Stepmania and Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) - all you should know about dancing games

So to start simply in 1999 Konami introduced a dancing game called Dance Dance Revolution. The concept of game is to rhythmically press arrows that appear on the screen to the beat of music. To do that you have a special controller which is a big square you lie on the floor and it has those directional arrow you need to press. As you see in the picture on right arrows from the bottom of screen move up and when they sync with those on the top you need to press that button on the dancing pad. It's very intuitive system matched with the bear of music. The dancing game turned out to be a big hit first in Japan and after that in whole world. Konami released many DDR games which were really the same game but with other songs on the game disc. But the main cons were that it wasn't free and you had to play songs which were released in Konami games and then someone thought of

Is basicly a cross-platform (Pc, Consoles) simulator/clone of Konami's DDR distributed as Open Source so you can get it for free. With Stepmania you can have as many songs as you want to play and also it's fairly easy to "add arrows" to your favourite songs so you can play them and share with other gamers on the internet. As of right now it's the most popular dancing game. It's also fairly cheap to play as you only need cash for the controller which is about 10-15$. Stepmania is a great for parties when you have 2 controllers you can play with your friends in cooperative or versus modes it gives many choices on how to play. Also it's great form of exercise which helps your eye-movement coordination, improves your reflex and stamina.

After you download Stepmania and plug your controller (remember to plug it before lunching Stepmania.exe as it won't be recognized otherwise). You just need to map your buttons and you're ready to play but wait you don't have any songs !? So where do you get them.

There are a few basic sites you should start off:

• http://www.stepmania.com/ - here you can get latest version of stepmania as well as some songs for it
• http://www.bemanistyle.com/ - is one of the largest database with stepmania songs which you can search and download after registering
• http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/ - same as above but not as large and if I remember correctly doesn't require you to register
• http://www.otakusdream.com/news/ - place when you can download fan made packs with many stepmania songs. Mostly anime, games and japan themed.
• http://isohunt.com/ - one of most popular bittorent's tracker here you can easily find big packs >1gb with stepmania songs as search you should simply type "stepmania" or "stepmania +songs"
  

There are different types of dancing mates you can buy they all range in price durability and connector. First thing to decide is what device you will be playing on in most cases this will be Pc so the dancing pad should have usb plug but you can get a dancing mate for any game console.

Second thing to decide is whether you need a simple pad which you can easily fold and move around or more of a professional metal dancing pad which of course is more comfortable as it doesn't move around as much and most probably will work for the rest of your life. For star I suggest you to buy a cheap dance pad on which you will learn basic, and it will be easy to take it to your friend for playing. After that if you like dancing to the bear you can decide on something more professional :). Below are some suggestions on what to get.