j1m0ne’s blog

What’s Stepmania?
I’ve mentioned Stepmania a couple of times in my posts without ever really going into detail about what it is, though I’m sure most people will have vaguely heard of it. Stepmania (free & open source) is essentially Beatmania simulating DDR for your PC. It can be played with a standard keyboard, or with PS2/Xbox/dance pads. Don’t know if using pads instead of keys is any easier or more fun but I guess the only thing you really need to play Stepmania is a sense of rhythm ^_^

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 ^_^

Posted on May 13th, 2007 under misc, music, stepmania • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback