(Written 9 May 2022. Revised and published 10 December 2022.)
In The Groove and its consequences have been a disaster for the dance game scene.
Now that I got your attention with an edgy uncle Ted paraphrase, a disclaimer: I never really played either DDR or ITG much, so the entire rant that follows is mostly me talking out of my ass and is very tongue-in-cheek. You can boil it down to "I don't like playing DDR the way ITG players do and I hope there are others out there who are like me." So, don't worry, I'm not gonna mail a bomb to Kyle Ward, lol. Please shoot me an e-mail if you agree with my ideas! Anyway, on to the article proper.
In 2019, I started playing Dance Dance Revolution.
Well, that's what I thought the game was. I had heard of StepMania and In The Groove before, too, but couldn't tell the difference between the three.
Around August of 2019, on a hot Summer day, I stepped foot into a room at a pony convention in Warsaw with two dance mats taped to the floor. The image at the projector displayed the title: TrotMania. Yes, I said "mats", not "pads", because that's how we call those things in Polish, which implies they're soft. The ones at the con were, in fact, soft, and what we call "rag-like" in Polish ("szmacianki"), both alluding to their shoddy quality and low durability. I didn't know any of that at the time, of course. There were some newbies there, visibly flustered about their unfamiliarity with the game, playing easy songs, standing in the centre of the pads and trying to hit the sparse arrows in time, taking the time to return to the centre after every arrow. The atmosphere was welcoming enough that I stayed and observed them a little before deciding to try for myself.
That day, a rhythm game player was born. I was instantly hooked. Otherwise self-conscious about my physicality, I had an excuse to groove and sway to the rhythm of the music, something I've loved all my life.
However, I was very lucky I had been introduced to dance games through TrotMania. Two and a half years later, I went to my first Polish rhythm game enjoyers meetup. I discovered that they usually go to anime-themed conventions. Had I met them first, they would have tried to convert me to their own perverted ways - namely, the way of In The Groove.
Simply Love. It's a household name among dance game players. It's the de facto standard for how modern In The Groove is played on PC, and a continuation of it. In The Groove itself is a defunct video game series destroyed by a Konami lawsuit. Made in the USA, it was a brand new spin on the old and tired Dance Dance Revolution. Of course, I soon learned that both DDR and ITG are both ancient, hailing from the 2000s.
Simply Love is just a theme - like a skin, but with custom scripting - for StepMania, which is a rhythm game simulator for PC, supporting a few different rhythm games, including "dance" - code name for a 4-panel dance game, started by Konami's DanceDanceRevolution (I'm not sure if it's spelled with or without spaces - there's no telling with the Japanese and their weird naming conventions). Simply Love is heavily modified with scripts, offering an experience that is quite different from a regular StepMania, and is nothing like DDR. It introduces ITG elements into the game. In The Groove may have ended with In The Groove 2 in the 2000s, but Simply Love carries on its legacy.
It's the theme literally everyone uses.
SL is rather ugly with its minimalistic flat design, pixel-art-like graphics, and pro gamer feel, but that's not the point of this article. I was horrified to discover Simply Love wasn't simply a try-hard pro gamer theme, but a way to make a more DDR-centric by default StepMania into ITG.
So, what exactly is the problem with In The Groove? If everyone favours it over DDR, surely it must be superior, right?
Well, I'd like to say "wrong" for dramatic effect. But the truth is, it may be. I wouldn't know. I've mostly experienced DDR through TrotMania, which as I've learned later, was designed to be "pony DDR". It adheres to standards set out by Konami's dance game. But, it might not be the same as real DDR. I don't know what real DDR is like. I've only seen a handful of videos, but haven't really played the songs outside of some conventions, and even then only briefly.
Here's why In The Groove is so popular. In the 2000s, Konami was exporting its DDR arcade cabinets overseas. The US was apparently teeming with arcade cabs. Then, Konami stopped. Apparently, for some years, there was a drought of new DDR games and songs. Kyle Ward and the other people from what would become Roxor Games were apparently pro DDR players. They could do any song on any difficulty, with their eyes closed - literally. Apparently, they would do the hardest songs on stealth - a song modifier that makes all arrows completely invisible. More of a joke mode, but somehow those maniacs were actually able to memorise the entire sequence of arrows from start to finish. Obviously, they thought, DDR was on its way out. The novelty had worn off, the people had become bored, the fad was over. But, they still loved playing. They had to mix it up to keep things fresh for themselves and keep it challenging. Roxor lads were going to make their own DDR. With blackjack, and hookers.
Thus, In The Groove was born.
(Don't quote me on any of the history bits, lol, I wasn't even remotely interested in any of this when it happened, I'm only paraphrasing what I've read elsewhere. Plus, I'm obviously biased against ITG.)
