Dance Dance Revolution

Played the insidious game again last night.

We got a PlayStation (PSOne) with a mod chip so we can play all of the japanese imports - woo woo! Right now, though, we just have the standard US DDR game. That's OK by me - I'm still lurching along. I'd like to hear some of the japanese music, though.

It's interesting - I still can't "dance" to the game nearly as well as I can move. So it's a struggle between elegance and speed, and elegance always loses. Both David and I are much smoother at, say, swing or tango. Also interesting: it's not frustrating, it's fun. I get better every time I play.

I still feel that Pump It Up is a better game, for a number of reasons. There are the cosmetic ones - I like the music videos that play in the background better than the random dancing characters. PIU has individual animated videos for each song, but in DDR they all just blend together and use the same visuals. Also, I like the PIU music better. That might be fixed by trying a Japanese import. Most of all, though, I feel more comfortable with the floor layout and how it maps onscreen to the arrows. PIU has the active squares laid out in an "X" pattern -


X - X
- X -
X - X


while DDR has a cross pattern -


- X -
X - X
- X -


The way I see it, PIU's layout has two advantages. First, the jumps and combo moves are easier to hit while still facing forward. Easy-style DDR seems to have a lot of forward-and-back combo jumps, for which I always find myself turning sideways and craning my neck to still see the screen. Second, the arrow layout on the screen is a bit more immediately readable. For example, in PIU, a Center-TopRight combo looks like the mirror image of a Center-TopLeft combo. This makes it easier to internalize as one move. DDR, well - Forward-Right doesn't have the same visual spacing as Forward-Left, so the cues are different and a bit hard to distinguish.

But! DDR has one advantage, and that's that I can play it in my livingroom. And it's still way fun.

exercise

Getting a car may be bad for my butt.

Last year, I biked to work all winter, since the alternative was riding the @#($)&!^# BUS, which took 80 - 90 minutes each way. This was a huge time sink. As a result, I biked two hours a day, a few times a week, all winter. I managed to stay sane despite having a really messy year.

Now, I have a car. In a lot of ways, this is a godsend - it's a magical machine that allows me to zip to work in 15 - 20 minutes. This gains me an hour or two, MINIMUM, every day. That's good time I can use to, say, sleep - and sleep keeps you sane, right? So ideally, I should be able to bike in to work, say, three times a week, and save the car for when I'm feeling lousy or it's actively slushy and icy.

In reality, I've biked once so far this month. There have been at least four potentially great biking days that I've missed, and a host of other possible ones. Sleep always seems more important in the mornings. But then, I get to work, and I've missed my entire transcendental commute. I missed the sugar-frosted sidewalks and the delicious feeling of my thighs warming up despite the winter cold. I missed the buffer zone that biking placed between my home life and my work life. I missed the clean and virtuous feeling of actually getting my ass in gear before 9 AM, and the solidarity of the nod that winter bikers give to each other.

Now, things bleed. I go home and I'm still thinking about work. I get to work, and I'm not fully alert yet. I feel slow and listless, unwilling to get outside and exercise. I'm operating under a constant low-level depression from lack of exercise. Indoor exercise doesn't cut it, either - I like lifting and playing DDR, but they don't give me the mental rush that biking does.

So it's a self-perpetuating cycle. I feel bummed, so I don't bike. I don't bike, so I feel bummed. This sucks!