exploring the wild world of DDR controllers

dance dance revolution dance dance revolution is one of my favorite things ever and that love developed entirely from playing the game at home throughout my life i've had very few arcades near me and none of them had ddr so the only option i had was to compromise this is a soft pad and it is the most accessible ddr thing ever produced since they were bundled with nearly every ddr home port you can get one for 15 to 30 bucks plug it in and it just works but that cheapness comes at a cost while you're playing the game they never stay put they like to slide all over the place and it becomes a force of habit after a song ends to reach down and rotate it back to its normal position this is such a commonplace issue that people just tape them to the floor another problem is that there's no tactile feedback at all the top layer is completely flat plastic you can't feel where the edges of the buttons are with your feet so the only way to center yourself is to look down and adjust and the last issue with them is the inconsistency depending on how old your pad is who made it where it came from how much use it's had it's a toss up on how sensitive the pad is going to be either it's too sensitive and registers a press when you don't want it to or you stomp on it really hard and nothing happens or maybe it'll happen too late occasionally i'll stumble upon a soft pad that gets the sensitivity just right personally i've had the best experience with official konami pads and the nintendo mario mix pad but even in the best case scenario soft pads still aren't viable for competitive play some people mod their soft pads by plating them with wood you're thinning out the soup a little bit too much okay so i thought of a lot of different ways that i could phrase this video and the best way that i could come up with was a tier list i know it's a bit cheesy but just bear with me okay okay so the left side is for foot controllers and the right side is for hand controllers we're just gonna focus on the left side for right now in general those standard issue plastic soft pads land firmly in the e-tier there is another kind of soft pad and as far as i know they don't really have a name so i'm just gonna call them thick pads they have these big thick pieces of foam inside of them which adds some weight and makes them slide around a bit less some of them have tactile bumps on the panels so i can feel where they are with my feet and center myself without looking the thick pads are slightly better enough to edge their way into the d-tier and of course the dream would be to have your very own ddr cabinet right well that'd be a tier well it's very clever to put ddra in the eights here i'm not specifically referring to ddra it's just a visual summary of ddr cabinets in general but why isn't it s tier well i'll tell you okay not all ddr cabinets are made equal despite being produced and distributed by konami themselves they range in quality greatly you can't just call konami and be like hello i would like one dance dance revolution please it just doesn't work that way so you're not gonna get a new one even then old used cabinets are difficult to get expensive and very bulky but let's say you managed to find one for sale and were able to drive out with a truck to transfer at home it doesn't just end there you gotta find a place to put it it's gonna need to be cleaned and repaired you spent hundreds maybe even a couple thousand on this thing and you're still gonna have to buy some replacement parts and when it's all said and done unless you wanna mod it you are still limited to only playing the songs that were originally on that cabinet no more no less what a lot of people that are in this situation would do is they'll separate the pad from the cabinet and then mod the pad so they can plug it into whatever they want like a pc or some sort of adapter box and then use that instead of relying on the cabinet if you're willing to put in the time and the energy then it is a really good option the end result is fantastic and it deserves to be this high on the list but it just doesn't deserve the est here because it relies on external variables that you don't have any control over so the middle ground between an arcade cabinet and a soft pad would be homebrew pads they're made by fans with no intervention from konami but because they're homebrew they're made to be tweaked you have to be prepared to diy when something goes wrong the cobalt flux is very well liked by the ddr community but it is constantly out of stock and trying to find a used one is very difficult the ltch pads are always in stock but they're manufactured in poland so if you're american like i am be prepared to pay hundreds of dollars for shipping i'm speaking from experience of course because in order to get one i had to spend around 650 in total so the ltch pad was it worth it i'd say that it was worth it to me i'll just say that it's got some baggage this is my very first ddr hard pad i've never owned one before and for the price i paid i was a little disappointed i justified the high price tag because i foolishly thought this would be endgame i have a hard pad with a hand bar just like the arcades but the reality of it is that it just made me want a real arcade pad even more because the ltch pad is very home brewy you have to do a bunch of mods in order for it to even be competitive with that being said i did take the time to do those mods a control board replacement and the steel plate sensitivity mod and as a result my experience was vastly improved compared to the stock unit one very common complaint that i also agree with is wow this bar sucks i do not like this bar it wobbles all over the dang place it