Check out the next incarnation of DDR. (From a different company, actually.) It's called Dance Factory. The claim is that once you've loaded up the game, you can put any music CD into the PS2, then have the game scan through a song and create a step pattern for it.I don't know how this thing will pull that off, or if it will really do that good a job of it. But it seems to me that if this thing actually works even halfway decently, it ought to be pretty sweet.
4 comments:
I wonder how that will work with my Wagner and Mozart CDs...
Tell me what you want, what you really really want.
there's a different type of game called Monster Rancher that generates monsters based on whatever dics you give it (music, movie, data, anything) it was lots of fun trying everything I owned to see what you'd get.
but the game had special monsters based on specific discs. I actually checked out Mariah Carey Christmas Album from the Library to get an Xmas Rabbit Monster (among others... go Library!) This game might have pre-programmed step patterns based on specific tunes they wanted to include, but were to $$ to include in the game.
I'm sure the random stuff will be hit or miss, but the testing should be fun enough for sure.
the mole
I'm interested in seeing how it works at all. Analyzing music from a purely technical standpoint is probably tricky. I'm sure the idea is to figure out the BPM and generate steps accordingly. How do you allow for error? I bet all those old Beatles songs aren't exactly (mathematically) on the beat. You have to allow for some deviation on the order of milliseconds. What about gradual tempo changes? Can you extract beats from some acoustic guitar/vocals song?
There's a tool out there for StepMania called Dancing Monkeys that does just that; you can analyze a WAV file and generate steps from it. It doesn't work very well at all.
Without a "four on the floor" techno style beat (which amazingly describes the majority of DDR songs as it is), it'd be tough to get a tool like this to work. Still, I guess we'll see.
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