Turns out playing Dance Dance Revolution for 90 minutes a day for nine days straight when you’re 39 is a good way to lose weight and just absolutely ruin your knees.
It’s been awhile since I’ve played a purposeful amount of DDR. After my last vacation, the tremendous amount of eating and drinking that took place forced my hand (or rather my feet) to get back into it, and I’ve gone further off the deep end than possibly ever before. Though I don’t tend to get into the more intense steps (my general level cap is 7, which might be 10 to 14 now, since apparently the scales were extended some years ago long after I stopped playing console versions), though I prefer 5s and 6s, since they’re still a reasonable amount of movement and you feel kinda like you’re actually dancing to either the lyrics or the beat, but without being so intense that every single blip, noise, and syllable needs to be its own 1/64th beat step.
Of course, I’m not really playing DDR proper. While I’m glad to see Konami is still producing new versions from time to time, I’m too much of a curmudgeon for most of the new music. I mean, look how they massacred my boy. (For some context, this is the original, and seems to widely be considered far superior.) Once PCs became powerful enough to deal with running it, Stepmania became the client of choice. While Project Outfox appears to be the functional successor, it seems to hate my cruddy soft USB pads (that are holding up unusually well) so I’m still comfortably using Stepmania 5. The real beauty of Stepmania is being able to create a whole new simfile (a file containing the step order and timing for a stage) from scratch, or to tweak/fix other files where something wasn’t set quite right. This has let me put some unexpected tracks in the list to entice my kids to give it a go, the oldest of whom only just last week finally passed his first song on Beginner.
The real trouble with gathering the exact tracks you want is, when there’s a version of something floating around the terrifying aether of the Internet, it might be A) not very well constructed or B) haphazardly chopped down to half-duration because of the old quarter-munching philosophy of making short tracks so players get through them faster. Personally if it’s a song I like I’d much rather the whole track be there, so for some songs you’ve got to take the steps already produced and figure out where to move them around and/or copy them to make the whole track work once you’ve replaced the media files. Another fun bit is needing to download a gigabyte or more to get a song pack that might only have a single song you’re looking for. This is less of an issue with modern bandwidth, but still feels a bit silly. Sometimes this is nice, however, as frequently this results in some additional inclusions for songs I wouldn’t have looked for otherwise. Indeed, the list below has quite a few tracks I probably wouldn’t bother with if I were just wanting something to listen to, but if the steps feel good for the beat then in the list it goes.
It’s also worth mentioning that most of the search engines for simfiles are sort of terrible, so I tend to find out about newer files via YouTube videos of people who record themselves playing the game at three angles for ones of viewers. Maybe there’s Discord channels out there that are better for this or something, but I haven’t stumbled onto them yet.
Once I get a few more things tweaked I’ll likely zip this up to share on Zenius as I can’t be the only 40-ish player who just wants to find a poppy list with some old intense staples mixed in to hop to until my fitness tracker tells me I’ve exhausted an appropriate amount of estimated calories for the day. For the most part it’s a collection of tracks converted from older DDR console games, plus a bunch of things from Ben Speirs, who appears to be a simfile-crafting savant.
In the event you care to peruse, here’s the list at the moment, which has gotten me nine lbs down from my post-vacation weight:
| Song | Artist | Source |
| Abyss | dj TAKA | DDR |
| Addicted To You (UP-IN-HEAVEN MIX) | Utada Hikaru | The Utada Hikaru Project |
| Afronova Primeval | 8 bit | DDR |
| Against All Odds (Definitive MIX) | DEJA VU ft. TASMIN | DDR |
| All Star | Smash Mouth | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| B4U Glorious Style | NAOKI | DDR |
| Bad Habits | Ed Sheeran | GG Basics |
| Bad Romance | Lady Gaga | DDR |
| Bangarang | Skrillex | SPEIRMIX 2 |
| Better Off Alone | Alice Deejay | Z-I-v Summer Contest 2015 |
| Bills | Lunchmoney Lewis | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Blame It On The Pop | DJ Earworm | GTKashi |
| BREⱯK DOWN! | Be For U | DDR |
| Break Free | Arianna Grande ft. Zedd | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Break My Heart | Dua Lipa | GG Basics |
| BRILLIANT 2U | NAOKI | DDR |
| Cake By The Ocean | DNCE | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Call Me Maybe | Carly Rae Jepsen | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Can’t Feel My Face | The Weeknd | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Can’t Hold Us (ft. Ray Dalton) | Macklemore & Ryan Lewis | Z-I-v Summer Contest 2015 |
| Can’t Stop The Feeling! | Justing Timberlake | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| CANDY♥ | Kosaka Yuri | DDR |
| Cheap Thrills | Sia | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Cheap Thrills (ft. Sean Paul) | Sia | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Classic | MKTO | 500’s Simfiles |
| Cold Heart | Elton John & Dua Lipa | Floor Filler |
| Counting Stars | One Republic | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Days Go By (Solstice Remix) | Dirty Vegas | DDRei-TournaMix-04 |
| DIVE (more deep & deeper style) | Be For U | DDR |
| Domino | Jessie J | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| DROP THE BOMB (System S.F. Mix) | Scotty D. | DDR |
| DYNAMITE RAVE (Down Bird SOTA Mix) | NAOKI | DDR |
| DYNAMITE RAVE (Long ver.) | NAOKI | DDR |
| Get Lucky | Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Good Feeling | Flo Rida | SPEIRMIX 2 |
| Goot Time | Owl City ft. Carly Rae Jepsen | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Goodbye Happiness | Utada Hikaru | The Utaka Hikaru Project/GTKashi Fix |
| Happy | Pharrell Williams | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Hold My Hand | Jess Glynne | Z-I-v Summer Contest 2015 |
| Hot n Cold | Katy Perry | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| I Cry | Flo Rida | 500’s Simfiles |
| Immortals | Fall Out Boy | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Levitating | Dua Lipa | GG Basics |
| LOOK AT US (Daddy DJ Remix) | SARINA PARIS | DDR |
| Look To The Sky (True Color Mix) | System SF ft. Anna | DDR |
| Makes Me Wonder | Maroon 5 | 500’s Simfiles |
| Max 300 | Ω | DDR |
| MOONLIGHT SHADOW (New Vocal Versian) | MISSING HEART | DDR |
| MoveYourFeet! | JunionSenior | DDRei-TournaMix-04 |
| Movin’ on without you | Utada Hikaru | The Utada Hikaru Project |
| NEVER ENDING STORY | DJ-AC-DC | DDR |
| ORDINARY WORLD | AURORA ft. NAIMEE COLEMAN | DDR |
| PARTY 4U -holy nite mix- | CRANKY | DDRei-TournaMix-05/GTKashi Fix |
| Raise Your Glass | P!nk | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Rather Be | Clean Bandit ft. Jess Glynne | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Run Away With Me | Carly Rae Jepsen | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Safe and Sound | Capital Cities | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Shut Up and Dance | Walk The Moon | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Something Just Like This | The Chainsmokers & Coldplay | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Stars in the Sky | Kid Cudi | GTKashi |
| Stomp to my beat | JS16 | DDR |
| Stonger (What Doesn’t Kill You) | Kelly Clarkson | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Sugar | Maroon 5 | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| The Greatest | Sia ft. Kendrik Lamar | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Tik Tok | Ke$ha | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| traveling | Utada Hikaru | The Utada Hikaru Project |
| Treasure | Bruno Mars | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Uptown Funk! | Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars | SPEIRMIX GALAXY |
| Wait & See -Risk- | Utada Hikaru | The Utada Hikaru Project/GTKashi Fix |
Your Experience May Vary 