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My Michigan DDR Adventures
Friday
I drove out to Oakmont, where Rebecca lives, and we practiced our routine once or twice on her DDR stages, with music but without actual game because one stage doesn't work. We got on the road shortly afterwards.
It was a mostly uneventful roadtrip. Rebecca lives like 5 minutes from Harmarville and the turnpike entrance there. We drove along the turnpike for ages and ages, into Ohio, for more ages and ages, into Michigan, for a few ages. Listened to a lot of music. She wasn't too impressed with my Rumania Montevideo album, although we had fun singing along to lots of her DDR soundtracks, and I put in a smile.dk album at one point. Rebecca's mom called at some point in the evening (9ish? 10ish?) to tell us that there was this huge tornado storm thingy in Pittsburgh that had just taken out the Whip at Kennywood and killed/injured a bunch of people. Scary. Skimming entries and seeing people talk about the storm Friday night makes me really glad I wasn't around for it. We had clear wonderful weather all weekend in Michigan, really. Eventually we arrived at the place we were staying, in Adrian... we hung out with Rebecca's sister, played with Rebecca's digital camera/camcorder so I'd know how to use it. I then went upstairs to reglue my Alice wristband together and to color the suspenders, and eventually went to sleep and all.
Saturday's Tournament
Got up in the morning and put on my Alice costume; well, everything except the freakin' blue wig, because DAMN it's hot wearing that. Rebecca put on her Yuni costume, and we took a bunch of pictures of us at the house (which I'll have and post as soon as she dumps them off her camera), and then we drove to Pinball Pete's in Ann Arbor, where the tournament was. They have like five DDR machines there...
2nd mix, 3rd mix, 4th mix, 5th mix, and MAX. 3-6 were against one wall and 2nd was around a support column. They also had Dance Maniax 2nd mix, Guitar Freaks 3rd 4th and 6th mix, DrumMania 6th mix, a broken KeyboardMania 2nd mix, and Para Para Paradise. This is in addition to a whole section in the back with oldskool arcade and pinball machines, like Arkenoid, Dr Dug, Tetris, Zaxxon, etc, and Theatre of Magic, Medieval Madness, Bride of Pinbot, um... they had like 25 pinball games total and just a shitload of cool Japanese arcade games. What is it about freakin' Michigan that supports these arcades?
Anyway, we signed in - I told them my name as Deanna "dr4b" Rubin, and Rebecca told them her as Rebecca "sorakirei" Roach. Since we were the only routine with two people, they just put us both down as "dr4b". The tournament was just on the 4th and 5th mix machines. We set up the videocamera and hung out for a while... I played a lot of PPP and DrumMania and a little bit of DDR. At 1:45, since the thingy was starting at 2pm, I got the counter guy to let me into the bathroom (the bathrooms are locked up - how ghetto) and I put on my blue wig. They got the tournament started. There were only 12 entrants and I only really remember about 5 of them. The first guy did "Theme from Enter the Dragon" and he was dressed up as a TMNT, and he had golf clubs, but I can't really remember much of what he did. We were second... our routine was "Alice vs. Yuni: Let the Beat Hit 'Em and we'll see who's better" as we were calling it. We got our whole routine and didn't screw up any of it... and I tried really hard to look out at the audience and to really get into my dancing, though it's hard to tell if we pulled it off. I dunno. The next guy did this funny Cutie Chaser routine... he put caution tape all over the machine and some traffic cones, and he just wore cut-off jean shorts and black suspenders and a hard hat and carried a plunger, and he did this total "I am a lecherous construction worker" routine which was actually really funny, he would hit arrows with the plunger and pretend to hump the DDR machine and stuff. After him I forget... this guy who's a friend of a friend, who goes by "Hollywood" did a doubles routine to I Was The One, which is hard to describe except to say that he had STYLE. I mean, he's this tall black guy and he could REALLY dance. Then there was this girl dressed up as Shorty from Bust-a-Groove... she did the cute Shorty wave at the beginning but other than that she basically just played .59 and sort of hopped around to it a bit. There was an 8-year-old kid who basically played through some song and waved his arms around a lot - it was cute. There was another guy who had "edit data" to AM-3P... that is to say, he took all of the arrows out, and basically just slid and jumped and danced around... he was really repetitive though, although he did a breakdancing thing in the middle. Oh, there was some guy who wore a rasta hat and had these toy monkeys, although I can't for the life of me remember what song he did or what he did except run around and throw monkeys at people.
