Konami's Bemani series has spawned all sorts of crazy musical gaming. It started, simply enough, with Beatmania, a game that challenged you to play its songs using a five-key keyboard and a turntable. The series expanded to include guitars, drums, full keyboards, and even dancing. Dance Dance Revolution is the dancing game that started the trend, spawning clones like Jaleco's Stepping Selection and generally turning once-stationary gamers into dancing fools.
The music is truly what makes Dance Dance Revolution so easy to play over and over again. The Dreamcast version takes most of the songs from both the original DDR and the arcade upgrade, DDR 2nd Mix (the Mantronik remix of EPMD's Strictly Business is sadly missing from the collection). Some songs from 3rd Mix have been thrown in for good measure, also. While some tracks are existing songs (Chumbawumba's Tubthumping, for instance) or remixes of existing songs (In the Navy, originally sung by the Village People), a lot of the songs are either totally original or thematic takes on existing music. For instance, Hero sounds a lot like Barbie Girl by Aqua.
The gameplay is, like all good rhythm/puzzle games, extremely easy to learn at first but extremely difficult to master. The dance steps for songs like Boom Boom Dollar and Kung-Fu Fighting are easy enough for anyone to complete, but once you get up to harder tracks, you'll see just how devious this game can be. The game is played in the same style as Beatmania or Guitar Freaks, except instead of hitting notes on a fake instrument when a bar crosses a line, you'll watch arrows scroll up the screen, and you'll plant your foot (you can play the game with a controller, but why would you want to?) on the proper arrow on your dancemat as the arrow hits the top of the screen. Continue to do well, and you'll earn combo bonuses. Miss too many steps, and your game ends. The game has a few different modes, including hidden steps and a mirror mode in the main game, as well as training and edit modes that let you practice the songs to perfection.
The graphics aren't a terribly important part of the game, but the game looks nice regardless. Behind the scrolling arrows, a polygonal dancer gets busy for the duration of the song, and the background behind the dancer occasionally has some pretty neat little effects.
If you invest in one or two dancemats along with the game, Dance Dance Revolution is an amazingly fun game that you can play alone or in large groups, provided no one is too embarrassed to get busy in front of a crowd.