doesn't matter how much you tighten it it doesn't matter how much time you put into trying to get it stable it will always wobble and i just can't get enough height out of it i don't it's like it's just not tall enough i'm in that weird height range where it's just barely out of my comfort zone drives me crazy but i don't have any alternative so i just use it anyway some people build their own bar but i just don't have that kind of a brain like i would have to commission somebody else to do it because i have no knowledge of like metal working or anything like that as for the cobalt flux i don't have one but from what i've read the quality is superb because they're so hard to find people just started building their own you can buy pre-made kits to build one and if you're american it'll only run you about 300 including shipping it's not exactly a cobalt flux it's just modeled very closely after one if you're willing to put in the time to building it that's genuinely a really good price honestly the cobalt flux and the ltch are pretty comparable but i'm going to give the cobalt flux to win on this one because it stood the test of time so hard that people are still modeling new pads off of it to this day b-tier and the l-tech is gonna go and see tier before we get into what's better than a ddr arcade cabinet let's talk about something terrible if you've been googling around for ddr pads you've likely come across ddrgame.com i actually have a ddr game thick pad and it's surprisingly good it's my go-to pad when i want to play ddr on the ps2 but i'm not convinced that they made any actual design changes to make it better than an official pad i'm confident that it's just a matter of age it was manufactured brand new within the last few years and it's being compared against soft pads from the early 2000s for ddr games soft pads i can't help but recommend them because they're still making new ones konami gave up on that long ago as for their hard pads though if you look at their catalog they are absolutely beautiful these price points are realistic to what you pay for a quality hard pad you could easily be fooled into thinking they're legit i don't have any personal experience with them but according to the ddr subreddit their pads don't hold up over time because they're exceptionally low quality the sensors are prone to failing and the control boxes tend to randomly disconnect sounds like an f tier to me i'm sure someone's gonna contact me and be like i bought a ddr game hard pad and i haven't had any problems listen i'm not speaking from experience i'm just going out with this paragraph on reddit alright i would love to personally roast ddr games hard pads by buying one and talking about how crap it is but oh my god these price tags are ridiculous for something that i know is going to suck but there is a way to enable me to do such things in the future though alright so getting back to it if a real ddr cab is a tier what would be estier this is the step maniac stage and it's as close to end game as you're ever going to get the force sensing resistors automatically calibrate and you can adjust the sensitivity of the panels in software it even has customizable rgb in every single panel a stepmaniax community member by the name of kevin got some excellent footage of a stepmaniax pad and that's what you're looking at right now he even went out of his way to demonstrate the custom led pattern feature by putting my youtube mascot kk on the pads it's a little hard to tell because of the gaps between the panels but that was still a really cool thing for you to do thank you so so much the stepmaniac stage is developed by kyle ward the same person that made in the group a four panel ddr like from the early 2000s i got in contact with kyle and he was super cool kyle even offered for me to use his original music for the project and that's what you're listening to right now the song that you're hearing is a song that he produced it's so cool kyle really really cares about the rhythm game community so give the man some love he deserves it okay enough nice things now i gotta explain the baggage stepmaniacs is an original five panel game it's like ddr but it has a center panel i'm definitely going to get a stage at some point but it's up in the air if i'm ever going to get to play the stepmaniax 5 panel game because it's not as simple as just downloading the game and running it on your computer you have to buy a touchscreen monitor to run the game it has proprietary hardware in there that the game is purpose built to run on so let's consider the absolute minimum for me to play stepmaniax i have to buy the stage and i have to buy the monitor to play the game on that's already over three thousand dollars not even including shipping but listen it's easy to complain about high prices but first of all you get what you pay for and second of all we aren't the demographic arcade owners are the demographic stepmaniacs is aiming at if you look at the price of a brand new konami dvr cabinet that's gonna be somewhere between 15 to 20k per unit and that's if you can even get one at all they have exclusivity deals with only a few different major arcades but stepmaniacs is independent non-exclusive and it's only around 7k per cabinet that deal starts to look pretty good just because it's easier to get than an official konami cabinet still doesn't mean that it's easy to get in fact quite the opposite they only open for sale every few months and they sell out in seconds the last drop that happened i tried to get one and i couldn't every single step maniacs person i've interacted with has been awesome including the developers themselves it's just the camaraderie in the stepmaniacs community is so good to see i'm