Anyway, in the end, Hollywood won first place, Cutie Chaser Guy won second place, and Rebecca and I won third place. Entry for us was $15 and the third-place prize was $20 and they gave us 2 bucks in quarters to play in the arcade with, so after the $3.80 parking lot fee, we made.. uh... $3.20 or so. Yeah. Also, they only gave us one certificate for third place with the winner's name listed as "DR4B". Grr... well, they said they'd send Rebecca one in the mail, too.
We took pictures of a lot of people (sadly we didn't win Best Costume; the Cutie Chaser Guy did), and nobody actually wanted a picture of us except the Shorty girl and we took a picture of her too. Oh, and Rebecca filmed me playing 3 Para Para songs because I was really curious how stupid I look playing. (The answer: REALLY stupid. My arms are really weak and my positioning is really awful... I'm going to make an effort to really emphasize movements in the future I think) Although, the machine didn't have the cartoon or movie of anyone doing the routines so I had them all memorized, which at least says something for me.
Saturday afternoon
After the freestyle was over it was like 4pm... so they were going to have a tech tournament too. But, I'd hung out and played a little bit of DDR already and I was feeling really sweaty and awful and it was sort of hard to play in costume because I wasn't used to the baggy pants (although I was able to pull off Absolute maniac, BB$ KOG trick, and Super Star maniac in them when I took advantage of the free play during the judging score total time). So we headed back to Adrian, where we showed off our certificate and some of the videos to the family hanging out there... and showered and changed to head back out.
Saturday night
BLASTERS HAS WAY TOO MANY DDR MACHINES FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
That's about all that can be said. My god, they have 7 DDR machines (no joke - in order, along a wall, they had a MAX, a 4th Plus, a 5th, a Disney's Rave, another 5th, another MAX, and a MAX2! I'll babble about MAX2 in a second). The 7 DDR machine stages are touching each other - you could literally run along a whole wall of DDR stages. They also had a Samba machine, a Para Para 2nd Mix, a Beatmania 6th, Guitar Freaks 6th, and Drummania 4th. There were also lots of gratuitous Konami interactive games, like the samurai game where you hold a sword as the interface, and a Lupin shooter game - Rebecca made me take pictures of her next to a lot of those. Except for their No-food-no-drink-nobody policy, this was an amazing arcade.
Ok, so sure, Brighton was like an hour and change away from Adrian, but it was worth going to. We got there around 7:30 or 8pm. It's in a nice suburban area... so unlike Pinball Pete's, in this one, the bathrooms are open for use... but there is no water fountain and you are not allowed food or drinks. We figure this is because there are a ton of little kids always running around there, and little kids are dangerous, but... it was really annoying, they yelled at Rebecca and I for having water bottles... so we said we'd take them outside. What really happened is that we hid them in Rebecca's DDR bag and then I'd be like "Can I borrow your bag? I'm going to the bathroom..." and then I'd take her bag there and drink a whole lot of water, and then put it back in her bag... or sometimes she'd go outside since she was trying to call a friend of hers, and I'd drink water then... but man, it was retarded, it was just soooooo annoying to not be able to drink water freely between songs and all.
As a result I think the only really major thing I did was full-combo Candy on Standard with an AA. I didn't really try to do any songs above 7 feet, because I was worried about dehydrating and coughing up a lung or two. The place was really empty though, so for their 7 DDR machines nobody really cared about whether you were doing cool shit or not. Most of the people playing there weren't really all that good... that is to say, they were at about my level, mostly doing Trick/Standard songs. Rebecca was probly the best player there, or something. The only machine that ever had a wait to use it was the MAX2 machine.
