pump it up

03Jul06

dispatches from the asian obsessed youth culture…

i have some bad news for you all. DDR – dance dance revolution – is over. the genre is still alive though and DDR has been replaced by PIU – pump it up. pump it up is a korean ddr knockoff that has an x shaped dance pad with 5 zones on it instead of DDR’s cross shaped pad with 4 buttons. This seems to make it easier to orient yourself toward the screen while dancing. The real reason PIU seems to have supplanted DDR though is that the designers understood what made DDR so popular and improved on those aspects. What eventually made DDR so popular was the showmanship, the fact that you could show off your skills in front of a large group. and as this caught on, people developed different categories to judge DDR contest’s skills in.

PIU took two of the most popular DDR skillsets and created special modes just for them. There’s a freestyle mode that features slow songs and a dance that moves across the side by side pads. the slow, semi-regular beat allows competitors to work in acrobatic or flashy dance moves, while still managing to hit the pads.

there’s also crazy mode, which i officially dub slayer mode. crazy mode is chock full of speed metal songs with dance patterns that move so fast that kids appear to learn it by leaning against the bar so they can just move their feet. experts in the crazy mode actually dance around the pad like maniacs. the patterns are so fast that often times all they can do is rock back and forth to hit the pads, other times they have to move around like an epileptic ballerina.

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