Playing around with Stepmania as a n00b I've run into some n00bish questions. With a little help of Wikipedia and a lot of help from my friend
MK I've now found an understanding.
After you've started Stepmania (or a game of DDR for that matter) and selecting your desired difficulty, you come to the song selection screen. This screen contains a list of all your collections and your songs and displays information on each dance. Up on top there's the title, which is easily recognized. But then there's a lot of weird stuff shown that is unfathomable to the uninitiated.
Now that I've figured it out I thought I'd share the insights because I'm sure a lot of other happless players are trying to cope with the same questions.
BLOCK A:
Right next to the stage's name you will find a few colourful icons ( blue, yellow, red, green and possibly purple). Not every song has all of these icons mind you. These icons indicate the various difficulties available for this particular dance. This may sound a little strange to you, since you've already chosen your difficulty before, right? Well, let me break it down a little.
Stepmania knows four difficulty ratings for songs: beginner, light, medium and expert. These difficulty ratings don't actually pertain to the difficulty of a particular song, but they allow songs to be grouped together. Consider the difficulty to be a category, or a genre. Selecting a certain difficulty will only impact the song selection menu's default difficulty setting. It does not affect gameplay itself.
Each song has it's own
foot rating. This indicates the difficulty of a song itself and is determined on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being the easiest setting and 10 the hardest. A song can have multiple
foot ratings to choose from, depending on how many sequences the author designed for this particular tune.
The
foot rating or the dance's difficulty is not affected by the difficulty rating chosen at the startup screen. The chosen difficulty only makes the menu pick out the "relevant"
foot rating for your choice. It is entirely possible to switch between
foot ratings and thus between difficulties.
BLOCK B:
Your currently selected
foot rating is shown here. As you may have guessed by now, the colour of the icon is related to the four main genres of difficulty. This gives you some indicator of what to expect.
You switch between
foot ratings by tapping up or down twice.
BLOCK C:
This graph in the shape of a pentagon is called the
groove radar. It shows you an indication of five key metrics for the song you've selected. These metrics are (clockwise, starting at the top):
Stream: The amount of consecutive, fast steps.
Chaos: The number of steps which fall on 1/16, 1/32, 1/12 and 1/24 beats.
Freeze: The amount of times you are "forced" to keep your feet down on a key.
Air: The number of jumps within a song.
Voltage: The highest step density which occurs in the song.
So! Now you're on your way to at least understand what Stepmania is telling you about your music collection! :D
Enjoy the game!
Posted in:
dance dance revolution
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difficulty
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foot rating
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groove radar
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stepmania