Huh, so MAX2... what do I think of it? Well, I think it's better than MAX in that it has a wider song selection... but I don't think I'd be happy if an arcade near me only had MAX2. Well, I mean, I'd be happy that there was one near me at all, but in my ideal world, I think MAX2 and a 4th plus machine would keep me pretty happy though. Or, say, MAX2, a 5th, and a 3rd Korean 2. I played a whole bunch of the MAX2 songs and none of them were really memorable to me except maybe Waka Laka, Look at Us, Stay, and Tsugaru. Well, and I really like the new Kosaka Riyu versions of Dive and Candy. Oh, I guess BeForU's new songs were okay too. I really need to hear the songs to judge them... since the machines were all so close together it was hard to really hear the music. D2R was a big letdown for me, although I only played it once, and could barely hear it, so maybe I'd like it more if I played it again or got to really hear it. Oh, and I do like that they now have the groove meter AND the foot rating so you can judge how hard a song is. And they groove-metered the old songs, too... it's pretty neat.
Anyway, I played a ton of MAX2, quite a bit of 4th/5th/6th, and a lot of doubles... a LOT of Petit Love, I *adore* that song soo much. I also played a ton of Para Para Paradise.. this was the one with the cute cartoon character guiding you through the moves, so I did both songs I know really well and totally new songs. See, for $20 I got 100 tokens, and the Bemani games were all 4 tokens per credit. I was able to play for about 3 hours on that $20, which is pretty good. I played a little bit of Guitar Freaks and I also did a lot of DrumMania, which I have decided is the next Bemani game I want to get really good at. Although I think I have heard the song "春～Spring" by Hysteric Blue about ninety thousand times too many for my tastes, now... I really loved playing it on DrumMania though, since I like the song so much. I also got to play "Liar Liar" by the B'z, another J-rock group I like... and they had other fun songs like Venus, and of course there was the infamous Cutie Pie. A lot of songs are in common between Guitar Freaks and DrumMania, apparently because the home version allows you to play the guitar AND the drums with a friend and pretend you're jamming in a band. If I ever have a bunch of extra money to spend, I think I'll try to pick up those games...
After we finished up all of our tokens at Blasters, around 11pm, we went across to a place across the street called Red Robin and had dessert. It was decent. Then we headed back to Adrian to sleep.
Sunday
My nose is really stuffed, so I woke up at 10am, despite setting my cellphone to ring at 9:30, and that everyone else in the house woke up when they smelled pancakes cooking. I came downstairs and ate pancakes. Then we showered/changed/packed/etc and got on the road.
Not much to say about the ride back actually.. In switching between CD choices I got to put on L'arc en Ciel and the Brilliant Green, and buriguri went over pretty well with Rebecca, which was good. We had this long ongoing conversation that was half about left-handedness and half about going to Japan. I thought it was really funny because she mentioned something about not using her left hand for anything except driving and I was like "Well, I'm left-handed..." and she was like "damn, really?" and I realized that you know, there's no real way people can tell what hand you are if they don't see you either write or use eating implements (which if I'm not mistaken, none of my DDR friends have any excuse to have done). I mean, I had friends I played volleyball with who, after like four years of doing so, would say things to me like "Why the heck do you always hit lefty?" and I'd be like "duh, I'm left-handed" and they'd go "No way."
Oh yeah, and we stopped at the Beaver Valley Mall on the way back, actually. Heh. There weren't any DDR players there though... and I think even Chris no longer works there on the weekends or something, he's now working during the week, so we didn't even know the arcade attendant. So I went in first and played a set that I now think of as my "warm-up set" - Pops Side B: Face trick, Byul maniac, and Silent Hill maniac. It is a really good warmup, I think. I almost always do those songs first when I get to an arcade, if possible. Rebecca and I played a bit together and I actually held up pretty well against her (I got 215 perfect out of 238 in B4U!) and after spending like 2 bucks, we left. Except for stopping off in Oakland so she could get a video CD, there was nothing much else about the trip home. And then I am home. And now I am home.
I wonder if these LJ-cuts worked as I intended. Dang, that took an hour to write. I hope Eli doesn't kill me.
I drove out to Oakmont, where Rebecca lives, and we practiced our routine once or twice on her DDR stages, with music but without actual game because one stage doesn't work. We got on the road shortly afterwards.
