What do you mean when you say

Alright just wanted to ask this cause it's been on my mind for a long time.

All the time I hear people saying things like "ITG is better than DDR" or "ITG is superior to other dancing games," etc.

My question to these people is what do you mean when you say ITG? As in official ITG AC has been taken over by Konami and they haven't produced a new mix in years. What I think when people say things like the above mentioned they are specifically talking about the fact that ITG can be modded and hack to act like a step mania. Does that have anything to do with ITG though? In my eyes a hacked machine is just a cab for stemania as in you can add any song you want. Again, was this the intention of RoXoR? (I know they allowed edit data but not to the extent you see today).

To summarize my point when people say they prefer ITG over something are they honestly just including the default song list from ITG 1 and 2? I was bored with 90%+ of the songs within it's first year or so and I can't imagine songs like tough enough or any other bad cover is still willingly being played today.

I know I'll get some bad feedback for this but I just have been wanting to say that.

P.S. I do like playing openitg often every week. I just rarely ever find myself sorting through the ITG 1 and 2 folder.

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I...think it has to do with the whole "hacking" the machine thing and also because "veteran" DDR players got bored of the hard charts from the game and decided to move on to ITG, which they claim it has better charts than DDR (which i would semi-agree >__>)

In my eyes, ITG is good in it's own way, same for DDR, BOTH machines have their good and bad sides. Neither is superior over the other, yet i find myself displeased with ITG because when i knew about it, i didn't know how hard it was going to be. Plus with all the mods it has it gets confusing which ones to use and whatnot.

Idk, but something about ITG just makes me unpleased about it, it could be that they tried to mimick DDR, but in some players viewpoints they did it the right way with the song charts and also because of the USB compatibility with the machine, something DDR wasn't able to do EVEN TO THIS POINT.

So honestly, i don't give a shit whether or not they say ITG is better than DDR, hell i would agree if they said ITG is better than the US DDR AC

*packs a flame shield just in case of emergencies*

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It's not ITG thats liked anymore, rather, it's the hack-ability that is.

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r21 with good pads = superior gayme, duh

If r21 cabs didn't have an interface that looks like a DDR funeral, I would probably seek them out more.

I agree with you Max. I still play ITG just so I can get experience from both DDR and it, but there is something with ITG that makes me like DDR a lot better. I do wish that DDR had a memory slot to play stepfiles from a USB port though.

Everyone in my town that played DDR quit when SuperNOVA came out and played ITG. Since then, they all hate DDR because of how easy it is, when they should really look at the new DDR boss songs and see that they are equally difficult. "Look at Pluto the First for crying out loud!"

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PTF (Oni) is horrible though.

True, I guess I should say Healing-D-Vision then.

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In the ITG community, customs are all that matter anymore. 95% of higher-tier ITG players don't play officials and/or consider them to be absolute rubbish compared to the top-quality customs out there.

To be honest, they're right. Customs are pretty sexy, and I even make my own. ITG officials are horrible, especially on doubles - wtf, Hip Hop Jam DX? Determinator DX? Twilight DX?

If I want quality built-in charts, I go DDR; if I feel super creative/adventurous, I go ITG (when I have access to an r21 machine *sob*). But, yeah, I now play ITG because it's Stepmania with amazing pads.

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That is equally bad..... oh the ending

you have no idea what a good doubles chart is. doubles was the only reason i played ITG before R21.

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r21 encourages good simfiles but also an absurd amount of shitty simfiles that make me hate 80% of its players. 16th streams through Shooting Star or some basshunter song is retarded. stop playing them. stop making me play them with you. theyre awful and so are you.

fuck dance games

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lol bolt

I agree though, I've had many debates with the local ITG lovers about what makes DDR different from ITG, but unfortunately a couple of them are the "but DDR sucks" sort. I love them, but it does make their arguments a bit one sided.

I really haven't been able to put my finger on it. Probably because the differences are so great.

I think it helps to break it down into modes aswell -
I enjoy ddr's single player because it's rather relaxed, and has a fair few interesting charts. Alot of the older charts, and many of the newer charts, have fun rhythms aswell as streams and the like, but also has a few songs for the fruits who like to blaze on the panels.
I enjoy ddr's doubles mode because it has quite easy to read charts but remains difficult. DDR doesn't have stretch jumps and the like, so it's nice to not be ripping your balls, and any mistake you make can be quite easily recovered from.

I enjoy itg's single player because the charts have creative rhythms, nice beats and well constructed charts. There's streaming, gallops, and jumps all in equal quantity, and charts like Xuxa and Infection I adore. There is a distinct lack of crossovers on many songs, but then they are quite tiring so it can be nice not having to deal with them sometimes. Hands are brilliant fun, I can say that anyone who plays ITG and doesn't use hands is a fool and is missing out on the fun of the game.
I enjoy itg's doubles mode because the charts are quite complex, with wider ranges of movement than DDR has, but at the same time this does make some of the doubles charts hard to read or hard to play. If you screw up and don't almost instantly recover, ITG will punish the hell out of you for making a mistake. Lemmings on the run in particular, if you lose the thread of a crossover on that song you're fucked.
On alot of the songs, however, it does seem that the addition of mines makes it almost necessary to use the bar to avoid them, especially with the pads often being modded to be as sensitive as they are. While they are nice for adding complexity, they are also rather annoying to deal with using no bar.

