ddr fading away

[Kevin Federline]

DDR has failed because it doesn't have any of my awesome music. Bitch, I got 50 mil and a Yankees cap, I'm fuckin' gangsta and I can do whatever the fuck I want.



KEEPIN IT REAL, REAL GANGSTA

[Sonick92]

[MasterWok]

DDR can never compare to ITG - I played DDR for like a year and a half and quit. Since 2006 I've been playing ITG for 3 years. ITG lets you stay interactive with the game through custom songs, lets you be more creative with harder songs, mines, hands, and different notes (that often go with the music). Not to mention the pads on itg are so much better and itg has a better scoring system with a displayed percentage. Anyone who chooses ddr over itg is truly lost

[DAVE101]

[ccristop]

[digi162]

I love how this instantly turned into an ITG vs. DDR debate on the first page.

I can agree with DDR fading away, and I want to throw in my two cents worth on the topic even though it won't really do anything but piss people off and quote debate me. I think DDR or just the whole dancing game genre itself has become to common place. It's not ground breaking or revolutionary anymore, so it's not going to gather the attention it did before. It doesn't matter what sort of gameplay tweaks are introduced, it just wouldn't be enough to push the series to a point where it'd gather the attention it previously did. So it creates the appearance of fading away to some degree. Plus with the increase in music game titles, it just feels like another notch in the now wider spectrum of the music game genre. Because we've seen some music games done to an impressive level, it's easy for others to look like shovelware if they can't out do another.

My major complaint is the community aspect. There are a ton of console releases, and with stepmania, you really don't have to go out to the arcade to play DDR anymore when you can just play it at home. The focus has really been drawn from the arcade experience to the home releases, which I think really doesn't help the genre. It does make it a little accessible but I think it's painfully agreeable that some of the recent DDR console releases haven't exactly been pleasing fans. Along the same lines, expensive cabinets prevent arcade owners from upgrading or getting the game, and some cabinets are just left in a crappy state you end up just playing the game at home because it's not worth it to go out. It's also hard to get people into the series when you invite friends to the arcade only to be greeted by some guy bar-raping Paranoia Hades with his shirt off, farmers tan, and he's drenching sweat all over the machine. Doesn't help either when you get on and they're making negative comments about your song selection or just anything in general to boost their ego. Visually that can turn people off from wanting to get into something IMO.

The dancing game genre is holding somewhat steady, but I think there's just a lot of things that need to be handled. Keeping things as is could probably see the genre fade out.

[JC_Denton46]

Man the first few post in this thread where an all out flame war, but I'm glad I keep reading and found the rest of the thread to be quite a good conversation

DDR was my life from 99 to 04, and I was so young (Started at 10 years old)

I was lucky to grow with the game, because I started on 2nd Mix and basically "ended" my DDR run when Extreme was basically starting to get stale

I remember seeing a 4th Mix machine for the first time, so cool

But nothing beats when we got a MAX2 machine in the area...blew my mind since 4th Mix and 2nd Mix was all I had for awhile

Then Extreme's started popping up all over the place, the community started to get huge, the tournament scene, etc.

Man I remember back in the 2nd-7th Mix days I would ALWAYS get a crowd of atleast 3 people watching, and on really busy days up to 20

Sometimes random people would even give me credits to play, they felt like I was giving a show or something

But now, there's one machine within driving distance, it's a Supernova, and the crowd is just...lame

I get plenty of people watching me since the machine is set up right next to the bar/bowling alley so the people sitting there can't help but notice the guy jumping around the machine with flashing lights

But what I mean by lame is there is only one guy I've ever really met from playing and had a good time with, ONE (He's also the only guy I've met there who plays on Expert)

All these rest are either groups of 12 year old girls that just give me glares when I try to show them things like how to change the difficulty or ask when I'll be able to play, or random teenage scene kids who play on Light and leave the second I step foot on the machine

I think for some reason people assume I'm some douche bag just because I'm playing on Expert, like I'm a show off or something

