for the DDR crowd

[cellio]

Pump-it-up dreams

As you might conclude from the above, the choir crowd went to Dave & Busters last night instead of Gullifty's. The food was decent. There aren't that many places that can satisfy all our constraints: serves food after 10, not smoky or noisy, and provides options for a vegetarian and someone (else) who's lactose-intolerant. This seemed to work, though I didn't look closely at the meat options to see if there were sufficient non-dairy ones among them.

After we ate, Chris demonstrated Pump It Up and got Gail to play one round with him. It looks like it would be fun; maybe next time I'll try it. Or maybe I'll try to sneak over to Chris' or Deanna's house, ask the occupant to set up the game and then leave, and try it out in private. :-) (At my current level of exposure, Pump It Up and DDR are basically interchangable.)

Comments

[dr4b]

hmm, so the thing about DDR/PIU is - I think you'd have some natural talents but also some natural problems with it. The talent would be, you are a musician and know about reading music. Essentially, DDR arrows are a score - they represent certain events happening at certain time intervals. Also, you've done some dance stuff (right?) so keeping a beat with your feet isn't an issue either. But, the disadvantage I think you would have in most setups is that the screen would probably be too far away from you to be able to sight-read a lot of the faster songs. (At home you could space it however you want, though) I think you'd at least be able to do well enough at it to understand why people get totally hooked on these games, at least...

[cellio]

Yeah, I think I'd probably do ok on the timing itself, though it would take a while to learn the pad. (It looks like it's easy to find yourself a few inches off of center, and that seems to be enough to cause hits not to register.) I couldn't play on a small screen; I think the screen zize they have in the arcade is fine. (And, similarly, putting the pad a couple feet in front of a large TV would work.)

The othe vision-related thing would be that sometimes the background images are so, um, loud that it can be hard to see the arrows. But the arrows are well-defined shapes in well-defined locations, so I assume this can be overcome.

I can definitely see how these games can be addictive!

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

It's possible to turn off the backgrounds (among a couple of other low-band-graphics vs. high-band-graphics options) on the home version of PIU. Of course, that doesn't help with the arcade version.

(I'll admit that depending on the song the background graphics will actually mess with me as well, although in most cases I can simply tune them out altogether.)