As for the interfaces of the machines, I like DDR's colourful way of putting things together. I haven't ever played a machine other than extreme (I played SN2 once) and find that the later games do have a more balanced approach to contrast. Solo does sometimes give you a headache. The options are hidden so as to not confuse players who don't know about them, and they are all named as such that people are likely to understand what they mean even if they haven't used them before.

ITG is almost too dull though. I love the fact that it's not quite as in your face as DDR is, but at times I find it's just a bit too dull. I'm not sure if that's just my local machine, but the game screen looks like it's for people living in dark places (which it is... the machine is in a dark corner in a side room at the arcade, lit by one blacklight).
The menus are quite good but yeah the in game interface just feels a bit dull.
Also, while the extra mods are brilliant, it's often harder to tell which one is going to do what. If you research it a bit, you'll be right, but many new players can find it daunting.

As for hacked ITG cabinets, I feel that this has both blessed the community but at the same time really kinda killed it. People can now chart their favourite songs and whatever is the 'flavour of the day', but unfortunately I don't feel the charts are as brilliant as people say they are. As it stands now, it seems that speed, stamina and streaming the entire time is what people want to do anymore, with a few negative bpm gimmicks thrown in to kill off the newbies that haven't played the chart at home first. In many cases, I think you could take the chart off any custom song, stick it to another song and change the bpm, and you could call it gold all over again. Aside from this fact, though, I feel hacked machines are a bit of a grey area.

I think what it boils down to is that I'm not so much a fan of custom charts nowadays, and some of the ITG players annoy the hell out of me. I'm sure some DDR players do too, but I haven't met more than one or two yet that do.

They're really two different games, that while sharing a number of similar mechanics, aim at different audiences. While they both are easily accessible and both are brilliant fun in themselves, they each cater to different sides of the same coin. I certainly wouldn't say that one is better than the other.

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I dont really understand it either. R21 and Hackability are definite influences though. Difficulty may be another factor as well. Dont Say "well what about H-D-V oni then?" Well that chart is god awful. ITG did do amazing things... The charts are, for the most part, fantastic and extremely difficult, something Konami usually fails to do without gimmicks.

In my personal opinion though DDR is way better. over 700 official songs to play, nice interfaces and nice songs.

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I don't find ITG's charts interesting at all. For one, far too many of the charts have arrow spam (My Favorite Game is the perfect example of this) and they rarely try to do anything interesting with foot placement, which absolutely wrecked havoc on how the community judges stepcharts (although it didn't help that Konami had a long spat where they either were very minimal with step placement gimmicks or were completely oblivious to foot placements, like HP2/FFP). Unfortunately, so many people view new charts like New Decade as garbage when it is one of the best boss charts in the entire library of DDR all because a huge part of the community forgot about foot placements more complicated than a crossover (and believe me, I've seen my fair share of good ITG players actually double step simple crossovers).

Also, the music and interface are not as good as DDR. Not much they could go about the music since Konami's in-house artists clearly have more experience and talent in making music than people like Kyle Ward and Roxor did not have as much money to license music as Konami generally does and they did make reasonably alright choices for as little money as they had. However, the interface of ITG is terribly uninviting and only marginally functional.

Yes, the interface looks like some high school kids's project.

And indeed, I only see it as a glorified Stepmania cab...

But they sure nailed pad quality pretty well.

I think an awful lot of us will agree that the ITG2 default red theme does look boring and soulless but what's to stop us from either making our own theme or waiting for something like Mad Matt's FF Tactics theme to be released for download.

Secondly percentage scoring works so much better than out of 1,000,000, and the judgement windows and weighting were both brilliantly thought out.

Lastly if anyone moans about officials there's nothing to stop them loading songs off a USB.

Currently I'd rather play ITG to DDR purely on that basis, though DDRX2 does have an awful lot going for it IF ONLY KONAMI GETS OFF THEIR ARSE TO FIX THE DRIFT BUG.

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The songs are what mostly kill it for me. There might be a total of 10-15 songs I would actually still play on ITG1 and 2. If you include ITG3 and Rebirth that might bring that # up to 30.

The best thing that ITG did was make great hardware. But again, I'm pretty sure if hacking/edit data wasn't allowed, the official data, steps, themes, and songs wouldn't be enough for people to stick around.

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I think that DDR has better music. ITG's tracks are all generic where as DDR seems to have some fun songs. I have a long playlist of DDR songs in my music collection, but only a few ITG songs.

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I'm sure there are many reasons why other people prefer the game over DDR.

Mine are chiefly the quality of the hardware (As in Andamiro's ITG 2 cabinet otherwise known as the dedicab). The pads are the same quality as Pump It Up, which is loads better than Konami's machines. The screen is bigger, flat, brighter, crisper, the speakers are nicer. And the ability to replay songs from bygone DDR mixes sure is a bonus.

I don't much care for the ultrawide timing window (Which was partially due to the ITG team's inability to sync properly), you know the game is too easy when I'm starring songs on Double/Hard on accident. But overall ITG was the best attempt anyone has ever made to fix the running limitations that DDR has and give the players what they wanted in a dancing game. And it was getting better with every release... until Konami got jealous and bankrupted them through court proceedings they wouldn't have won legally anyway. And now they won't even use anything they acquired in spite (Shock arrows are NOT mines).

Can't keep a good dog down though, Pump Pro is the best thing that's happened to the Pump It Up series and my first and only experience with Pro 2 made me fall in love with music games all over again. It was glorious and I wish them good will in continuing to make DDR look dated and cheap.