Soon, In The Groove cabinets started appearing in the US. Based on a heavily modded StepMania (kinda like SL), it was probably hailed as DDR's more extreme brother. Dance Dance Revolution at the time had difficulty levels ranging from 1 to 10. In The Groove was way more ambitious than that and its difficulty levels went up all the way to 13. Dance game players were overjoyed. It played great and was harder than the old Konami songs everyone's already managed to PFC (Perfect Full Combo, meaning they got the perfect judgment on every arrow). Most importantly, they were there, in American arcades, and were fresh, filling in the void left by Konami's game.
Then, a sequel to In The Groove, In The Groove 2, came out. It was bigger, meaner and harder. A PC version of ITG was released, too, allowing people to play at home, provided they had their own dance pads. Keyboard play was also supported. But all the arcade cabs put Roxor on Konami's radar. Then the lawsuit came, yadda yadda, and somehow Konami ended up with the rights to ITG and killed off their competitor. I dunno why I'm telling you the story I don't even know it myself I'm just ad-libbing this shit let's get to the point alrea--
So, I guess there were many more ITG players than DDR ones at that point in time. They could play ITG at home. They had StepMania, which was what ITG was built on, so they could make their own songs (called "sims" in the StepMania community, short for "simfile", a file containing the "charts" - levels in dance game terminology - for a given song), providing a foundation for a community centred around the game and ensuring ITG's enduring legacy many years after its untimely demise. Fanmade sims were shared, enjoyed, rated, put up on YouTube, and so on. People could do whatever they wanted.
And whatever they wanted they did, indeed. Time went on. DDR had moved on. With the release of DDR X, they introduced a new difficulty scale ranging from 1-19 instead of 1-10. It wasn't corresponding to ITG's scale, which was just a simple extension of the old DDR scale. The old scale's 10 wasn't the new one's 10, but more around 15. With new, crazy level 18 charts corresponding to ITG's level 13 and level 19 ones going even further beyond. ITG players did not care about it, and kept their 1-13 scale, sometimes going beyond it, and beyond even DDR's own new difficulty scale.
So I don't know how the history of rhythm games looked like in Poland. But fast forward to now, there are barely any arcade cabs left there. The few still around have apparently all been modded to run Simply Love (ugh...), and I've been told that there used to be some DDR cabinets imported to Poland, but they're all ancient. So, DDR never even really had a chance to take off. I guess people go straight to downloading StepMania instead, and find the online ITG community and become converted.
Alright, story time's over. Now, let me get to actually answering the question: what's the problem with In The Groove? It's the patterns. The "tech".
I think the crux of the problem is Kyle Ward's becoming bored with the plain old DDR. He just had to go and add new weird things to the game, which I feel don't fit at all.
First of all, the removal of restriction on mines. In DDR, only challenge (highest difficulty) level charts can have mines, and they have to appear simultaneously for every arrow panel, meaning no panel is safe and you have to step off all of them. Well, actually in DDR, instead of mines, there are "shock arrows", which I think they work a bit differently from mines in StepMania, but whatever. In ITG charts, you will sometimes randomly see mines put in the weirdest of places, only for one panel, or anything less than four. On any difficulty. I'm neutral on this change alone, but unforunately, mines have been used to enable some patterns which I feel are travesties on the default way of playing the game.
Another disclaimer: I haven't really played ITG, I've only tried out some charts exhibiting examples of "ITG tech" as part of their online competition event, the International Timing League 2022. I've never played the "original" ITGs: ITG 1 & 2.
Second of all, probably the most contentious topic: brackets. It's a shorthand for "bracket jumps", named so after the little brackets placed at the corners of the four panels on DDR arcade cabinets. This technique is to cheat your way out of a jump that combines two of the diagonally adjacent arrows (like left and up, down and right, etc.) by placing your foot in between the two panels, with the middle of the foot on the panels' brackets, with the heel and toes touching the panels' corners, triggering both. Some people have feet that are too small to do that reliably. Some home use dance pads' sensors are not sensitive in the corners, creating a pad modding scene. It's a good thing DDR charts don't require this, but apparently at least some fan-made charts are made to exploit that degenerate technique! The horror. You have two feet, I think a chart would flow much better if you were able to execute each jump reliably with both feet, and not have any issues because of that.
Third "tech" piece: hands. A "hand" is any part of the chart where three or four panels have to be pressed simultaneously. The name of the technique implies having to use your hands. Apparently, original ITG charts did this. I've only played a chart with hands once. Squatting down to touch a panel is kinda fun, to be honest. But something about the idea of using something else than your feet for playing rubs me the wrong way. Not to worry of course, since you can combine hands with bracketing to just trigger all four panels at once with just your two feet. The problem is when something like that is treated as a normal move and worked into the chart so that it's required. To me, it feels like a cheat more than a legitimate technique.