not associated to or sponsored by stepmaniax i'm just a fan i just really like their stuff so to sum up the stepmaniax pad you get what you pay for it's extremely high quality there isn't a modding scene because it doesn't need one it's fully configured out of the box you can buy kits to add more panels so you can play a variety of different floor panel games instead of just ddr for example pump it up and you get entrance to a great community now listen i am talking trash to ddr by putting the smx pad a tier above i love ddr i love these cabinets but the flexibility of the step maniacs pad speaks for itself so i talked about a lot of different foot pads but this is far from all the options that exist these are just the ones that i found to be the most notable from my perspective as a non-hardcore player i can play any original ddr game on mac's difficulty no problem but i'm still not good enough to play something like stamina which is ddr but with long unbroken streams of arrows at a high bpm right and i'm not anywhere near the level of skill required to play not itg sight reading charts like that stuff is insane if you want a more in-depth look at ddr pads in the context of hardcore stamina players i highly recommend checking out this video by dom itg it's got a lot of great information was super helpful for me during the scriptwriting process and one last thing before we move on to the hand controllers why okay so in preparation for this video i was searching dance dance revolution on ebay i saw this and i immediately wondered how that could possibly work i've seen dvd games where you can like move a little cursor with the remote but there's no way that they could make a rhythm game with that concept right did they make a ddr pad that uses infrared like a tv remote like how does it work well it doesn't and i'm not just saying that it tries its best and just doesn't do a good job they expect you to literally play pretend it comes with a vinyl sheet that has a ddr matte decal printed on it there are no electronics at all you can crumple it up like a sheet of paper and the dvd just plays a video of arrows scrolling up the screen and you're expected to act like you're playing a video game and of course it always says perfect like you're doing well on the box it says dvd game seen it is a dvd game because it has a win condition and a lose condition you can pick the wrong answer in scene it and then you'll lose in the dance dance revolution dvd game you can just do nothing and win anyway like the only instance that makes any sense for this thing existing is if like you don't have any video game consoles or anything and that's what this review says great alternative to buying an entire game system like fair enough that makes sense to me but the thing that i'm so hung up on is that it calls itself a dvd game but there's no game to be had you're just watching an exercise video they should have called it the ddr exercise kit or something it may be 16 but using my imagination is free [Music] you guys see the sonic movie yet the one from like a year ago in the beginning of 2020. you haven't why not it's the highest grossing video game movie of all time though you should totally watch it it's on netflix but you got to get a vpn to watch it because it's in iceland and japan and russia and sweden and ukraine oh wait you don't have a vpn well if i got a deal for you atlas vpn is running a huge discount on their three-year deal just 139 per month with a 30-day money-back guarantee so click the stinky link be in the description and pin comment alright so you want to watch the sonic movie right you're going to use atlas vpn to connect to one of these five countries let's go to sweden atlas vpn encrypts your data and routes it through a server in sweden so then you're going to reload netflix and ta-da there's the sonic movie it's also got this thing called data breach monitor you'll put in your email address and it checks if that email address has been compromised it'll even notify you if you get breached in the future and get this right you can get atlas vpn on all your devices too for real though this deal is not gonna last long it's it's a limited time offer 139 per month 30 day money back guarantee atlas v dot pn kk clue the k the k and the c our capital you gotta type it that way or just click the link in the at the top of the description and pin comment you know the deal okay back to the video okay so let's take a look at the right side of the tier list let's say you don't have any ddr pads but you do have a playstation and a copy of the game what are you going to do you're just going to use the playstation controller yeah i mean i don't see why not it really isn't surprising that there's an entire subsection of the ddr community that plays the game with their hands it's all about accessibility good keyboards are less expensive and easier to come by than good ddr pads are friday night funken's success is due in part to its accessibility it's free all you need to play it is a computer even though mechanically it's an experience identical to playing ddr with a keyboard the game is so much more than just its mechanic stanstance revolution is the same way even when you take away the gimmick it still has insane appeal even konami knew this and they wanted to encourage alternate control schemes so they manufactured and released an official ddr hand controller i love this thing it's just awesome i even tried to make it look like a real ddr pad it's great the only thing that would make it look even more rad is if the buttons lit up as you press them but sadly they do not you may have noticed these extra buttons up here what are those for well for those that are unaware there's a game mode of