Dance Dance Revolution Extreme

"The best DDR to date.. honest!"

Now.. its not everyday that you come across a great game. Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR, has become a fad in the past which was nearly forgotten, but then my local arcade upgraded its DDR machine to EXTREME!

A quick intro for those not inclined to know what DDR is, a simple game where the arrows float to the top. At the top is a bar of arrows (LEFT, DOWN, UP, RIGHT) and as the arrows float over them (or glide as some would say) you press the corresponding key on the dance mat. Note beforehand, the dance mat in the arcade is 1000000000000x better than the Playstation/PS2 dance mats. This one is heavy, made of metal, lights up, and can take a good beating. It also doesn't move when you slam it.

Now, the most important part is how it plays, and the songs they put in. Well, the songs are EXCELLENT! And there's lots of them! Enough to cater for new DDR players, and enough to give the old school gamers some good flashback memories. Some of the new DDR 8th Mix (Extreme) exclusive songs include Cartoon Heroes (one of my newfound favorites); but when I'm playing I like to play some other older songs like Dam Dariram (3rd Mix), Crash (7th Mix), If You Were Here, Love Love Shine (7th Mix) and Butterfly (Original). As a note, the mixes I've listed above are what I ''think'' (not necessarily what they are). For a more complete listing you can check out;
http://www.ddrfreak.com/versions/songlist.php?mix=80

DDR Extreme maintains all the original steps, but also it makes it very accessible for people to use modifiers. Simply by holding down the select button you can pick modifiers such as 1x, 1.5x, 2x (and so on) for arrow speed; boosts, change your difficulty steps (really useful for when you have accidentally selected the wrong difficulty right after putting your money in) and more. These options previously required people to remember extremely long codes, but now they have made it much more convenient. And also by pressing the LEFT/RIGHT song select keys during song selection, navigation is made easier through this giant jukebox of songs by categorizing into different mixes, difficulty, popularity and alphabetical order. Just another minor convenience added into DDR by Konami. Thanks!

Now.. Whats wrong with this DDR? Well, my machine had no memory card slots for edit data. I also wished they had added new dances for old songs; such as to include the new Freeze Arrows. I also wish they would stop changing their difficulty patterns; that is, I wish they would stop changing what 5-foot difficulty correlates to. The only good thing about the difficulty selection is when you are selecting songs a graph is generated based on the different aspects of the song's difficulty (air, chaos, freeze, etc.) and the song's BPM is displayed (very important).

Those are small problems, and to most people, DDR will bring new fun into their lives. The two player VERSUS, and the DOUBLE mode will also dampen your wallets further. Watch out boys and girls, this is the machine where your Timezone cards will be spending most of their funds.

(Note: Timezone is an Australian arcade chain, and instead of using coins you swipe a plastic card.)

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 11/24/03