It was a mostly uneventful roadtrip. Rebecca lives like 5 minutes from Harmarville and the turnpike entrance there. We drove along the turnpike for ages and ages, into Ohio, for more ages and ages, into Michigan, for a few ages. Listened to a lot of music. She wasn't too impressed with my Rumania Montevideo album, although we had fun singing along to lots of her DDR soundtracks, and I put in a smile.dk album at one point. Rebecca's mom called at some point in the evening (9ish? 10ish?) to tell us that there was this huge tornado storm thingy in Pittsburgh that had just taken out the Whip at Kennywood and killed/injured a bunch of people. Scary. Skimming entries and seeing people talk about the storm Friday night makes me really glad I wasn't around for it. We had clear wonderful weather all weekend in Michigan, really. Eventually we arrived at the place we were staying, in Adrian... we hung out with Rebecca's sister, played with Rebecca's digital camera/camcorder so I'd know how to use it. I then went upstairs to reglue my Alice wristband together and to color the suspenders, and eventually went to sleep and all.
Saturday's Tournament
Got up in the morning and put on my Alice costume; well, everything except the freakin' blue wig, because DAMN it's hot wearing that. Rebecca put on her Yuni costume, and we took a bunch of pictures of us at the house (which I'll have and post as soon as she dumps them off her camera), and then we drove to Pinball Pete's in Ann Arbor, where the tournament was. They have like five DDR machines there...
2nd mix, 3rd mix, 4th mix, 5th mix, and MAX. 3-6 were against one wall and 2nd was around a support column. They also had Dance Maniax 2nd mix, Guitar Freaks 3rd 4th and 6th mix, DrumMania 6th mix, a broken KeyboardMania 2nd mix, and Para Para Paradise. This is in addition to a whole section in the back with oldskool arcade and pinball machines, like Arkenoid, Dr Dug, Tetris, Zaxxon, etc, and Theatre of Magic, Medieval Madness, Bride of Pinbot, um... they had like 25 pinball games total and just a shitload of cool Japanese arcade games. What is it about freakin' Michigan that supports these arcades?
Anyway, we signed in - I told them my name as Deanna "dr4b" Rubin, and Rebecca told them her as Rebecca "sorakirei" Roach. Since we were the only routine with two people, they just put us both down as "dr4b". The tournament was just on the 4th and 5th mix machines. We set up the videocamera and hung out for a while... I played a lot of PPP and DrumMania and a little bit of DDR. At 1:45, since the thingy was starting at 2pm, I got the counter guy to let me into the bathroom (the bathrooms are locked up - how ghetto) and I put on my blue wig. They got the tournament started. There were only 12 entrants and I only really remember about 5 of them. The first guy did "Theme from Enter the Dragon" and he was dressed up as a TMNT, and he had golf clubs, but I can't really remember much of what he did. We were second... our routine was "Alice vs. Yuni: Let the Beat Hit 'Em and we'll see who's better" as we were calling it. We got our whole routine and didn't screw up any of it... and I tried really hard to look out at the audience and to really get into my dancing, though it's hard to tell if we pulled it off. I dunno. The next guy did this funny Cutie Chaser routine... he put caution tape all over the machine and some traffic cones, and he just wore cut-off jean shorts and black suspenders and a hard hat and carried a plunger, and he did this total "I am a lecherous construction worker" routine which was actually really funny, he would hit arrows with the plunger and pretend to hump the DDR machine and stuff. After him I forget... this guy who's a friend of a friend, who goes by "Hollywood" did a doubles routine to I Was The One, which is hard to describe except to say that he had STYLE. I mean, he's this tall black guy and he could REALLY dance. Then there was this girl dressed up as Shorty from Bust-a-Groove... she did the cute Shorty wave at the beginning but other than that she basically just played .59 and sort of hopped around to it a bit. There was an 8-year-old kid who basically played through some song and waved his arms around a lot - it was cute. There was another guy who had "edit data" to AM-3P... that is to say, he took all of the arrows out, and basically just slid and jumped and danced around... he was really repetitive though, although he did a breakdancing thing in the middle. Oh, there was some guy who wore a rasta hat and had these toy monkeys, although I can't for the life of me remember what song he did or what he did except run around and throw monkeys at people.
