StepMania: Like DDR, but FREE
I love DDR. It has been a fun game for me to play for a long time. For a while, Xbox only had one DDR game available and it was too hard for me to play as a beginner. There was only one or two songs that I could play and not get kicked out. DDR Ultramix 1 was the most frustrating experience for me.
StepMania is a dance simulation game that is open source and works on Window, Mac and Linux. I downloaded it when my frustration level became too high with DDR-UM1. I bought a USB-to-PlayStation 2 adapter from Red Octane that worked really well. I was finally able to play without getting kicked out of the songs.
It took some work to get StepMania working on my PC. Mike found an article on DDR-UK that really helped us get it working:
My only problem was that I didn’t want to download songs that officially belonged to Konami. I didn’t want to feel like a criminal and original songs were hard to find. Now, however, there are tons of original songs available for download on StepMania’s offical website:
Not only that, there is software available that will take any song and add step patterns to it so you can play with it on StepMania:
I haven’t tried any of these new original songs and I haven’t played with Dancing Monkeys, but it looks like StepMania is a lot more workable on a PC than it was a couple of years ago when I downloaded version 1.0. Right now, I’m happy with DDR-UM2 and UM3, so I don’t really need to search the Internet for more songs, but I’m glad to know that there is a ton of stuff out there that is legal.
If you have been wanting to try out dancing simulation games, but you don’t have a gaming console, this is probably the best thing that you can try inexpensively to see if you would like it.