Download StepMania from the official site.

Playing StepMania
All you need is at least two fingers on each hand if you intend to play spread style, one on each if you wanna play index or just three fingers on one hand if you want to play one-handed. I think the more common style is spread, where you use the index and middle fingers for each key (ie Left Middle on Left Key, Left Index on Down Key, Right Index on Up Key, Right Middle on Right Key). I use the bizarre method of a spread pattern with the middle and ring fingers of each hand. You could try breaking your fingers attempting to bash the keys one-handed like this guy but I generally wouldn’t recommend it. Different styles suit different people so it’s really up to the individual to experiment.

Options, Options

StepMania tends to hit you with a barrowload of confusing options. StepMania FAQ answers most of the common questions. As I’ve said before, I play everything at C400 speed cos anything slower than that will kill my interest. You can also customise a lot of the themes – as you can see above, I use an ITG skin.

How to Get Good at StepMania
Practise, practise, practise. Of course, it would help if you had a sense of rhythm and good timing, but I’ve seen a lot of people get great scores by simply memorising the sequence of steps. Which totally doesn’t work for me since I play SM by sight-reading the steps a split second ahead… again, it’s really up to individual users on what method works best for them.

Getting Songs
Focusing on anime/eroge songs, cos techno and trance do my head in. And of course, the ever reliable Bemanistyle (requires registration) and Otaku’s Dream (anime songs) are the places to go for people who hate dealing with moon runes. Both sites are great for beginners as well and contain sims in low difficulty, which is a good thing since Japanese simfile makers are rarely kind to noobs.

So once you’ve gotten up to speed and have progressed to being able to play stuff at a higher degree of difficulty, it’s time to surf the Japanese sites for more simfiles. Some of the ones I’ve been frequenting recently:
1. Teikutsu
Mostly video game songs with different degree of difficulty, files hosted on Mediafire and come with videos.
2. hirudo
Mix of songs from anime and eroge, files hosted on Mediafire and come with videos.
3. Chrono Factory
The guy used to keep moving his site so often I got dizzy trying to keep up. He seems to have settled here for now, and mostly makes simfiles for anime with the occasional game thrown in. Again, files hosted on Mediafire and come with videos.
4. Yoyoyu
Hey, one of the people who’s still around from my last post! Except his/her site’s moved. I consider Yoyoyu’s sims easier so beginners might warm up to his stuff. Files hosted on Mediafire and have videos.
5. Step Minor
Small collection of game and anime sims. Hosted on Megaupload, no videos included.
6. Mont Silvern Flugel
Hosted on Megaupload with videos. Sadly, most of the sims are only one difficulty so noobs should stay away from the 鬼 (oni) difficulty songs.
7. Slow but Steady
Sims from some of the newer anime. Self-hosted files, come with videos.
8. Subette Korobu
Small selection of sims from newer anime. Hosted on Mediafire, come with videos. Nice range of difficulties included.

Five of the oldies:
1. TAKA’s ROOM3
2. Cherry Step
3. U.K.U.G.
4. Oukashou
5. Syank
Just click wherever it says DWI to get to the simfiles. Doesn’t matter if you can’t read a thing, you’ll muddle your way to the downloads somehow.

Hey, that’s me sucking at StepMania (Mizuki Nana’s Nostalgia, in case you’re wondering). I haven’t been playing for ages – almost a year now, and my fingers are all over the place :/ Songs that I used to ace with 90+% I now struggle to get beyond 80% and it’s driving me insane

My excuse for that sorry performance above is that I was using a PC and a keyboard I’m not comfortable with, plus I recorded the video using FRAPS so there’s a bit of lag. My usual setup is a Toshiba laptop, but there was noooo way I could record stuff on it without crazy ass lag. And yes, I still get motion sickness if I attempt to play with animated videos in the background. Not a lame excuse, just the truth.

See that? Yeah, I used to be able to play decently – that screenshot was taken on 2nd June 2007 when I was still in good form. Miss You (song by m-flo feat. Yamamoto Ryohei & melody.) was an absolute bitch to play at times because of its length – 6 minutes, and the number of steps – 1563! I often got cramp in my fingers after playing it.

Also see me suck at Sakura Saku and Awayuki.

I would tell people to try StepMania, but only people with loads of time on their hands would likely have time to get real good at it. Like college students, as I used to be when I was playing it

Download Stepmania from the official website.

Everyone knows DDR – match the moving arrows to the static ones as perfectly as you can. With Stepmania you can speed it up or play it in reverse, and there are a couple of difficulty settings to suit newbies and experts alike – of course, it still depends on the simfile itself. I only started playing bout….6 months ago? Out of boredom, for the fact that I can’t run intensive games on my laptop without it threatening to burst into flames….