Anyway, in the end, Hollywood won first place, Cutie Chaser Guy won second place, and Rebecca and I won third place. Entry for us was $15 and the third-place prize was $20 and they gave us 2 bucks in quarters to play in the arcade with, so after the $3.80 parking lot fee, we made.. uh... $3.20 or so. Yeah. Also, they only gave us one certificate for third place with the winner's name listed as "DR4B". Grr... well, they said they'd send Rebecca one in the mail, too.
We took pictures of a lot of people (sadly we didn't win Best Costume; the Cutie Chaser Guy did), and nobody actually wanted a picture of us except the Shorty girl and we took a picture of her too. Oh, and Rebecca filmed me playing 3 Para Para songs because I was really curious how stupid I look playing. (The answer: REALLY stupid. My arms are really weak and my positioning is really awful... I'm going to make an effort to really emphasize movements in the future I think) Although, the machine didn't have the cartoon or movie of anyone doing the routines so I had them all memorized, which at least says something for me.
Saturday afternoon
After the freestyle was over it was like 4pm... so they were going to have a tech tournament too. But, I'd hung out and played a little bit of DDR already and I was feeling really sweaty and awful and it was sort of hard to play in costume because I wasn't used to the baggy pants (although I was able to pull off Absolute maniac, BB$ KOG trick, and Super Star maniac in them when I took advantage of the free play during the judging score total time). So we headed back to Adrian, where we showed off our certificate and some of the videos to the family hanging out there... and showered and changed to head back out.
Saturday night
BLASTERS HAS WAY TOO MANY DDR MACHINES FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
That's about all that can be said. My god, they have 7 DDR machines (no joke - in order, along a wall, they had a MAX, a 4th Plus, a 5th, a Disney's Rave, another 5th, another MAX, and a MAX2! I'll babble about MAX2 in a second). The 7 DDR machine stages are touching each other - you could literally run along a whole wall of DDR stages. They also had a Samba machine, a Para Para 2nd Mix, a Beatmania 6th, Guitar Freaks 6th, and Drummania 4th. There were also lots of gratuitous Konami interactive games, like the samurai game where you hold a sword as the interface, and a Lupin shooter game - Rebecca made me take pictures of her next to a lot of those. Except for their No-food-no-drink-nobody policy, this was an amazing arcade.
Ok, so sure, Brighton was like an hour and change away from Adrian, but it was worth going to. We got there around 7:30 or 8pm. It's in a nice suburban area... so unlike Pinball Pete's, in this one, the bathrooms are open for use... but there is no water fountain and you are not allowed food or drinks. We figure this is because there are a ton of little kids always running around there, and little kids are dangerous, but... it was really annoying, they yelled at Rebecca and I for having water bottles... so we said we'd take them outside. What really happened is that we hid them in Rebecca's DDR bag and then I'd be like "Can I borrow your bag? I'm going to the bathroom..." and then I'd take her bag there and drink a whole lot of water, and then put it back in her bag... or sometimes she'd go outside since she was trying to call a friend of hers, and I'd drink water then... but man, it was retarded, it was just soooooo annoying to not be able to drink water freely between songs and all.
As a result I think the only really major thing I did was full-combo Candy on Standard with an AA. I didn't really try to do any songs above 7 feet, because I was worried about dehydrating and coughing up a lung or two. The place was really empty though, so for their 7 DDR machines nobody really cared about whether you were doing cool shit or not. Most of the people playing there weren't really all that good... that is to say, they were at about my level, mostly doing Trick/Standard songs. Rebecca was probly the best player there, or something. The only machine that ever had a wait to use it was the MAX2 machine.
