Words On Wednesday

I spoke of how I had discovered StepMania back in November 2017 . I bought a PS2 to USB adapter online, and I had high hopes that it would allow me to play with my dance pad. Admittedly, I’m a little late on the followup, but I did finally try to use the USB adapter  with the game. Shipping from an obscure little company in China obviously takes a while, so I didn’t get in any hurry waiting for my package. It took a few weeks, but the adapter finally came in. I told myself I would try it out, but I sat it aside and didn’t get around to it for a while. And by “a while,” I mean about 5 months. Things came up, I forgot about the adapter, and I just never got back to it. Finally, in March 2018, a friend came up and asked if I had ever gotten to try it out. I obviously had not, but we decided to hook it up. I expected there would be some configuration, so I was prepared for some setup time. With a black belt in Google-fu, there are very few general tech issues that I can’t solve wit...

I recently learned of StepMania, and it has ignited an attempt in me to play dancing games in the comfort of my home once again. A few weeks ago, I was listening to my music on shuffle as I often do and a familiar song came on. “Beethoven Virus” was originally on Pump It Up, but it is the iconic song for dance video games in my opinion. There are numerous songs from dance games in my music library (don’t judge me), but this is one that just takes me back. It’s high tempo, catchy, and it embodies the nature of dance game songs. While that particular song was from Pump It Up, I was always a bigger fan of Dance Dance Revolution or DDR. The 4 buttons in up/down/left/right configuration always felt more natural to me than the 5 button configuration with diagonals and a center button used by Pump It Up. Not only that, but DDR was available both in arcades and on home consoles, so I could practice at home and then show off my skills in arcades. For whatever reason, Pump It Up has b...