ddr called solo which adds two more directional panels up left and upright and this controller is designed to support that and that kind of rocks when i first got this controller a few years ago i was pretty down on it i didn't like how square the buttons were and how the d-pad was so far apart but as i used it more and more i really started to come around and this is my favorite way to play ddr on playstation on a normal controller you can't press two opposing directions on the d-pad at the same time but obviously that issue is resolved with the ddr controller you can press left and right at the same time with your thumb i can't imagine you'll be in that situation super often considering the low difficulty of the playstation ddr game but you can do it overall not bad i had a pretty good time with this controller for sure it goes in b tier and since it's basically just a playstation controller but meant for ddr naturally the original wouldn't be far behind see tier you use two legs to play ddr so making that the equivalent to two thumbs on a hand controller is pretty smart but let's say that some company took ddr pad for your hands a bit too literally this is the bio mini ddr controller and wow there are a lot of problems with it how are you supposed to position your fingers on it i guess what they intended is for you to do finger legs like on a tech deck which i guess is fine but realistically i want to position my fingers like this using two hands and even then after a while my fingers were so strained from the awkwardness of the controls the buns themselves are okay they're serviceable but dude they're loud they click like crazy it's like you're slamming on a typewriter i'm hacking i'm hacking the best thing about this controller is how it looks the aero panels have these brushed aluminum plates on top that give them such a uniquely luxury feel and the buttons glow when you press them always love that very pleasing the bio mini controller is kind of cool actually but like it's not good and that kind of hurts to say because this is what people would think of when they hear mini ddr controller for actual gameplay it's just not as practical as the ddr controller or even the playstation controller but it isn't totally unusable so i guess it's going to go in deep here and before we get down to e and below let's go up to the top and talk about keyboards i briefly mentioned earlier that the keyboard ddr sub community exists and the reason why is because it's undeniably the most consistent way to play rhythm games with your hands keyboards come in all different shapes and sizes and configurations and key switches and there's like a million different variables right but in general okay keyboard play gets a keyboard a some people play with the arrow keys some people play with four keys in a row some people spread them out between their two hands you get a lot of options for customization when you use a keyboard my keyboard of choice for a long time was a standalone board meant specifically for keyboard rhythm games it's called the thick 4k i tend to be pretty rough with my keyboards when playing rhythm games i've bottomed them out really hard when pressing them so it has cherry mx red switches which actuate at the bottom all things considered it's held up pretty well over the past few years i've had it but i do have some problems with it micro usb instead of usb-c it's not hidden compliant it needs arduino drivers in order to work so if you plug it into old computers or consoles it won't work the case and the keycaps are 3d printed which is fine but 3d printed things tend to be kind of brittle the little plus shape that holds onto the key switch that broke off really soon after i got it i can't show you the 3d printed keycaps because i threw them in the trash like three years ago i replaced them with better keycaps and all was well other than that not bad they also make some keyboards that have touch controls and i gotta try that at some point that sounds sick my brother makes keyboards and i told him my problems have to think 4k and he was like yeah that's lame i'll make it better and a few weeks later he came up with this prototype there are two boards with two buttons each and they're designed to be positioned wherever you want it's got hot swap key switches with no soldering required i ended up not getting a lot of use out of the boards being separated and having two microcontrollers doubles the price of production so he made a version with only one board very similar to the neck 4k we called it the groove board it's hid compliant so you can plug it into anything and it'll work just fine i also made the graphics for the board and you can tell because it's awesome we're gonna do a limited run of groove boards on ebay but if you can't get one then don't worry you can still build one yourself because the design is open source baby to be clear we aren't trying to compete with nick this was a very personal project i wanted a low profile hid compliant chock switch usb-c board and the think 4k wasn't checking any of those boxes so i took matters into my own hands next boards are still very good i highly recommend you check them out they're very accessible and their prices are good they've been doing it for years they know what's up i don't want anyone to think that i'm trying to one-up them or anything that's just not the case just consider this like fan fiction you know i made it out of a labor of love i ain't trying to step on your toes these kind of keyboards are designed with ddr in mind so of course is the best way to play the game best here yeah sure all those things are cool right but what if i want to play ddr on the bus on the way to school not to worry konami thought of that