Huh, so MAX2... what do I think of it? Well, I think it's better than MAX in that it has a wider song selection... but I don't think I'd be happy if an arcade near me only had MAX2. Well, I mean, I'd be happy that there was one near me at all, but in my ideal world, I think MAX2 and a 4th plus machine would keep me pretty happy though. Or, say, MAX2, a 5th, and a 3rd Korean 2. I played a whole bunch of the MAX2 songs and none of them were really memorable to me except maybe Waka Laka, Look at Us, Stay, and Tsugaru. Well, and I really like the new Kosaka Riyu versions of Dive and Candy. Oh, I guess BeForU's new songs were okay too. I really need to hear the songs to judge them... since the machines were all so close together it was hard to really hear the music. D2R was a big letdown for me, although I only played it once, and could barely hear it, so maybe I'd like it more if I played it again or got to really hear it. Oh, and I do like that they now have the groove meter AND the foot rating so you can judge how hard a song is. And they groove-metered the old songs, too... it's pretty neat.
Anyway, I played a ton of MAX2, quite a bit of 4th/5th/6th, and a lot of doubles... a LOT of Petit Love, I *adore* that song soo much. I also played a ton of Para Para Paradise.. this was the one with the cute cartoon character guiding you through the moves, so I did both songs I know really well and totally new songs. See, for $20 I got 100 tokens, and the Bemani games were all 4 tokens per credit. I was able to play for about 3 hours on that $20, which is pretty good. I played a little bit of Guitar Freaks and I also did a lot of DrumMania, which I have decided is the next Bemani game I want to get really good at. Although I think I have heard the song "春～Spring" by Hysteric Blue about ninety thousand times too many for my tastes, now... I really loved playing it on DrumMania though, since I like the song so much. I also got to play "Liar Liar" by the B'z, another J-rock group I like... and they had other fun songs like Venus, and of course there was the infamous Cutie Pie. A lot of songs are in common between Guitar Freaks and DrumMania, apparently because the home version allows you to play the guitar AND the drums with a friend and pretend you're jamming in a band. If I ever have a bunch of extra money to spend, I think I'll try to pick up those games...
After we finished up all of our tokens at Blasters, around 11pm, we went across to a place across the street called Red Robin and had dessert. It was decent. Then we headed back to Adrian to sleep.
Sunday
My nose is really stuffed, so I woke up at 10am, despite setting my cellphone to ring at 9:30, and that everyone else in the house woke up when they smelled pancakes cooking. I came downstairs and ate pancakes. Then we showered/changed/packed/etc and got on the road.
Not much to say about the ride back actually.. In switching between CD choices I got to put on L'arc en Ciel and the Brilliant Green, and buriguri went over pretty well with Rebecca, which was good. We had this long ongoing conversation that was half about left-handedness and half about going to Japan. I thought it was really funny because she mentioned something about not using her left hand for anything except driving and I was like "Well, I'm left-handed..." and she was like "damn, really?" and I realized that you know, there's no real way people can tell what hand you are if they don't see you either write or use eating implements (which if I'm not mistaken, none of my DDR friends have any excuse to have done). I mean, I had friends I played volleyball with who, after like four years of doing so, would say things to me like "Why the heck do you always hit lefty?" and I'd be like "duh, I'm left-handed" and they'd go "No way."
Oh yeah, and we stopped at the Beaver Valley Mall on the way back, actually. Heh. There weren't any DDR players there though... and I think even Chris no longer works there on the weekends or something, he's now working during the week, so we didn't even know the arcade attendant. So I went in first and played a set that I now think of as my "warm-up set" - Pops Side B: Face trick, Byul maniac, and Silent Hill maniac. It is a really good warmup, I think. I almost always do those songs first when I get to an arcade, if possible. Rebecca and I played a bit together and I actually held up pretty well against her (I got 215 perfect out of 238 in B4U!) and after spending like 2 bucks, we left. Except for stopping off in Oakland so she could get a video CD, there was nothing much else about the trip home. And then I am home. And now I am home.
I wonder if these LJ-cuts worked as I intended. Dang, that took an hour to write. I hope Eli doesn't kill me.
Re: Thank you for taking the time
I can't wait until I have a video to show... I think we look pretty silly but it's so cool to be in one of "those tournament videos". Plus, it's not like anyone would ever be able to recognize me unless I said "hey, I'm the dork in the blue wig".
Re: Thank you for taking the time