S. Worthen | Weblog

At anime conventions, in Toronto, I could spend hours watching people play DDR, their precise, considered movements guided by the expert-level stream of arrows flowing across the screens in front of them. Anime North hired commerical units, with hard buttons, durable. It was a place to show off, not practice. It was astonishingly elegant, bodies smoothly, relaxedly hitting the buttons with their feet at a madly-fast pace.

This year's gift-giving season brought me a DDR mat of my own. It's a soft one, home edition, but I've never played any other kind. I feel like a beginner who took up a sport because she saw the Olympic-level beauty which it can achieve by exhaustively well-practiced teenagers. Fortunately, the game is already more satisfying than that. My first session was halting and confused. It took us a while to locate the training modes, because they weren't in the section labeled "Training Mode". Three sessions and several days later, and already I am heading toward competent on the relatively low levels of difficulty with which I began.

I won't ever be up to the mid-air flips of two-player mode shown in the loving parody of the extremes of the game in the Scott Pilgrim movie, but at this rate, I may yet be trying out the modes above "Medium" before the month is out.