The DDR Corner: Anime, dancing, and you (and advertising)

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The anime community and the Dance Dance Revolution community aren't horribly far apart. With both things being mostly Asian fads given strange looks by most Americans, it's not suprising that a large amount of anime fans enjoy DDR as well.

DDR as one might surmise is mildly lacking in official anime songs; while they feature enough Eurobeat, techno and J-Pop (and for lucky Americans, silly 30-year-old songs as well) to keep a mildly Japanophilic dancer happy, sometimes one just has the urge to bust some moves to Hare Hare Yukai (one can already bust some drums, but that very well doesn't count).

Enter popular DDR simulator Stepmania, pretty much a free DDR clone for your computer. The default interface is pretty much a carbon copy of DDRMAX, although the program can be reskinned in all sorts of fantastical ways. The program is pretty obvious and easy to use once you get the hang of it, and if not, I'll be sitting here with my Tech Support cap on backwards.

But for those new to Stepmania, you'll notice one thing; there's no songs.

Haven't found a place to put the jump yet so I'll leave you on a cliffhanger; if you're still interested in DDR on your computer, or if you just need a few more locations for songs, march onwards.

Yeah, if you ever wondered why that download size was so small it's because Stepmania doesn't come with a default song set. And it's probably better than way.

Customization is once again the name of the game, and this time it extends to songs as well. Like home versions of DDR, you can create your own steps for songs, except in Stepmania, you can create songs from the ground up!

The fact that pretty much anything can be stepped is evidently shown in Stepmania song sharing communities such as BemaniStyle (one of the largest, featuring what has to be thousands of songs). The variety of songs is staggering; American rock and music, anime theme songs, video game tracks, custom remixes of DDR songs, even a few joke tracks (This Is Spartaaaaa! Techno Remix). It's really endless and if you're not careful you'll find yourself gigabytes deep in Stepmania.

However if one is a mad anime addict and is looking for more of that and less of Sparta, it might be a bit tricky. There is definitely an established anime simfile (as they are called) base at BemaniStyle - I've even created four and uploaded them there myself (look at the top) - but there are certainly other places out there which are far better.

Otaku's Dream, I've found, is one of those Best Places, and it may say something that I only have one source for anime simfiles. This place for me at least is guaranteed to leave your bandwidth taken up for days on end - there is probably at least 4 or 5 gigs of zipped simfiles on there. Some may be duplicates but there are so many files on the site I can hardly check them all.

The simfiles are very high quality as well, usually, featuring full videos as well as steps. I would give them a reccomendation if you're in the need for more Stepmania simfiles here. A lot of these are not uploaded to BemaniStyle as well; my only complaint is that a lot of them are in huge (like, huge zip file is huuuuuuge. like, Mikuru huge.) packs of more than 400 MB so it's not exactly for the faint of connection. If you have the time, the urge, and the bandwidth, it's a great place though.

That's my 5 minute rant on Stepmania. If you have alternate sites for simfiles or some of your own you'd like to advertise, feel free to post about them.

-CCY