Success!

It’s not So Deep, but Tsugaru has fallen! It took a few tries, and it’s not consistant quite yet, but I got an A on that damn thing. Tsugaru is one of the harder 9-footers, otherwise known as Catastrophic difficulty. I’ve gotten A’s on other 9-footers, but this one is an utter bitch. So Deep is harder yet, if only due to the sheer level of stamina required to finish it at full speed.

A few short months ago, 6-footers seemed like hellacious rites of passage constructed only to thwart my hopes and dreams, and reduce me to a shuddering heap on the floor. Now it takes hard 8-footers to constantly take me out. I read on a FAQ about a year ago, that the harder songs were possible. At the time, I watched them in practice mode, and laughed at the insanity of trying to haul my uncoordinated self from lurching haphazardly through a 4-footer to sleeping through 6-footers.

Recently I’ve tried using the arrow modifications like hidden, boost, and reverse. Boost is pretty easy, stealth is a good way to learn to read arrows early, but reverse literally makes me ill. Instead of the arrows going up to the top of the screen, they fall toward the bottom. I don’t know why, but this just seems inherently wrong, and I could feel the fabric of the universe trying to reject the travesty of inverted DDR arrows. For fun, I enabled both boost and reverse, and found myself barely passing songs with a B, which I had previously AA’d. But hey, reverse, boost, and hidden would probably impress people, so I have to practice. ^_^

So, for those of you out there who are just starting DDR, and are failing 2-footers: have faith. I was there about a year ago. Me, a skinny, uncoordinated nerd who used to do nothing but sit on the floor and play RPGs, have somehow managed to get this far up the DDR tree. Let’s face it, I’m pretty old for a game like this, and I’ll probably never be as good as the people I look up to, but I’ve never felt better. The Shambling Fogie says, “Play this game!”