Introduction

It was a cold winter morning, the remnants of a light frost from the night before still coating the corners of the window frames, leaves crunching underfoot as three intrepid DDR players and Chuck Norris made their way across the wintry car park to an undisclosed location following a tip-off from a fellow member of DDR:UK, icy wind whipping at their hair, making each of them huddle further inside their respective overcoats. The walk to the building wasn’t long, and was made shorter yet by the fast pace at which they forced themselves to move, partly from the cold, partly from the sheer excitement at the prize they all knew awaited them inside.*

What is it?

DDRX Banner Konami are due to release to the UK in 2009 a brand new arcade dance machine, Dance Dance Revolution X. This is a major change from the original Dancing Stage series that we have all become accustomed to within Europe, for many reasons, and not just the name change. Dance Dance Revolution X, DDRX for short, comes during Konami’s 10th Anniversary of the DDR brand, and will be considered another world wide release. Japan are due to release the machine on Christmas Eve, a nice Christmas present for all those across the waters in Asia, however the European version is still under construction. DDRUK got the chance to view the machine in its early stages, so how does DDRX fair up to the likes of Euromix and Fusion? The main feature of the DDRX from the onset is the complete redesign of the cabinet, away from the usual Dancing Stage design, it brings in a fresh new look to DDR.

New Cabinet Design

Wide Screen Monitor: A very nice change to the older style monitors, the new wide screen display. This makes for a much clearer image, crisp and that feeling that it is defiantly a new machine. When playing, it does feel like you are a little more immersed in the game as it does take a lot of your peripheral vision, a personal view more than a feature of the machine. Blue glow from the bass speaker, reflecting off the etched plastic. Aesthetics: Using a similar design to the uBeat (JuBeat in Japan) machines, the etched plastic which when lit up by the hidden lights gives way to a futuristic style machine. The top lights are integrated in with the speakers, and the whole lot forms part of the banner as a whole. Buttons: An interesting change to the machine is the additions of two up and down arrows to the player selection area, along with a square select button. This is used more later on during the game play however. Storage: This was one we didn’t expect to be able to talk about. We are all used to putting our personal items at the top of the machine, or to each side of the Dancing Stage screens, the new DDRX style means we lose the ledges to the side of the monitor. Where the banner attaches to the top of the machine, there is now an area which you can put smaller items, however the banner continues along the back meaning you can’t accidentally push your wallet or keys down the back of the machine. This along with the metallic area at the bottom, above the base speakers, gives a lot more space in front of you that you can put items, and not hidden around the back. Coin Queue: This is more of an issue rather than an addition, the machine we were able to look at had some missing sections... from the videos we have seen it looks like it is the LED lights which run across the front of the machine. The smaller ledge means it’s impossible to balance coins on for a coin queue. Six Tower Lights: These were not attached to the machine, so we are unable to comment on this, however it is noted that the machine didn’t require these to run. Size: The machine is a little wider than the standard Dancing Stage machines, however very thin, at its smallest point probably only measuring about the width of someone’s hand (a small one at that!). New arrow decal Pads: New decal for the pad arrows and the side of the stage, the basic layout of it stays the same. The red bar replaced with a black bar, and the screws which hold each panel in place, replaced with screws which line up nicely with the panel they are holding in place, making it virtually flat. Lighting behind the arrows for this machine was a mix between the white light and the coloured light which makes up each arrow. Where the light matched that of the colour of the pad, it did look better than the white light. Coin Mechanism: Located in the centre, facing upwards to the roof, does make it easy to drop coins in, however there are some small issues where the coin could get stuck on the way in. Thankfully a pair of tweezers shifted the coin from where it had landed, and into the mechanism itself, registering the credit. As we are not allowed to view the coin mechanism itself, it is hard to tell if this is a machine fault, or a fault in the coin mechanism placement, on assumption it had to be swapped to work from taking foreign currency. Overall the machine looks very neat, tidy and does attract the attention of the random holiday maker, who watches on bemused by the flashing lights and flailing arms.