Next one: footswitches and sideswitches. Those are typically jacks (short for "jackhammers", sequences of notes falling on the same arrow) that have to be executed with alternating feet, or else the subsequent pattern stops making sense when you try to step through it as normal, alternating your feet, and gets you all twisted and doing half-spins facing you away from the screen at the most awkward of moments. These apparently appeared in DDR first, but they could have been bad charting, so who knows. In ITG, they are done deliberately and are typically marked with a mine between the two jack notes, on the arrow where the second foot would be, forcing you to put it on the same panel as the first foot. The problem is, you end up with both feet on the same panel, so you need to predict this and jump away with your other foot. It's an interesting technique, but to be honest it's really awkward to do consistently, particularly playing without a bar. Sideswitches are just footswitches, but the jack is on the left or right arrow, which is surprisingly much harder to read than FSes, which only use the up and down arrows. It's a cool technique which nevertheless feels like an ugly hack made when scraping the bottom of the barrel in search of complex, challenging patterns in a fundamentally simple game. It feels like bad patterning to me.
Next up, we have rolls. They're a new note type introduced in In The Groove 2. They're just dumb. They are like freeze arrows, but you have to keep tapping them throughout their duration to maintain them. You already have jackhammers, which serve the exact same function. To be honest, they make sense in the context of marking jackhammers as opposed to e.g. footswitches, which may well be mistaken for ones if not for the guiding mine, but overall I feel like they're another ugly hack made to add complexity to the game.
There are also lifts. They are inverted freeze notes, where you have NOT to be pressing the button when it passes the receptor area to score. Apparently, those are NOT actually from In The Groove, but they're in StepMania, and I've seen them used in at least one ITG chart, because the community has no charting standards whatsoever to adhere to, so there.
Lastly, there are fakes. I just dunno. They are arrows that look visually identical to normal arrows, but don't actually do anything when missed and don't register when hit, and are only there to confuse players. They're stupid.
Look at all this crap I've enumerated. DDR doesn't have any of that, except possibly some unmarked footswitches. And yet, the top difficulty DDR charts don't need to include that stuff to be hard. Some of its level 19 charts still haven't been PFC'd, and Iamchris4life is pretty much the only one in the world right now who can even do that.
Which brings us to the most important question: why does tech exist? What was even the point of including all that tech, Kyle? I thought DDR was getting too easy for you? Well, try quadding DDR 19s if you're so extreme. I think Konami has proven with time that tech is completely unnecessary, and sufficient difficulty can be achieved using just the very basic building blocks that exist in DDR, with some creative rhythmic charting, note density, and BPM changes.
I swear, it feels like In The Groove is a whole different game from Dance Dance Revolution now. They even have pads that they mod to have the panels flush with the rest of the surface and super sensitive, so they can scoot their feet on it while barely lifting them off the ground, and so that nothing impedes their bracketing.
And worst of all, Kyle Ward is again working on needlessly revolutionising Dance Dance Revolution. He's now making a successor to In The Groove, StepManiaX (not to be confused with StepMania), where he adds the central panel, apparently to make bracketing more of a core mechanic. I know Pump It Up has a central panel, and having played it a bit it's an interesting addition, but PIU is way different from DDR with its panel arrangement. And Ward's apparently worked with Andamiro before, even making some version of it for them named Pump It Up Pro. Oh, and of course he's adding in more unnecessary shit to his game, like the lifts, which I dunno where they're from. Just, why. At least he's apparently making God-tier dance pads while he's at it, the StepManiaX Stage. They cost an arm and a leg, especially since you have to import them from the US, and they weigh a whopping 100 kilogrammes because they're fully metal and come with a bar etc. Apparently they're incredibly good, on par with arcade pads.
Anyway, this all feels to me like the entirely wrong way to be striving for more challenge. Why remove external impediments, instead of trying to overcome them? Wikipedia classifies dance games as "exergaming". Well, I think you'll get more exercise trying to maximise your movement, instead of minimising it, which is the way ITG players have been going. They try to optimise the movement by moving as little as possible so they can hit arrows faster. Am I the only one to whom this seems utterly pointless?
I have played DDR for over three years, and the best I can do right now is some level 16s. Playing no bar, no double stepping if I can help it, and absolutely no bracketing. Trying to do full movements, instead of optimising them and checking how much I can get away with by only hitting as close to the edges of the panels as possible. Even getting PFCs is challenging playing like that. This is the way. People should be striving for high scores while adopting this playstyle, but that's just my opinion. Of course, this style will not get you good results, but, at least for me, it's more fun. And let me tell you, it's an incredibly tough way to play. All while playing pony DDR which claims to stick closely to DDR's patterning style. As you can see, you don't need weird, hacky patterns or new note types or even silly modifications like stealth to be highly challenging.
Or maybe I'm just bad lmao
Either way, my 0.02€ on the matter.
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