Forty years old is when you start expecting things to hurt arbitrarily. Maybe not all at once, but the ghosts of wounds of yesteryear are expected to emerge and cause frequent annoyance. Honestly, I’ve been experiencing that for years anyway, so I assumed I’d just cruise into this getting more of the same. Instead, I decided to get myself a shiny new DDR pad and fall the hell off of it.
Well, maybe not fall off of it exactly. L-Tek pads are from Poland and are some of the nicer mid range pads for a DDR hobbyist like myself. I’m not a serious player, but I try to be consistent one, and after decades of dealing with floppy pads shelling out over time and producing infuriating “Boos” I decided to treat myself to something a little more Polish polished.
The trouble is, these things sit about an inch off the ground. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’ve spent your life jumping on flat-to-the-floor cheap floppy pads or even the foam-filled puffy (but still squishy) pads, an inch might be higher than you think. So after a few sessions of thinking I had this thing (and myself) broken in, a moment of distraction was all it took for my foot (while wearing shoes) to wander just a little too far to the left, my weight to be trying to rest on the wrong foot at the wrong time, and my ankle to go sideways in probably the most painful sprain I’ve ever experienced, though admittedly I don’t sprain my ankle terribly often.
After a little over a month I finally felt recovered. I returned to the pad again to see if I could get back into it. What I found was that the fear of the same thing happening again was just too distracting to focus on, let alone enjoy, playing the game. So I finally set out to do something about it.
Four planks of poplar and some screws have done the trick nicely to put a frame around the pad, giving me 5.5 inches of “oh my foot is hitting the frame I should adjust before I wound myself again” buffer. Managed a full session of testing without issue and it did help me catch myself straying farther than I should once or twice. I didn’t even get any splinters!
Need to sand this down and get some wood finish to prevent this from warping horribly at some point, but it looks like I’m back in the game.
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:
James Gets Through 