Last month my brother got a free DDR pad at his work, hurling us straight back into an obsession we thought we'd put to rest fifteen years ago. This kind of high-impact exercise is harder on my body than it was in my dainty adolescent twink years, but the cardio feels great and I'm glad to have an excuse to work up a sweat.
The real pleasure, though, has been the chance to reacquaint myself with the music. DDR radically shaped my musical tastes as a youth, for better and mostly worse, but even as a manic happy hardcore junkie I still kept an open mind to the rest of the franchise's massive library, if only for the stepcharts. In my wiser, mellower adulthood, I have come to rebuke the false messiah Jenny Rom and turn toward the riches of TaQ and dj nagureo and Slake. The flashy Dancemania stuff often overshadowed the wealth of electronica that Konami's musicians cranked out for the better part of a decade, so it's nice to have a release like Konamix that highlights their contributions, even if that's just a result of licensing issues.
And really, aside from framerate, the only thing differentiating one DDR from another is their songlists (or a bunch of ancillary game modes that no one gives a shit about), so one I can get behind counts for a lot! Based on the metric I developed for evaluating these song lists, epiglottis' Highly Objective Library Evaluation (henceforth eHOLE), Konamix scores a 58% with 30 of the 52 songs being listenable, fun to dance to, or ideally both. More hits than misses, tons of funky-ass Club Mix stuff, Paula Terry only gets exhumed from her wicked sepulcher once... at this point the CS releases were still content with being niche and weird rather than trying to land a big normie audience and I'm thankful for that!
Favorite song: patsenner. THE WOODBLOCK! Come on!!!
The real pleasure, though, has been the chance to reacquaint myself with the music. DDR radically shaped my musical tastes as a youth, for better and mostly worse, but even as a manic happy hardcore junkie I still kept an open mind to the rest of the franchise's massive library, if only for the stepcharts. In my wiser, mellower adulthood, I have come to rebuke the false messiah Jenny Rom and turn toward the riches of TaQ and dj nagureo and Slake. The flashy Dancemania stuff often overshadowed the wealth of electronica that Konami's musicians cranked out for the better part of a decade, so it's nice to have a release like Konamix that highlights their contributions, even if that's just a result of licensing issues.
And really, aside from framerate, the only thing differentiating one DDR from another is their songlists (or a bunch of ancillary game modes that no one gives a shit about), so one I can get behind counts for a lot! Based on the metric I developed for evaluating these song lists, epiglottis' Highly Objective Library Evaluation (henceforth eHOLE), Konamix scores a 58% with 30 of the 52 songs being listenable, fun to dance to, or ideally both. More hits than misses, tons of funky-ass Club Mix stuff, Paula Terry only gets exhumed from her wicked sepulcher once... at this point the CS releases were still content with being niche and weird rather than trying to land a big normie audience and I'm thankful for that!
Favorite song: patsenner. THE WOODBLOCK! Come on!!!