Margaret and I have been doing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) for about a year now. We first got into it after her mother mentioned that it she heard that is a good workout. Margaret mentioned it to me and we decided to run out and get started on the DDR craze. We had never played before, but the startup costs was only $100 and it sounded fun, so we jumped in.

If you are now totally lost and have no idea what DDR is, let me elaborate. The setup is real easy. There is a mat on the floor with 4 buttons pointing up, down, left, and right. You stand in the middle and use your feet to hit the buttons. Now comes the harder part, you have to hit those buttons in time to the music, as directed by the game. It looks a little like this:

Once we decided that we wanted to play, I had to figure out how to get these pads and the game from. Thankfully, there are quite a few communities that were able to give me pointers in the right directions.

First off, I got my pads from Level Six. They came highly recommended as being the best quality pads you can get before going insane in cost. They currently stock USB pads, but when I got mine I had to get Playstation pads and a Playstation to USB converter. Total cost: $100 (I got free S/H, YMMV).

The next step, what game was I going to use? I don’t have an XBOX or PS2, so I was looking for PC based solutions. At the time, I knew of two. PyDance is a python based DDR clone that I thought was cool because it was in Python. But StepMania (the one I still use) has more features than you can imagine and plays a lot better than PyDance.

The great thing about both of them is that they are free (as in beer and as in speech). Since they are free to use, I downloaded both and was able to decide which I liked better. Since they are both free as in speech as well, it means that people can modify them as they want to. For example, some crazy people took the StepMania code and made StepMania Online which lets you play DDR over the internet against people. Insane!

So I had the pads and I had the game, the final step was to obtain some songs to play with. Thankfully, StepMania provides a list of places to get songs from. I got most of mine (of questionable legality) from DDRUK.

It has been a lot of fun to play, and to also try and get my family members to play. I’ve even taken it into my office to play against my co-workers. I’ve had at least 2 of them express interest in getting the stuff together themselves. DDR has even broken into the mainstream media with a mention on NPR this morning!