It's definently a new generation, and it's not even a fourth of what it used to be



Also, to the guy who mention 10k Commotion...THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

I totally read that when it first started and kept checking every week for a new part

I forgot the name, so thanks a ton for reminding me, I'm gonna have to go read it again now lol
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Back from the dead

[MasterWok]

[GERARDAMO]

[DAVE101]

About timing, I think he meant in terms of Perfect Attacking in Extreme, as there seems to be a lot less focus on Marvelous Attacking. The progressive difficulty is the best part about ITG in my opinion. It really helps you improve. Groove radars don't tell you much about the song, and it's much harder to find which 10 footer to attempt next.
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poop

[Suko]

I remember back in '04 or '05 driving to my local arcade on a Saturday and having to share the machine with at least 6, and sometimes as many as 13 fellow players. I think back to how awesome those times were, but I'd admit that presently I'd want more time to play on the machine and would probably be a little agitated to see how long my wait between sets would be.
_________________

"Arcades have gone away but the culture is not gone."

DDRecall | Groovestats | Beatspace | UI Bemani Club | Suko's Shirt Shack

[JC_Denton46]

[des144]

did anyone mention yet that an entire US state (I forget which, I think it was Delaware) bought DDR setups for all 700+ schools. They added it to the official state physical education program thingy. So now every single public school in that state has DDR! It's finally starting to be recognized as a good way to exercise while having fun and it gets gamers off the couch.
And they just featured it on the WCG reality show on sci fi which basically means it's one of the major genres of games.
DDR is sort of like Myspace. This is pretty much how it went. DDR came out and it was a bit slow, then it picked up and became insanely popular all at once. Then it sort of leveled off so it looks like it's starting to die but really it's just not growing much anymore. But it leveled off at a huuuuuge amount of players. So just because it's not catching on madly like it used to doesn't mean it's "fading away." I think it's set up for another big boom with the whole WCG and school thing and everyone wanting to get in shape and move around. That's the whole reason the Wii got popular so all the Wii people are probably going to discover DDR and and make a big popularity boom again.

[Suko]

I agree with your observation of it "leveling off". However, to say it leveled off with the peak number of players is incorrect. The number of active people in our community was a lot bigger in '03-'06. While the genre or community isn't "dead" today, it's also not as big as it once was.

Fun way to validate this claim:

Check out the polls section on DDRfreak
http://www.ddrfreak.com/statistics.php

Just go to the earlier polls (the ones that would be considered the "golden years" of DDR). Usually you'd have somewhere around 1000 people casting votes.

If you scroll to the most recent polls at the top, the numbers are nearly 1/8 that.

I'm not claiming this is scientific, but it is interesting.
_________________

"Arcades have gone away but the culture is not gone."

DDRecall | Groovestats | Beatspace | UI Bemani Club | Suko's Shirt Shack

[MasterWok]

[Suko]

[social life ninja supreme]

Coincidentally, all the arguing about DDR vs. ITG is a big reason why those games have died in popularity over the years.
_________________

Have you accepted Jesus into your stomach?

[MasterWok]

[__]

Here's a story for you:

I started in a time when using the bar was BANNED lol.

From this, you can tell that I started on DDR a long time ago. This is what I learned from going from DDR to ITG.

1. In DDR, you need to step firmly to get perfects. To an ITG player, it would be looked at like "stomping".

2. Any song can be cleared "no bar" in DDR. The reason is that all songs in DDR are under 700 steps and under two minutes (they average about 1:40). In ITG, after level 9, you pretty much NEED the bar to do well (unless you are in awesome shape, or have really good no bar skills).

3. DDR was not built to go beyond level 10. It was barely built to go beyond level 9. ITG was built to go to level 12 (with some shakiness). The players overclock it (songs, programming, RAM, etc.) and there exists reasonable means to go up to 14 and have it make sense. Anything beyond that is almost entirely built on stamina.

I could cite more info, but this will do for now.

[JC_Denton46]