DanceDanceRevolution (AC) (Japan)

Are you kidding me?! Now I have an excuse to go back to Texas.

How are people checking which D&Bs are getting DDR? Is it just asking the guy on Reddit? Ask your local store?

Or what I really care about, which locations in New England?

Insert another [ /quote ] after the one you put.

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Thanks for the help, they worked the last time I used quotes, don't know they didn't work that time.

On a related note why not Ohio? Space restrictions? Population not big enough? The DnB closest to me is to the north of the Greater Columbus area. Oh well, at least Texas gets one.

I hope the cabinet software will be updated with better english than what the loctest had to offer.

Probably not. We all know Konmai very well.


But I do really hope they dont mess this one up.

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I'm guessing they're putting it in locations that have more foot traffic, as well as places that either have not had a dance game before or currently have a successful one. Maybe they'll get more machines by the end of the year for stores not getting it this round.

Hopefully they at least send older DDR cabs from locations getting new DDR to other stores.

Just the guy on reddit. He's been very quick and honest in his responses. I specifically asked about Ohio, his answer was "Not in the first wave. Perhaps in a subsequent buy."


If you're talking about D&B Polaris, it's definitely too small, and even when they had DDR X there, it was an underperformer that needed frequent maintenance. I can understand why they wouldn't want it again. They don't know the difference. If any Columbus area D&B was going to get it, it would be Dublin. Plenty of space and probably similar traffic to Polaris.

Wait since when was there an X machine? Damn it! At least there's a SuperNOVA at the Magic Mountain (wish it was a SuperNOVA 2 though)

It's been years since they got rid of it. You didn't want to play on it anyway.

MME used to have SN2 (a community member had a SN2 board but their machine wasn't working, so they put it in MME temporarily).

You should join the OhioDDR facebook group, if you live in Columbus and haven't already. There's still a few people around.

I don't have a Facebook account but I'll look into it. Thanks for the info.

You can bet your ass Puerto Rico won't get these. :T We have no Dave and Busters or Round 1. I just wish they made it easier for arcades to buy upgrade kits for their older machines in USA. I don't know much about that kind of thing, but from what I can see you need to have connections in Japan and take part in auctions if you're lucky to find an upgrade kit for games X and up, and English versions don't even exist I think. Puerto Rico only has one single MAX2, SuperNOVA2 and X3 machine (upgraded from SN). Everywhere else it is EXTREME or SuperNOVA. Wouldn't it be nice for any arcade to be able to call some place or log into some site thats always stocked with upgrade and repair kits, and easily get one shipped with instructions to get your machine in top notch conditions? Maybe then there wouldn't be so many older machines that everyone's so familiar with and the series could gain at least a little more mainstream attention. The X3 cabinet certainly gets more attention than most.

you have no idea how any of this works, do you

Why not stray from the snarky comments and instead elaborate on the subject and orient me? I've been curious to know how all this works for a very long time.

Because it's been discussed repeatedly on the last several pages. But fine.


Individual arcades should be able to purchase them. It won't just be available to D&B and R1. However, it's probably going to be costly (somewhere in the range of $15k USD) so don't expect many arcades to buy machines.


Understand that many of the older machines are extremely old, some made by people other than Konami such as Betson, and require a lot of updates to even be functional. Any pre-SuperNOVA machine would require EXT-IO boards (the converter that came with SuperNOVA upgrade kits to allow older machines to work), new monitors, etc. SuperNOVA/SuperNOVA2 machines differ slightly from JP. How is Konami supposed to account for that? DDR X/X2 US machines are completely different. They can't easily build an upgrade kit that will work with all of these things. It's much easier from both a sales and support perspective to just say "new machines only, no upgrades, take it or leave it."


You don't really need to have connections, you just have to bid on these auctions. Most of those kits, however, are not supposed to be for sale. Konami has strict controls over what happens to their hardware, and they don't like this happening. Japanese arcades don't want to get in trouble with Konami, because Konami will refuse to sell anything else to that arcade owner/chain. That would destroy them. You're correct that no English version upgrade kits exist for DDR X and up, as Betson came to the same conclusion as Konami--dealing with upgrades is too hard, let's just make new machines.


This is most of the world outside the Japan/Asia market. There were a lot of cabinets made in the 1st-EXTREME era, and bootlegging made it very easy and cheap to upgrade older games to EXTREME. The bootlegging is also the reason that Konami took such a long break between EXTREME and SuperNOVA. They were tired of developing a new game, only to have it cracked and resold at a fraction of the price. Why would you buy a legit kit for something like $1200 when you could buy a bootleg for less than half that?


Not profitable. "Just in time" manufacturing means making sure you have just enough on hand to deal with what you need right now. It's a much more profitable way to operate, because you don't end up with useless parts sitting around for months or even years at a time. You build what you need with as little extra as possible. Just because it's slightly inconvenient to us doesn't mean it's the wrong decision.


You seriously overstate the brand recognition of DDR in the eyes of the average person. How often do you hear about people walking by a Pump or ITG cabinet and say "Look, it's that DDR game that was in Grandma's Boy!" or something similar? They don't know the difference. All dancey boxes are DDR.

Look, DDR already had it's mainstream day in the sun, and they're lucky it happened. What happened from 1999-2002 was a fluke, and better branding/marketing/whatever isn't going to magically make it popular again. Your best bet is to try to buy a machine with your own money and then it's your own responsibility.

Do people actually think DDR will somehow be catapulted into the mainstream again? Most people would just go "four arrows? why don't i just play a game where you actually dance?" We're a niche, deal with it.

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fixed that for you...

really though, if DDR is really important to you, I'd recommend moving to a place where there appears to be a profitable market for Japanese things. I'm only half joking when I say http://kizumonogatari-usa.com/theater.html is as good a place to start as any - a couple states have never gotten any Aniplex movies since https://web.archive.org/web/20131218070858/http://madokamagicausa.com/rebellion/ because of $$$

Thank you ranatalus, you've cleared up many things for me now. I kind of underestimated how upgrading works since I see people like Kon that own cabinets and play DDR games old and new. I'd only I knew where to find those auctions.

yindesu, I'm very aware of the terrible economic situation Puerto Rico is in at the moment, what with building up so much debt throughout the decades, and unfortunately moving isn't an option right now, though my family has considered it often. I do know that there's a few people in Puerto Rico that own personal cabinets though with plenty of games.

I just generally see that people are naturally attracted to new things in the west, so upgraded cabinets could bring in some new fans due to the new music and enhanced visuals, and people will stop seeing the DDR machine as that thing that keeps playing La Copa de la Vida or Centerfold. At least it's not as niche as everything else BEMANI.

My link isn't actually about Puerto Rico's economy, it's about Puerto Rico's sovereignty...

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