and they put dance dance revolution on the dang game boy and you have this little plastic thing you got to clip onto it so you can have ddr buttons okay as ridiculous as this is it's kind of awesome it's really charming to hear classic ddr songs in chiptune form [Music] the plastic buttons are a little inconsistent but honestly they did their best i like ddrgb a lot just because it's so weird that it exists at all it's definitely not good so eat here but i don't have a game boy clue oh my god you're so whiny fine will you stop complaining if i show you the ddr lcd game or the music sounds like it was put through a blender three times i could not get one of these they're very expensive and from what i've seen they're definitely not worth it f-tier they made a few hello kitty ones though and those are really cute someday i'll get one that day is not the day and the very last ddr controller i have to talk about is so terrible that it should not exist at all okay imagine a thin soft pad like a bad third party one and you shrink it down to be only a few inches big introducing the dance pad pro series the fact that this was green lit and manufactured is insane to me trying to use this to play ddr is a nightmare the sensitivity is comically low i put it on a flat surface and absolutely hammered it with my fingertips and it was still like a 50 chance that it would register a press at any given time there is no tactile feedback the buttons aren't raised or anything so it suffers from all the same problems of a standard soft pad but this one is small so it sucks even more [Applause] that's about as far as i thought i'd get i had the best luck with holding the pad with two hands and pinching the buttons with two fingers i had to hold it like a controller with two hands to get it to even function at that point why don't i just use a controller isn't the whole point for it to be better than using a controller or they just made me play with my toes is this a tow controller for your toes just stop it stop it dance pad pro series get out of here seeing the tier list filled like this gives you so much perspective on how much reach ddr had like represented here we have the entire range of accessibility high to low price points all over the place stuff that was officially made by konami and stuff that was made by fans you've got third party copycats and bizarre license deals it's just it's it's really cool to see oh yeah speaking of license deals remember how i talked about burger king toys in the eye dog video yeah so konami partnered with friggin burger king to make ddr toys back in 2006. what is it with burger king getting all the best ips for their toys this right here is called the ddr foot moves and it is stupid it's literally just simon it does a little sequence of left and right and you copy the sequence and according to the promo website you're expected to play on this with your toes i don't even there were a lot more of these this was just the one i was able to get a hold of they also gave out little music sampler cds i bought this because it's so bizarre to see dance dance revolution and burger king printed on the same cd they almost feel like opposite concepts hey kkk what the heck is going on man why haven't you uploaded like 36 million years yes i hear you all right prepare yourself because i'm about to spill the beans i spent about five months working on this video it survived two depressive phases and three different entire script rewrites like a lot of drastic reworking to get it to flow like i wanted it to and in the middle of the production process i also moved into a new apartment i also spent a lot of time in april making stim packs which i sold the fans of the channel for an autism research charity i also opened a brand new merch store at clu.g which has some really sick new designs that i made so take a look at that it's really cool thank you for your patience and thank you to everyone on patreon for keeping me alive oh yeah also subscribe to my second channel kk2 i have a show over there where i open fan mail that people send to my p.o box occasionally i stream on twitch i'm actually a furry vtuber over there so go check that out since you're just going down the laundry list of stuff that i do we also have a really tight-knit community over on discord as well so if you're looking for some cool friendly people head over there i've been a busy bee uh so yeah stay tuned i've got some more rad videos coming up in the future this is what it sounds like when i'm dictating to the microphone underneath a blanket i captured some footage of this pad a few days ago but i just wasn't happy with the results we'll have that like blue earthbound background behind it as you can see in this example right here how to do is go frame by frame make it so that my arm will still appear when it goes through that masking part and this is really really sloppy i usually do a lot better than this

Channel: kkclue

Views: 311,798

Rating: 4.962913 out of 5

Keywords: evan clue, kkclue, clue media, eclue, clue's house, toys, wholesome, ddr, itg, dance dance revolution, in the groove, stepmania, stepmaniax, softpad, hardpad, l-tek, ddr gb, game boy, ddrgame, review, thiccpad, piu, pump it up, controller, ps2, retro, playstation, ddrmax, kaykay, cobalt flux, cabinet, homebrew, diy, pad, mat, konami, bemani, beatmania, outfox, grooveboard, thnikk, osu, fnf, friday night funkin', friday night funkin, DankPods

Id: AttTFpKn0zQ

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/shadowartist201]

(6:31) DDR II does not suck. Aside from that, the video is great.

[u/WispyWave]

Watched this last night~ I gotta find the GBC DDR soundtrack now!

[u/cryopotat0]

god the stepmaniax thingy 😭😭😭😭

one day...