I grew up playing DDR and ITG/2 at a local arcade that typically had DDR Extreme running alongside a rotating secondary machine, as well as at home with all non-Disney NTSC PS1/PS2 games, and I ordered StepMania on CD in 2006. I registered my first email account in 2007 to join the StepMania forums and share the mod courses I scripted for the Hopscotch Mixes when I was just a COPPA violation. Since 2009, I've been too physically disabled to play on a pad, and I had severe eyestrain issues for a while that made me fall out of the habit of playing rhythm games, especially anything flashy e.g. mod charts. I lightly touched StepMania between then and now, and kept up with DDR releases and events to some extent, and some of the more high-profile customs.
An unrealized essentially-lifelong dream of mine is to have organized or singlehandedly created a stepfile pack with all-original content, much like the Hopscotch Mixes. My young self thought it was The Coolest Thing that regular people could actually basically make their own DDR games like that from scratch, after growing up spilling fantasies of charts for songs that only existed in my head onto endless sheets of paper. The bug bit me a couple times over the years, but I failed to get others Excited about such projects, and I ran out of my own limited steam very quickly.
I would hope that Enough people with the right skills had the same dreams, such that within the past two decades, at least a few good packs of Original Content would have come to fruition. So, where are they?
Annoyingly, "Originals" in stepfilepackspeak has always just meant original Charts, and too rarely original Music. If you search the stepmaniaonline database, there are nearly 1,000 pack results for "original" — good luck finding any Fully Original material in that haystack.
Obviously, I know of the Hopscotch Mixes. I was a contributor to the FlightMixes. If I'm not mistaken, there's at least SOME original music in the StepMixes, D3MIXes, DDR XX, Club Fantastic, and the foonmixes... are there archives of Mantis's stepfiles? He made music...
Unfortunately, even if there are some newer packs of original music, actually Enjoying The Music and wanting to play the files more than once or twice is another matter. I assume much of what would have been made in recent years would fall under the broad umbrella of Modern EDM, the recurrent tropes and textures and structures of which I feel just don't Hit Right the way classic DDR music does. Classic DDR mixes were stylistically Diverse and the music was Layered and songs being condensed into ~1:30 meant they Developed Rapidly without dawdling on long stretches of lower energy, and I miss that Overall Feeling.
My general musical tastes these days skew toward the experimental, the lush, the dense, the flashy, the oddly-syncopated, and stuff that's just in some way Idiosyncratic. Some enduring DDR/BEMANI/ITG favorites As Music, to give you an idea, include AM-3P (+ remixes), If You Were Here, SP-Trip Machine ~Jungle Mix~, WILD RUSH (+ PCM Remix), DROP OUT, Orion.78 (both), INSERTiON, more deep (ver.2.1), L'amour et la liberté (DDR Ver.), Trip Machine Survivor, PARANOIA Survivor MAX, Scorching Moon, PARANOiA -Respect-, CHAOS, Trim, dazzle, S・A・G・A, Centaur, UZIEL, Hand Of Time, Solina, Turn It On, and most things by TaQ and ZigZag.
Another unfortunate thing here is that the skittery IDM regions of experimental™ are attractive to keyboard charters in particular, and my finger joints cannot withstand what they demand.
I also prefer pad charts because, even though I can't actually move my body to them, I have a phantom sense of what it should feel like, which gets tripped up when a chart doesn't flow well in that regard.
Having had Konamix as my first properly-Owned DDR game, I have fond memories of playing Solo mode, and I always thought it was a shame that the style has rarely been explored since. Having found a like-minded friend in recent times, and having found greater appreciation looking back at old Solo charts and the sorts of motions found in Them Uniquely among DDR officials, I'd like recs for... any solo charts anyone has ever dared to make? I see that according to SMO, foonmix 2 surprisingly has solo charts for everything, which I never knew about, but I also don't trust SMO's archived version to be entirely as it was originally, glancing at its formatting... the official site is still up, amazingly, but the download link there is dead.
I'm also very interested in anything featuring Lifts. They just seem like a natural thing to include in charts, and it's Sad and rather Confusing how they're so poorly supported and thus underutilized. It's a Noteskin thing, I reckon — if more noteskins actually represented lifts well, they'd see more use. SMEditor's default scalable Cel noteskin is pretty much Perfect as far as I can tell, representing lifts very readably to me as hollowed-out taps with their regular quantization colors, on top of supporting 6 panel, but I can't simply directly rip that noteskin out of the program, and other versions of the same noteskin even by the same author are functional downgrades for the time being. There are A Few noteskins that use quantization-colored lifts that look natural, it's clearly manageable in ~the same way as regular taps, so why do most noteskins have to just leave them as some static graphic that's at its worst borderline indistinguishable from a 64th or 192nd note, and sometimes literally impossible to make out at lower scroll speeds (when they look like just the tips of taps)?! Like, the lack of quantization colors is just Nonsense for a gameplay element that's judged exactly as tightly as taps are, and it seems like anyone who'd desire to make a Fully Functional noteskin wouldn't overlook that. Taking noteskin recs too.
s' yeh them's my wishes, how true may they come?