Me and Stepmania
I’m playing with a laptop keyboard so I can’t use the directional keys without being impeded – I instead map left and down to a and s and up and right to ; and ‘. I also use a slightly bizzare technique of playing – a spread pattern with the middle and ring fingers of each hand instead of the conventional index and middle combo. Don’t ask why, it just feels more natural to me that way. Can’t play one-handed – don’t particularly feel like breaking my fingers, like I would if I was this guy. Anyway, you can adapt whatever style you feel comfortable with – you can play with your toes if you like.

Am I a Cheat?
I guess I could be labelled a bit of a cheat cos I turn off the background videos when I play. But wait, there are two reasons for that!
1.Waste of Space
The first is the silly reason of me not having enough space on my hard drive for the videos – which, when you have over 1000 simfiles can add up to a couple of gigs better used for storing mp3s…..

2.I Get Sick
The second is less amusing – I get motion sickness if I play with the videos on. I cannot deal with anything constantly moving on a screen; jerky cameras, bobbing heads etc all make me want to throw up. Unfortunately it’s something that I’ve always suffered from; I can’t play FPSes with the exception of the Timesplitters series for some odd reason. I cannot even watch someone playing Doom on the PC; even watching a Half-Life feature on TV made me feel very ill. When I was watching The Blair Witch Project movie yonks** ago, after half an hour I had to go lie down cos the room was starting to spin. Hah! I’m such a softie ^_^

Slow, Slow, Slow
I HATE playing anything below 400bpm. It just bores me to play slow songs so I set everything to C400 except those that have speed changes (which I just put 2x or 3x faster ^^;).

What songs do I play?
Anime/video game songs hahaha. I do play the odd Jpop/dance tune but y’know, it’s easier to play stuff that you know almost by heart. The video below is me playing SECRET AMBITION…. it’s a bit crap to be honest, I know I can do better….I blame it on the fact that it was past midnight when I was playing and my brain was frazzled ^^; There’s also me playing the Shana OP but that sucks even more ^^;;;;;. Obviously I’d like to record proper videos of me playing but it’s just not possible with a laptop – it’d lag like mad.

So where do I get the songs?
I guess Bemanistyle (requires registration) is the biggest central download place for English-speaking simfile makers. There’s a pretty large selection of mainstream dance, anison and Jpop sims you can get. For anime sims, Jubo’s site is the biggest; he and a few others produce a giant pack of anisong sims called Otaku’s Dream Mix every coupla months – it’s always good fun to play.

However if you’re like me, you’ll get bored very easily with a few dozen songs… so I turn to the Japanese simfile makers. The majority do eroge/ren’ai game songs (I guess cos the songs are publicly available for download, hence less copyright issue rubbish). Some of my favourite sites are listed below; obviously they’re in Japanese so you might have a bit of difficulty navigating – the keywords are DWI and DL, haha. Quite a few of them use Filebank, a Japanese personal storage site that only works in Internet Explorer. You’d probably need a guide to using it – there used to be one on the net but I can’t seem to find it, so I won’t list sites that use it.

Japanese Stepmania/DWI sites (Ani/Game Songs)
1. U.K.U.G. – A 3-person team who do mostly video game simfiles.
2. TAKA’s room – Has a good selection of video game and anime files. Most of them are stored on Yahoo! Briefcase so downloads can be pretty slow.
3. Chrono Factory – A small collection, but has a few of the latest anime OPs/EDs.
4. Syank’s Free Room – Has quite a few anime and video game sims.
5. Kaleido Step – Relatively new blog/DWI maker – has sims for songs from the newer anime seasons like kukui’s Utsusemi no Kage, savage genius’ Hikari no Yukue and Clover’s Miracle Episode I.
6. Cherry Step – Mostly video game themes; but most of them only come in one difficulty (Heavy). You’ll probably need a couple days of practice to get up to speed (if you’ve never played Stepmania) to try these out.
7. Oukashou – Bubblicious’ site. He(she?) uploads most of his demos on Youtube. Lots of songs from the new spring season.
8. Oukadou – Pretty large collection of anime/game simfiles, and comes in varying difficulties too.
9. Anata, Haijin desu m9(ﾟﾛﾟ) – Lol. Yeah that’s the blog’s name (Go look haijin up in a dictionary). Two guys who make sims for both anime and video game songs. Not many of them have easier modes though.
10. Yoyoyu – Again, lots of newer songs and few with beginner modes. Good fun if you’re past the newbie stage.
11. Stra-y- – Easier songs, all hosted on Megaupload (Click Present list). Beware large filesizes, as the videos packed in are all higher quality than your standard fare.

That might keep you busy for a few hours….

Help! I suck at Stepmania and can’t even get a C in beginner mode!
Don’t worry, I was crap when I first started playing too ^^ Give it a few days, you’ll get better.

So if ever you’re bored and looking for something to play….give Stepmania a go. You never know, you might get addicted ^^

**This is completely off-topic but I realise I heavily utilise British slang in my posts so if you see some random word you’ve never heard of, please refer to The English-to-American Dictionary or A Dictionary of Slang. They cover my vocabulary pretty well ^_^