Dance Dance Revolution, an interactive video game with international notoriety, has made its way into local arcades over the past few years, including Time Out at City Place Mall in Silver Spring, and is attracting a huge following of middle school to college-aged youth.
Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR if you speak the lingo, is a dancing simulation game featuring a dance pad with room for two players, sound, lights and a screen that tells you how to move. DDR is part of Konami's Benami series - a series of dance games - based in Osaka, Japan.
The DDR craze has a following of youths who travel from arcade to arcade to play the game. They have DDR parties. They own home versions of the game that they play on their Sony PlayStations. They create Web sites with forums so DDR fanatics from around the world can interact with each other. They compete in DDR competitions around the nation for cash, electronics and other prizes.
There's a core group of youth between the ages of 12 and 22 who regularly come to play DDR at Time Out, said Cynthia Tenicela of Silver Spring, whose children love DDR. "Some moms are soccer moms, I'm a DDR mom," she said.
Conceptually, DDR isn't hard. There's a platform with four arrows pointing up, down, left and right. There are four corresponding stationary arrows at the top of a video screen. At the bottom of the screen, arrows scroll upward. When the scrolling arrows overlap the stationary arrows, the dancer hits the corresponding arrow on the platform. The dancer is graded based on the precision in which he or she hits the correct arrow in time to the beat and as skill levels increase, arrows fly faster across the screen.
Torian Knox, 16, of Hyattsville comes to Time Out once a week to play DDR and said he's lost 35 pounds over the past year from playing the game.
"One day I saw the machine and decided I needed to play," he said. "And then I got hooked."
"It's good for the arcade," Cynthia Tenicela said. "The arcade serves a need because it provides a source of recreation for middle and high school kids in our community. We need more of that in Silver Spring."
SOURCE:
Gazette.Net.
