I <3 DDR. I was so excited to have a new version to play here at the end of September. I thought I'd have a bunch of new favorite songs, and maybe there would even be a new Captain Jack. But no. A bunch of slow worthless songs I can do without. There's some that are okay. But overall we're talking stinkfest. It looks like these songs were picked by finding the cheapest to license numbers by the most famous artists. They are on average much slower than I've become accustomed to, and they just don't sound fun. Why would they do this? I understand throwing a few bones in to try and build the DDR fan base, but they've left out anything that sounds and plays like the songs that made the game fun for those of us who have been playing for years.
Worse, Konami has continued the trend of dance master double extreme ultra mode. This is a single player 'narrative' mode that I have hated ever since it was introduced back in Extreme 2. I wouldn't mind them throwing a useless mode in if they didn't do so in a way that ruined the rest of the game. The back of the box says the game contains over 70 songs, but 44 of those are accessible only by first playing through dance master mode. It's not like they prevent me from playing certain songs until I have burned 5,000,000 calories in Workout mode, another mode I could do without but benign. I can understand having to unlock portions of the game through play, and Max and Max 2 had this down just right. What's truly awful about dance master mode is that to unlock songs for normal play (for me this is with default options at whatever difficulty I choose, and with my wife), I have to spend hour after hour in the mind-numbing, single player, first way-too-easy then immediately way-too-hard, constantly using all the options I never cared to turn on.
I bet this mode took tons of time, effort and money to develop, but why? I love to play DDR. If Konami took their arcade version of Supernova 2 and split its 300 songs across 6 console versions, I would quickly plunk down $40 each and enjoy every minute of it. No extra work on their part. They could print money. Why go out of your way to ruin a good thing and displease an easy-to-please customer?
If they were just trying this out, I could understand that too. But this is the third time, and popular support is against this game mechanic.
Its enough to make me order a controller adapter and download all the mixes using bittorrent. It's not right, but at least I'll be able to play DDR, something the latest PS2 release wasn't designed to allow me to do.

It's been more than a year since I first visited the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee, WI.

This fantastic building borders the Milwaukee river at Riverside park, between North and Locust. The park is the setting for our new ARGH, "Riverside: a Milwaukee game", and the building has been the site of our professional development workshops for Milwaukee area teachers who plan on using our game in their classrooms in the coming year. I've spent much of my summer designing this game, along with Jim Mathews, with help from Ming-Fong Jan and Mark Wagler.
Broadly speaking, the game is about the health of the Milwaukee River corridor. And like the other ARGHs we've been preparing for the Star Schools grant, it is a 10-day affair intended for middle-school students, although we tend to include enough research for an in-depth semester of study by college students.
Here's some pictures.