Playability

Moving on to the game play itself, it will be very hard to bring up an objective view of this, due to the software being incomplete at this stage. Many of the options were unavailable, only standard game play. The first annoyance came up quite quickly with the selection to accept two players. Putting two credits in, and pressing start on one side of the machine, leaves the screen loading for a second or two, during this time the second player that hasn’t entered yet, has to wait till the player selection screen to activate their side. The player selection screen is a little more informative than before, explaining that you require extra coins for a second player, or a second credit for doubles, and when selecting the mode explains which side needs to take action next. Moving on, the following screen shows up many under construction signs, for the different available modes. As only one mode is available, all we can do is select Standard Mode. Just like DDR Supernova 2, you can select your character for the background, Emi returning for the default selection of player 2. This being an early version of the software, we hope that additional characters will be available in the near future. Taking us to the ever popular, song wheel! Grouped very much like Supernova 2, there is a section for each arcade mix where the song first appeared, 1st Mix all the way through to Supernova 2, and of course the new DDRX songs. At this point, only the up, down and select arrows on the selection area are lit up, this is to warn you that you now use the up and down arrows to select songs. Pressing either the left or the right button does nothing, however double tapping them, takes you backwards and forwards through the sorting type (BPM, Artist, Group, etc). Pressing both left and right, brings up the sorting menu, so you can choose which sorting method you prefer. The visible mixes were grouped into section based on DDR releases, rather than European Mixes, so unless you know where you were looking for a specific song, and knew what release it was made for originally, finding them could be tricky. Love Shine, now a level 10 song! As noticed from the Playstation 2 version of the game, the difficulty levels have all been changed, so songs like Love Shine on Expert now registers as a level 10 song. Difficulty at this point is still selected by double tapping the up and down arrows on the dance stage itself, and still set to beginner as default. Additionally you still find the normal additions to the song selection screen, Groove Radar, BPM and more. Press and holding the select button on the song of choice brings up the usual options screen, with a few additional options. Starting from the very top, it is noted that 2.5x is now an available option for speed, should make a few songs a little easier to read! Towards the bottom an additional option for a screen, with dark, darker and darkest. This puts a screen behind your arrows, so that if you feel the background and dancers are putting you off, you can blank them out to help you with reading your arrows.

Dance Dance Dance!

Off we go! The song starts, and off we play, how did it go? DDRX side banner lights As a new machine, the pads were very new and defiantly responsive, being able to press and activate the arrows with our little fingers came to some amusement for us. The larger screen gives for a slightly larger arrow on the screen, and being a lot more readable than the older machines. Lights from the top of the machine did not glare, and distract you from the arrows, and with the full darkest setting switched on behind the arrows, the background wasn’t too distracting either. Announcer, thankfully wasn’t as bad as the PS2 version, a lot less in the way of disrupting your song, however there are still a few annoying ones still in there... the “whoop whoop” every once in a while made for a joke the first few times, then got tiresome very quickly. With the inability to change this setting, meant you are stuck with the “hip-hop” announcer, however members of the public seemed amused by it. Lets see what the final version brings. Being an early version of the software, commenting on the song synchronisation could be a little hard; however most of the tracks played did seem to play very well. However it was difficult to conclude if the timing windows had been increased. Like with Supernova 2, Marvellous returns to standard play, to add the hardcore touch, and comes with it the same style scoring system. Shock arrows are one of the new additions to the game play, just like mines, you are to avoid the arrow travelling up the screen. If you do hit the shock arrow, there is a slight electrical sound, nothing too distracting, to let you know that you have hit it, however the whole song chart fades out for a split second. On this version of the machine, there was only one song with Shock Arrows in, the song was identified by the shock arrow icon, above the groove radar, on the song selection screen. As time went along, we did notice that the difficulty in getting the higher grades was on part with Supernova 2, it was a lot easier to pass songs. It seemed like the life bar either wasn’t going as far down as we had initially thought, or that because of the wide screen, the life bar was actually longer, but collecting your D grade score for a song you were just messing about with, and deliberately not doing so well seemed to happen quiet a lot. Saber Wing selected as the 3rd stage. On completion of the 2nd song, would give you access to a “boss” song for your 3rd track, based off the difficulty that you were playing on for the second song, and locked to that difficulty. “Saber Wing” by “Tag”, difficulty 13 on Expert popped up as this “boss” song, however given the short song list, we can assume that there will be additional songs. A very Fusion style end to your 3 song stretch.

Total Result
Total results screen With this machine 3 stages is what you got, no extra stage enabled at this time, meant taking you to the final score screen. A nice addition to be able to see how well you did on different songs, giving only score and grade, gives you an indication of how you did overall.

In Conclusion

DDRX Coming Soon Konami seem to be bringing the style of their machines to a universal look, shown quite nicely with the etched panels to mirror uBeat, and it has done well. What we saw of the machine was very nice, and had that new feeling to it. The new wide screen brings the display up to what the Pump It Up players are used to, with their new machines, and the new style does detach them away from the standard DDR image we are used to. The announcer was the major sticking point with DDRX, and has been for all iterations of this game so far, very hip-hop and the comments while you stood to take a picture, egging you to move on, did get very annoying. Theme itself wasn’t too bad, it has taken the futuristic look from Supernova and Supernova 2 and bought it back to American backstreet. There were no USB ports on this machine, so no way to look at this, and the missing LED bar at the front left a very odd gap, here is hoping that it does make a comeback, and only missing due to the location. eAmusement also wasn’t present on this machine, but we can all hope for the future of this. All in all Konami seem to have got themselves a nice new looking machine, one that could take on the market quite well. The game itself, hard to judge at this time due to the incomplete software, however the machine will be making an appearance at ATEI in London (Trade Show), and be released to a popular location for the fans with updated software for everyone to try. Let us hope things go well in that area. Stay tuned to DDR:UK for additional information on the player test location, as and when we receive the information. *Note that the next couple of paragraphs and the last paragraph of this review have been removed, for personal reasons. (6th Jan 2009)