Have you ever played DDR naked? There's nothing quite like the feeling! I gave myself the gift this Christmas of revisiting an old and beloved pastime - with two new dance pads! I was first introduced to DDR by some friends in high school. My initial reaction to it was to avoid it out of embarrassment - me not being the sort of person who likes to get up in front of people and dance (although I've learned that this is actually a good way to do it, since the arrows give you a sort of script to follow - it's like dancing on training wheels).
I went out on a limb and tried it again in college, mainly because it gave me an excuse to interact with a girl I fancied within the context of a social environment (i.e., it gave me the illusion of having a life). I discovered at this time that DDR was actually quite a lot of fun, and subsequently got hooked on it, dragging my best friend into my obsession. We bought dance pads and hooked them up to a projection screen, and danced with anyone who happened along and wished to join us. At the height of our obsession, we swapped out Dance Dance Revolution with StepMania, a DDR-based computer application with
hundreds of songs.
Following the inevitable scattering of friends post-graduation, my dance time dwindled, as the dance pads I had in my possession gradually wore out. There were periods when I would run DDR tracks purely for the exercise, even without a controller connected (not a bad idea, if you don't care about the grades). Such an experience even made it into my
Daily Nude Videos project from eight years ago. Since then, though, I've let my DDR Max discs collect dust on the shelf, and have resigned myself to the very infrequent occasion of happening upon a DDR machine "in the wild", so to speak - at an arcade.
Until now, that is. DDR lives again!
