I'm usually there every weekend in the late afternoon into the evening haha.
And yeah, when I saw your record, I was like "dammit, and I had it for so long too"
You must've gotten like 3 or 4 less greats than I did.

So I ran into Keby on Saturday night when I was at Gameworks for the first time in a long while, and we ended up talking about the Seattle DDR scene for a bit.

It's always nice to meet members of the site, especially new ones that I don't know. Anyway, Supernova's P2 pads are bleh, P1 is pretty good.  Extreme is because it froze when I tried to play it. Keby says it's usually pretty good though.
Taiko seemed fine, drummania seemed ok too (remember I play mid 40s).

So yeah, stuff didn't seem too broken there.

Yeah.......I have to admit though, SuperNova has been getting progressively worse. Extreme has been in the same so-so condition for awhile.

Honestly I just go to Gameworks to play Drummania now-a-days. The only time I play DDR there is if I feel like doing a bit of freestyle on extreme lol.

Don't ask about DDR USA, I refuse to touch it.

drummania is great. i went two weeks in a row now and it was good.

i went twice last week. everything was spanky.

I guess some Gameworks in Chicago recently got a US DDR X dedicab.  I wouldn't be surprised if one shows up in Seattle soon.  I'm not sure of the build quality of these things, but it would probably be better than Supernova.

I'm convinced anything is better than SuperNova

http://www.bemanistyle.com/index.php/news/dance-dance-revolution-x-us-dedicab-review-1407

I guess the pad is all one metal plate now.  Looks like Betson messed everything up again!

Holy cow, after reading that "review" I'm angry enough to punch a baby. Why has Konami let DDR fall so very, very far? This is just atrocious and terrible. When the Korean knock-off (Andamiro) can produce cabinets far superior to yours and ship it overseas at equal to or lower costs, you know something is wrong with your company!

Ugh, and here I thought Konami was making the cabs again.  I thought they had taken that job back from Betson after SuperNOVA 1 & 2

Research is your friend.  I probably have some incorrect details in my memory here, but IIRC DDR and Pump were developed so closely together time-wise that most people don't want to make a claim as to which was really first; Konami landed the US and many EU patent claims first, but Pump took other countries (each took their home nation, too, obviously).  Andamiro pays royalties in Konami's countries and Konami just doesn't market outside their territory.  The royalties exist mainly because Konami was willing to go all out with their legal battle when the genre was very new and possibly would turn out to be a flop, so Andamiro chose to just back down and settle it out of court.  The hardware between the two companies is exceedingly similar (to the point that the Yellow center panel can be used to replace a DDR arrow and vice-versa with a perfect fit) and the real problem was letting Betson take over Konami's production, since they didn't drop prices in the wake of cutting every corner they could.

The price difference is heavily a function of Korean labor being cheaper, plain and simple.  Japan's the second richest nation in the world and has a pretty small population supporting that, so Japanese workers are basically the highest paid in the world for many fields.  If Japan had outsourced more of it, they could charge less than Andamiro because of the aforementioned royalties Andamiro has to charge extra to cover.

andamiro also used standard pc parts since their first release instead of proprietary 573 systems. that cut costs a lot back in those days.

A few videos have popped up of the new cabinet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjb-Pc2Q3ZA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0BLijwafgk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBWEJerJ80U

goin here with toph tonite

edit>gameworks is a bust. popn is crammed between an ollie king and crane game and the volume is slightly above "mute". right white button is half broken too.

uh so they have DDR-X and the pads fucking suck. and theres this little blip that flashes up when you get a marvelous and it looks like what it looks like when you used to get a good and the note would go past the top which used to tell me when i was off but now it means you're on and it's really confusing.

either you know what i mean or you don't.

but the screen looks nice.

god the pads suck. i couldn't hold a freeze on either side. i thought this thing was brand new? oh yeah 8 points.


oh yeah the moved the games around a bit. pop'n is now on an end by itself but it could stand to be louder.

1P Ollie King is broken sorry.

Initial D V3 steering wheels both finally work proper except 2P has no force feedback and 1P has way too much which was strange and 2P doesn't allow using cards but w/e no one plays this anymore anyways.

Extreme is still broken.

The new pads are just that bad. It's not too surprising.

Oh well, just another reason to go to Gameworks once and never again. Fuck DDR.

yeah i know it's been a long time. ironic because this is the only one i really feel like playing. well if the pads worked good at least.

Is it just me or is this place not worth walking into?

Seriously, I walked into this place once, found a friend of mine from Portland, and left immediately.  Partly because everything was so retarded and broken, and partly because they were closing.

Seriously, the Avalon has better maintenance for 20% of the price. :/ (not that they have many good games any more.  Panic Park's the only reason I'll go back there.  Ever.

Well, the DM is in awesome condition. If you play DM it's basically the only place to go unfortunately. I'm too addicted to TGM now though to bother going anywhere but Acme.

I'll probably make an appearance here when I get back.

I guess at a Gameworks in Illonois, the staff was so angered by the Betson DDR X cabinet that they phoned Betson.  A Betson rep came and fixed the pad, and now apparently it works really well.  I'm not sure what they did, but it supposedly runs perfect now aside from the screen lag.

http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/viewthread.php?threadid=1265&page=309#p114627

Funny story about that.

I played my first game of DDR in over 5 months. I picked AM-3P HVY, and anybody who has watched me play knows I do not use the bar and I step LOUDLY. I FCed it with like 4 greats and then the game locked up.

That was in May. Sorry guys. =(

Just hit the exact sequence of buttons except backwards.  It's probably an easter egg Konami came up with while they were on acid. ;P

Shortly thereafter, they made SuperNOVA.

Is this starting to make sense to anyone else?

Saw some guy opening the DDR X pads (it takes forever with that design) to put some little rubber tabs on top of the sensors. He also had a fax of a photo of how to install them. Didn't stick around to see if they did anything though. With the lag (and price) it doesn't really matter how good the pads are.

Popn music right white button is still broken. drummania is wedged between an ollie king and guitar freaks with about half the volume it usually has.