 years after the lawsuit, DDR in the US still sucks (except now even normal people realize it sucks), but the weird thing is that people still play ITG. Granted they do so mostly because a hack was released that allows basically any song in existence to be played, but it's still quite an accomplishment that a game published by a company that went out of business 5 years ago is still going strong.

To give you an idea of the wide range of people who play this game I'll give you but two examples.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Sigatrev

Mad Matt is considered the fastest player alive. Just watch the video on his main page and you'll realize why.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Kote12TK#p/u/8/0GRvtvHQoBA
Kote12tk is a community favorite. You'll find out why pretty quickly.
http://aaronin.jp/boards/viewtopic.php?t=7157