Can’t Stop The Beat

[EDIT: Big thanks to Grey for getting the Blog of the Day award for Games for August 27, 2006!

— JZ]

A number of years back there was a game that consistently drew me to arcades around the country. It was called “Punchmania”, and as you might guess it involved punching the arcade machine. It had a story and stages to it based on the anime “Fist of the North Star” (aka Hokuto no Ken) and you could play as Kenshiro, Rei, or even on the hardest difficulty Roah (where you would in the end have to beat the good guy Ken). You had to punch six pads as they emerged from the machine – the trick was to hit them at exactly the right moment when the light came on, and not to use too much force. At the end of each stage you had to perform some special Hokuto or Nanto move to finish off the opponent – usually something like punching the pads 100 times in 5 seconds. It was highly fun and very addictive, and I probably spent a lot of money on it overall. After extensive playing I began to find that I would see lit up pads when I closed my eyes, imagining the timing of when to hit them.

After 3 weeks of extensive playing of Stepmania - which has become a lot more concentrated lately as I try harder to better myself - I find that I’m suffering something similar. When I close my eyes I see arrows. Multi-coloured arrows float up through my head and I imagine the steps I would have to make to them. And it’s a lot worse than it was with Punchmania – happening much more frequently, especially first thing in the morning or going to bed at night. When half asleep is the worst time – I end up trying to do steps and waking myself up (as documented previously).

Playing Stepmania has made me realise a few things about my other gaming interests. Firstly, I don’t think I’ll ever again play a single game as much as I’m playing this right now – it’s simply unhealthy, and I’m not in any way comfortable with how my mind is becoming obsessed with the game. Secondly, the reason I liked Punchmania yet mock DDR games was mostly due to its theme – I would never have played it if it wasn’t based on Fist of the North Star. The game itself was fun, but not as fun as the anime behind it which generated a real love for the game. Thirdly, and most importantly for me, I’ve realised the reason I enjoy RPGs so much. It’s that sense of continuous progression, constantly improving your character with higher levels and new skills, stats, equipment etc, making you more able to face greater challenges. That joy I’m experiencing somewhat with Stepmania, and the character I’m improving is of course me.

But it can’t last forever. There will come a point where I can do no better, and it’s not like I can just start again from level one. This satisfaction from improvement is ultimately doomed to disappear, and without any story or entertaining theme to the game there will no longer be a reason to play. For me the game has only that one major drawing point, and it’s short-lived. Even now I find there are many songs I like that I don’t dance to any more, because they only have low level difficulty settings. Now that I’m beyond them what’s the point?

I do have a competitive streak in me, so if I had people around me who played as well then I would be tempted to keep playing in competition with them, rising myself to even greater heights. Like this guy here has, or even more impressively this other guy. Looking at those videos has made me realise just how poor a player I am in comparison with the masters.

I’ve said goodbye to 4 and 5-foot now – I only use them for warm-ups at the start of a session. I thought they were hard before, but trying out 6-foot difficulty songs has been a whole new level of intensity. As I said before, 4 and 5 foot songs use a lot more in the way of half-beat steps and diagonal jumps. 6-foot goes beyond that by making most of the steps either jumps or half-beats or some other difficult manoeuvres, all whilst vastly increasing the speed and density of arrows. This basically means you’re pretty much constantly moving both feet, as opposed to having little rests for one or more feet every so often on the easier levels. Dancing can get frantic and desperate as you try to keep twisting your body round to quickly hit the steps. There’s no more time for thought and planning – you need to react instantly to everything you see.

So how have I been doing at this new difficulty level I’m forcing myself into? Well, mixed results overall. The easier ones I can get As and Bs on, the harder ones Es and Fails. To be honest I’m simply awful at timing the half-steps, and I get the diagonal jumps wrong a lot. My proudest performance has been getting a B in “No Limit”, which is apparently from one of the actual DDR mixes. I’ve found it to be very hard, but kept pushing myself to get a good result. When I got that B I actually felt like I was dancing in the same way as the guy in the first video above, with my feet constantly flowing between the buttons at high speed.

One thing I’ve been trying to figure out is the five variables of Stream, Voltage, Air, Freeze and Chaos. Every song has different maximums for these at different difficulty levels, and your performance at the song determines how well you do in each category. Air seems to be for jumps, which I usually do well enough in, and Freeze seems to refer to holding steps, which I’m often perfect at. The other 3 I’m normally okay with, apart from Voltage which I’m sometimes awful at, but I can’t figure out what they mean. In one song on which I hit every step I got Voltage to maximum, so it could maybe have something to do with combos. What’s interesting about these ratings is that the maximum values for each seem to be determined by the game itself, so it’s a way of telling how hard the song really is, irrespective of how the step-chart maker has set the difficulty rating.

I’m now into the last week of my 30 day trial of Stepmania, and I feel I have come very far. Dancing to “No Limit” has forced me to play in a different way – something more chaotic; far faster with less time to think, and both feet constantly moving. I need to improve my timing with this style of play, but it’s putting me on the path to mastering the higher difficulty levels. I’m a completely different type of player than I was 22 days ago when I first got my feet on a dance mat. And so now I feel I’m ready to face the machine. That’s right, tomorrow I will be going to an arcade to find an actual DDR machine (or one of its clones) to test my feet and my skills against the might of the real Dance Dance Revolution.

Positives: My computer isn’t good enough to run Stepmania whilst also recording a video of it – quite a handy excuse not to put up embarrassing clips for now. Oh, you want to know something positive about the game? Well, er… let me get back to you on that one…
Negatives: The arrows, the arrows! They’re all around me, make them stop!! For the love of god please stop!!!
Overall so far: Expert DDR players are scary. But even scarier is the feeling that I don’t think it would take me that long to actually get up to that level of play. But that would involve more arrows invading my head, and they scare me even more…

9 comments August 27th, 2006