Dance Pad Games: Exercise and Entertainment
Want to have fun and exercise at the same time? The dance pad is an alternative video game input device where the player uses his/her feet to press buttons. And of course it is of interest to us because it allows video games to become exercise. The dance pad is an input device that not only allows you to play popular games, but also acts as a piece of exercise equipment.
Dance pad games have been around for a while, but their popularity skyrocketed in 1998 when Konami released Dance Dance Revolution(DDR). DDR was released as an arcade game and typically involved two dance pads, each with 4 primary buttons - left, right, up and down( these are the main buttons used in the game, although dance pads with 6 and 8 buttons are standard ). The game involves arrows on the screen moving to the beat of a chosen song, the player has to step on the right direction key on the dance pad when the arrow on the screen lines up with another arrow at the top of the screen. While bouncing around on the dance pad the player is simultaneously dancing and exercising. Since its release nearly a decade ago the DDR brand has released over 90 official versions with over 1000 different songs being used around the world. The dance pad phenomenon is now not limited to the arcade, with versions released for Playstation, Gamecube, Xbox and the PC.
While DDR experienced a long unchallenged run in the dance pad games industry, other operators have moved into the market over the past five years. The two biggest competitors are Pump It Up and In The Groove. Both have followed the same release path as DDR, releasing first for the arcade and then for the home. DDR didn't take the competition in the dance pad industry lying down, filing a lawsuit against Roxor Games (the producers of In The Groove) in 2005 and in 2006 gaining the rights to the In The Groove series as part of the settlement.
When buying a dance pad game there are two costs to be aware of, the cost of the game itself, and the cost of the dance pad. The games are generally comparable to other games for the console ($30-$50 new), but the prices of dance pads can vary significantly. A normal 'soft' pad can be as cheap as $10, while a top of the line metal pad can cost you over $200. The soft pads have a tendency to move around or crinkle while you are playing your game, but are much cheaper than metal pads. Even the full metal pads are very cost effective when you consider them as exercise equipment rather than a fancy game controller. You won't get a good treadmill or exer-cycle for much less than what the metal pad will cost you.
The good news is that once you have the dance pad, there are plenty of other exercise video games that you can use it with. EVStep's Egg Snatch is an example of a more traditional arcade game that uses the dance pad as an input device. In this game the screen shows a hen house with nests in locations corresponding to the positions on the dance pad. When a weasel appears, the player must jump on the correct dance pad square to make a chicken protect its nest. EVStep created this game to use the dance pad as a sort of exercise equipment and to show that regular games can be used as exercise video games.
There is also StepMania, a free - PC based version of Dance Dance Revolution. StepMania is interesting because it allows developers to design their own dance steps to songs of their choice. This has lead to a practically infinite number of dance track possibilities. The 'stepfiles' can be released for others to download and use, although for copyright reasons they should not be released with the song itself. StepMania brings several other innovations to dance pad games, such as lyrics which can display in real time to the song, mines which penalize the player for wrong steps and highly customizable skins and background images, which can make two versions look very different from each other.
The variety of options in the exercise video games industry is evidence that dance pad games are more than a passing fad. People are very aware of how much time children are now spending in front of the computer screen. This is time that former generations spent running, climbing trees and playing sports. Products like Dance, Dance Revolution, Stepmania and Egg Snatch are taking a healthy attitude to this problem. Rather than simply telling kids to get off the game console and go outside to play, they provide an option to make use of gaming consoles to provide a new type of exercise equipment - one that provides all the positives of exercise with the fun of video games.
