/i> In the Groove

I went to the In the Groove launch party on Wednesday. In the Groove is a Dance Dance Revolution like game released last year to the arcades. It features the same arrow scrolling as DDR, but has new (and some harder) songs, as well as some new options for those bored with DDR.

Red Octane developed the Playstation 2 version of the game, and it's being released in late May or early June. I participated in a focus group for Red Octane a while ago, and they graciously invited me to the launch party. Conveniently it was held in San Francisco, just a few miles away from my work.

It took place at Fluid SF, a bar located on Mission St. I would have never found it had I not been looking, but the inside was pretty nice. There was an open bar and sushi rolls (which were pretty good). Unfortunately, I was driving so I couldn't take advantage of the open bar.

In the Groove has several features which I'm really looking forward to. First, I really like the music. The DJ had all the songs and was playing them over the speakers. All the songs were definitely dancable, and wouldn't have felt out of place at a dance club.

ItG has all the standard DDR mods like speed mods, mirror, shuffle, sudden, stealth, etc. But it also has several completely new mods. I don't remember the name of them all but among them are:

- wave: the arrows move left and right as they travel up the screen
- spin: the arrows spin around quickly in place (relatively) as they travel up the screen
- hurricane: the arrows are jumbled around at first, only going to their correct position near the top
- wave2?: the arrows accelerate and decelerate as they travel up the screen
- stream: extra arrows are added for each half beat (possibly more, but only half-beats for the song I played)
- echo: I think this one adds an extra arrow for each arrow?

There are several others too.

One thing I didn't realize about the interface is that selecting an option doesn't de-select the other options. So I played a song with stream, which was fine since I was only playing a 5 footer. I then turned on echo for the next song, thinking it would deselect stream.

Nope.

I did my best imitation of thumper for about 30 seconds as I had to quickly hit the same arrow for 10+ times in a row in between the real arrows before I gave up because that setup wasn't fun.

So next time I'll know to be careful mixing and matching mods. I'm definitely looking forward to playing this game at home though.