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I Love Stepmania

Saturday November 2, 2024

There isn’t much to this post. I just really like playing Stepmania on my computer. To be more more specific, I play a fork of Stepmania called ITG Mania.

I talked about Stepmania before in my first “Recent Obsessions” post. At the time I didn’t realize it was going to hook me so hard. When I was writing the second post in the series, the current game obsession was still Stepmania, but I talked about Anteater instead.

I feel like I can play forever because it never “feels like practicing.” It just feels like listening to really good songs over and over again, which is what I already do. I usually tap along with my fingers, but Stepmania provides satisfying tapping instructions.

I am a lot better than I was when I made that first post. Holy shit. I forgot I used to use the arrow keys. I have since adjusted to this (much better) layout:

Z X . /

I said I used to fight for my life on “9” songs, but now I can clear 11s and some 12s. Sometimes if a song is really good and I think clearing it looks particularly impressive, I’ll record myself and send it to my friends. Here are some examples so you have a reference of my skill level:

I’ll add more to this post as I record and upload more in the future.

I don’t like the process of finding new song packs. I can’t tell if I’m going to like it just based on the title and difficulty range, so a lot of times I end up downloading a pack just to delete it shortly after.

One day I would like to get a hard pad and build a “DDR machine” for my garage. I think I would wall mount a TV and make the whole thing take up as little space as possible. I don’t have a ton of space in there, so I’d put away the hard pads when not in use. The computer and TV can be used for something else useful when it isn’t time for Stepmania.

Playing DDR with your fingers does not make you better at playing DDR with your feet. I prefer using my left foot for some reason, and that gets me all twisted up. I need to get my own setup so I can hit that shit at real arcades.