What we've been playing

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: a Music Week special.

I have a stack of about four DDR Wii games at home, and having mastered the tracks on Hottest Party Three, I've started working my way through the other titles. Going back to the early learning stages has reminded me just how much DDR reminds me of sight-reading music on clarinet or piano. Unless you want to get your legs in a tangle, or set yourself badly off-balance (creating problems further down the line), you have to read several beats ahead and anticipate both the rhythm and footwork required. That includes jumping height, speed of movement, and how to angle your body. Playing guitar in Rock Band feels similar, but moving your whole body means you really have to commit to what you think is the right combination of footwork. On top of all that, DDR can sometimes present you with incredibly dense and slow-moving arrows, something which can be tricky to parse. Not to mention some sneaky off-beat rhythms are thrown in on harder tracks.

Eventually, once you've practiced the hard sections long enough, you'll develop the muscle memory to automatically know the footwork for a song. But practice will also make you better at sight-reading new tracks: I can now bring up a video of DDR on Youtube, and read the arrows as if I were actually dancing it. When you finally crack the code, that's a pretty cool feeling to have.

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