swanton00's Full Review: DDR Max: Dance Dance Revolution for PlayStation 2
Dance Dance Revolution, the phenomenon the took over Japanese arcades hit the American audience sometime around 㥫. Starting off in very few arcades with the original mix that had not even 15 songs, this physical game has gained quite the popularity, especially with people ages 12-mid 20's. In a short three or four years the franchise has expanded into more than eight arcade mixes and close to that with the console versions. Konami now plans to stop with the arcade versions for good with their 2003 release of DDRExtreme, but that don’t mean DDR’ers won’t get a chance to move their feet to new tunes. Konami now has the Xbox and PS2 with their own series’ of new mixes. As it is now, we will continue to get at least two new console versions a year, and each one becomes more of an American style stirring away from its Japanese roots that made it as cool as it is in the Arcades. How could Konami let such a great franchise like this become worse with each new console version? They should have learned what Americanizing a DDR does when the arcades, Dance Dance Revolution USA Mix failed. But this review is of one of the earlier home versions, Dance Dance Revolution Max, the 6th mix.
It’s More Epic Than Final Fantasy 7!
Well no, it’s really not. In fact there is no story at all. However if your cool like me than you can pretend your playing to become the best in the world and you will crush your competition! Not too original or epic, but it’s motivation.
Teach You To Dance, I Will
As if you didn’t know, this game is played using your feet. You step on arrows that come across the screen according to which direction their facing when they hit the top. Eh, that made it sound like the each arrow spins or something and isn’t facing the same directional the whole way up. Well, that’s not how it is. The pad has four arrows, the up, down, left and right. There are four slots or panels in the shape or arrows at the top of the screen. Arrows come from the top and when they get right in the middle of the panel of the same direction, you hit that arrow. Now that doesn’t mean as soon as it gets up there hit it, be ready for it and hit that arrow on the pad at exactly the same time as it hits the middle. Don’t understand that? Here’s another way of putting it: When a right arrow appears at the bottom of the screen, it will rise upwards. Your object is to hit the right arrow on the pad you’re standing on at the exact time it reaches the middle of the panel up top.
Don’t think that there will be one arrow rising at a time because where would the exercise be in that? You’re just thinking lazy. This version of the game has three difficulty setting, and a fourth special one we shall get into later, that will test your foot-eye coordination skills. So it’s not really dancing but more of using coordination. So now your probably disappointed that you wont actually get to improve your dancing grove, but there is a bright side my friend…exercise! You will do plenty of sweating, getting tired and you can even lose weight. DDR is recommended by some doctors for weight loss, seriously. But how could a few measly steps on arrows get you thin? Well you will improve and move on to more physically challenging stuff. The whole idea is to move to the beat of the song. You select a song to play and arrows come up and they reach the top at synchronization with the beat or rhythm of the song. So hearing the song may be nessessary for more difficult songs when the arrows can be hard to see, which is commonly referred to as reading the steps. A big part of becoming a dancing master is memorizing the steps in the songs. No, the songs don’t just randomly through arrows at you, each songs will have the same steps at the same time ever time you play that song. Each song ranges from roughly one minute and 20 seconds to one minute and 50 seconds. That don’t sound like to long, and it really isn’t but it sure does seem like a lot longer when your playing.
The difficulty of the song is weighed on a graphical chart to the next to the song title when you are selecting a song. There are five things that the difficulty is judged upon. These are stream, voltage, chaos, air and freeze. The more the color goes towards the word the more of that the song will have. Freeze indicates how many freeze arrows appear in the songs. Freeze arrows are the long green ones that you must hold onto until the whole line of an arrow has reached the top. Air determines the amount of jumps in the song. Jumps simply mean you hit two arrows at once, which you have to jump for. Stream measures how long the steps go on for at a time without giving you even a moments break. For the most part you won’t be stopping throughout the songs for more than a half a second, but sometimes you will get lucky with maybe even a two second pause in between the steps. Chaos shows how complex the steps will be. The higher the chaos the more rhtymatic you will have to be as different types of steps that require different timing will be placed in songs. Voltage does…um…well I really don’t know exactly what voltage is, but its something. Aside from the chart, a songs difficulty will also be measure with a step chart. A step chart is a bar with 10 feet in it that rests next to the songs title. The more of the feet that are colored in, the harder the song. Like a certain track but its to easy for you? Well then, increase the difficulty. There are three difficulty settings, Light (easy), Standard (medium) and heavy (hard) to play on. The harder the difficulty you put it on, the more steps there will be and the more complex and steps will be. Another factor to judge the songs complexity is the speed the arrows rise to the top. DDRMax has its share of slow songs like Sana Mollete Ne Ente, but things can get very speed with Max 300. The speed is measure by how many beats there are in a minute. For this mix Sana Mollete Ne Ente appears as the slowest song in the game with about 60 bpm. Others like Healing Vision Angelic Mix and Max 300 reach between 250 and 300 bpm.
Some of the more advanced steps can be very complicated to learn and might just take a lot of practice. But one thing I’ve noticed, some people get better a lot quicker than others. DDRMax doesn’t have the beginners difficulty yet (that’s Max 2) so beginners have to start out on light which might prove to be difficult. At start you may be hitting an two arrows a second for a average of about 120 steps in a light song. There can be quite a bit more or less depends on the song. On an average heavy song you can be hitting five or six steps a second and heavy songs will usually have anywhere between 260 and 600 steps in the song. Besides just the regular rhythm stepping, some songs have more complicated steps known as gallops in them. Think galloping as in a horses gallops of the sort. There are parts that consist of a lot of steps that will have you galloping around between the four arrows. Other more difficult maneuvers are crossing your legs over and doing spins. Some songs have step patterns that allow you to spin in a complete 𣟐 circle, that stuff can take some practice.
If you’ve ever walked into an arcade and seen someone playing this game the odds are you will think its dumb and would never want to try it. At least that’s how myself and some other were when we first seen it. Heck I first tried it back in like 2000 or 2001 with the 3rd mix and I hated. I will admit that I was embarrassed at the time and now I regret not starting that early. I ended up trying it again early 2004 due to the fact that a lot of my friends were playing and watching them slowly gained me interest. Heh, now I’ve become better than most that I know, maybe the same can happen to you, remember your goal is to become the best in the world. DDRmax has a good 60-70 songs to obtain ones interest. You’ll start with only maybe about 30 but as you play more songs in the game mode, you will unlock more. It can take a lot of playing to unlock all the songs. I think the last song gets unlocked after 250 songs are played, and that takes a long time. Most would figure the game contains lots of techno type dance beats, which it does, but there more to it than that. You’ll find some club tracks like “Ecstasy”. Then theres some slow paced hip-hop tunes such as the lesbian song “Secret Rendevous” and “Baby Baby Gimmie Your Love”. You’ve also got your fast paced heavy tracks that make you want to move like egyptian sounding “Exotic Ethnic” and “Healing Vision”. Max even has the fameous American song “ I like to Move it” from the late 90’s and even the worlds only Christmas, love, techno song, “Silent Hill”. Each songs got a unique sound and beat to it, your sure to find some that you shall call your favorites. There is but a few that I don’t like, but uh…I forgot the names.
Ways To Differ Your Dance
Besides just the normal game mode, DDRMax has the training mode, edit mode, oni mode, lesson and workout modes. Lesson just explains starting off in great detail giving you tutorial on the different types of steps and such, it’s a waste of time even for a beginner. Workout is another lousy mode I don’t like. As the name intends, its meant to workout. But wouldn’t playing other modes enable you to get exercise aswell? Yes but this is where is counts how many calories you burn. It averages out how many steps you hit into a number of calories and tells you what you should have burned. I’m not interested in losing weight to this doesn’t matter to me. Training mode is great. Unlike lesson it lets you pick any unlocked song and practice it in a variety of ways. Put on any of the option mods that you can use in game mode and even use advanced options to learn the song. You can take away the music and just have beeps and click noises that takeover for the beat. My favorite thing is the ability to lower the speed of the song and its not just the pace that the arrows come up, it actually slows the song down much like playing a DVD on slow or 0.5. These two things really help to learn parts of a song or the whole song that you just don’t understand. Edit mode that’s you take the steps in any song and change them. You can delete all the old steps and create a whole new step pattern or just add steps to the existing ones. It goes into a lot of detail and lets you use all sorts of complex steps you want in the song. Make it as difficult or as easy as you want. You can make as many edits as you wish. Lastly is a mode for the true masters, the pro DDR’ers. Challenge mode, aka, Oni Mode. In this mode you will choose a set of songs that is pre dertermined to play them all once without a break in between. The song list and difficulty setting is predetermined so in Max you cannot make your own Oni courses which does suck. The ones that they give you generally contain a lot of light and standard songs. I do not believe that there is one with all heavy. That is sure to drive a pro away, not that I have anything against light and standard, but I pick Oni for a challenge. You may ask how it could be hard with light and standard, I will tell you how. The songs regular life bar is gone and replaced by a battery bar. The battery gives you four lives. You lose a live by missing a step. Losing all the bars on the battery and it’s game over. At the end of each song you will gain 1-3 bars back, depending on how hard the song is.
Now that I think about it, I never went into much detail about that game mode did I? After you select your difficulty you will play through anywhere between one and 5 stages (songs). You select how many stages you want in the options. You can select any song you want for the stages. At the top of the screen you will see a life bar. Hitting about 10 steps in a row will cause the bar to start rasing slowly, the higher the combo you have, the more the bar will raise until it reaches Max and it turns a fire color. Missing steps will cause the bar to decrease, the bar empting will result in your failure and you will be sent back to the title screen. To raise the bar you must get a good grade on the step. Hitting the steps at the right time will give you a better rating. The ratings for hitting each step are as follows, Boo, Poor, Good, Great and Perfect with of course perfect being the best. The better the rating the higher score you get. Score isn’t for anything but show. At the end of the song you will receive an overall rating. This rating is a letter grade that ranges from E-A. Getting better and increases the amount of perfect you get will cause you to get the super AA and the ultra AAA rankings.
Visuals Matter Most
Well not in DDR they don’t, in fact they don’t at all but I just thought I’d say that. Graphically, DDR isn’t much. You see arrows of three different colors rasing up the screen and a background video to go along with the music. The video is distracting to some but I find them amusing. There all a bunch of weird and random scenes of like words and objects floating by or some random cactus’s dancing. They don’t make sence at all but they are amusing. If they bother you, you are given the option to turn them off in the options.
Dun..Dun..Dun..Dun…...Dun
Besides the music the only thing you will hear is the announcers and the audience cheers or boos if you decided to keep them on. The audience boos at your misses and cheers at your combos. The announcer will say some random lines according to how your doing, announce everytime your combo went up by 100 and such. While he can say some annoying things, I like to keep him on, it gives it more of a arcade feel. I already described the music in detail a few paragraphs ago and I’m not putting it here again so go back up if you wish to read about the games music.
Can I Call You A Dancing master?
Why yes you can…er, uh ya, get DDRMax.
Release: October 28th, 2002
Developer: Konami
Console: Playstation 2
Genre: Music, Rhythm
1-2 Player(s)
The game features over 60 new songs -- that 100+ minutes of music for you to move to Fantastic next-generation graphics bring the blistering excitemen...More at Amazon Marketplace
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