Dance to the Beat!

When my wife and I got our old house ready to sell, I had to pack away DDR. In particular, the pads were too big and heavy to keep handy (I got metal pads from this place, which are fantastic if you play on the higher levels of difficulty, and especially if you play a lot). I also packed the game discs away quite early (well, most of them), which made the pads issue pretty much immaterial.

Being unable to play most times of the day also limited options (between work and my daughter's sleep schedule), and the game being set up on the top floor of our old house meant it was nearly impossible to play for six or so months.

Well, I finally got everything set up last night. Actually, that was kind of interesting also; previously, I'd had the game hooked up to an old 32" CRT. Well, here I had it hooked up to a 1080p LCD. I didn't really expect that to cause any issues (I'd only seen issues with that sort of thing once at a friend's house (he had a DLP rear projector that caused about 7/10ths second delay; boy, was it fun playing DDR with that. I had to re-teach myself how to play, practically)), but was surprised to see that there was a noticeable delay (probably two to three tenths of a second). After monkeying around for a bit, I found a game mode which got rid of the delay.

But the new house got rid of most of the difficulties. It's a) single family, so I don't need to worry about the neighbor; b) can set up in the basement, where the sound doesn't carry; and c) because of those first two, I can play after my daughter goes to bed. I knew there was a good reason we moved. :)

Well, after not playing for over half a year, I was surprised that I didn't have too much trouble playing at the Hard difficulty level. I wasn't in any danger of getting any AAs, but only one or two might have tossed me (I had it in exercise mode, so it's difficult to be certain).

I played for 27 or 28 minutes, and burned about 450kcal, according to the game. My only recent exercise being chasing my daughter around, I was surprised that I wasn't wiped out by that at all. In fact, the calories are close to twice what I was planning to do; this was supposed to be very light exercise (ok, compared to some of my workouts when I was serious (either trying to get in particularly good shape, or to lose a little weight), that is very light, but I wasn't comparing against that standard in my mind). It made for a very pleasant surprise.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens when my daughter gets old enough to play. I could see that going in several different directions; although the thought of her possibly being able to beat me when she's like seven or eight is a bit scary. Well, a bridge for when we come to it.