Another Lost Wiikend

"Hi, my name is Velvet and I'm a Dance Dance Revolution Addict."

Yes, I have fallen off the gaming wagon and have been under the influence of Wii. What fun. It's really nice to be able to indulge in video gaming without the couch potato-ness that comes along with it. Sure, there are all sorts of standard video games to play on it, but we've been getting a lot more mileage out of Wii Fit, Wii Ski, and the ironically named Active Life: Outdoor Challenge.

Ah, and then there's Dance Dance Revolution... it's a pretty well known game in the arcades, but for those of you who have never seen it, you stand on a square floor pad that has four arrows on it: a left arrow, a right arrow, a front arrow, and a back arrow, all in their respective positions. You choose a song from a list and a pattern of arrows comes streaming up from the bottom of the screen as the song plays. When the arrows reach an area on the top of the screen, you step on that respective arrow on the floor pad. Simple, right?

Well, when we first started playing, we thought that we might have gotten the wrong game in our package because there sure wasn't a whole lot of anything that looked like dancing happening. Had we gotten the black market copy of another game? Perhaps we got Stumble Stumble Revolution, Hop Trip Revolution, or perhaps Desperate Off-Tempo Toe Stab Revolution. It looked like we might have been drinking and dancing which may just be illegal in this state.

At our wedding, our future brother-in-law decided to get out on the dance floor for some group dancing (my hat is off to him for getting out there, I assure you) and ended up doing a dance that we later dubbed "The Hoparena"; it's like The Macarena, only it looks more like hopping arhythmically and touching yourself in random places. I can honestly say that we have now been doing a version of the Hoparena with the best (?) of them. What a shame, then, that we're actually getting better at this. We must have found the Dance Dance Revolution game disc was somewhere in that case after all.

I have discovered one thing, though: there's a "Golden Moment of Dance Dance Revolution". This is the kissing cousin to the Golden Moment of Pool, which is when things are flowing smoothly, you're playing really well, sinking every shot, and then you take just one more sip of your beer/drink... and your pool playing night is OVER. And so it is with DDR, too.

Well, I suppose even us addicts have to take a break sometime.