I take my Ignition and lean it against the wall.  No taking out the foam and folding the pad up - much easier to leave it out, and no needless wear and tear on the sensor circuits.  I have it facing the wall, no edges or corners against the sensors.  Once in a while I'll flip the foam on the inside over.  That's pretty much it as far as maintenance goes.

My Ignitions tend to last a year or so.  Their useful life ends when they start flickering and I can't correct it by modding the foam inside (beveling the edges to reduce tension, for example).  Two that didn't flicker too badly became my doubles pads - I'm not so good on doubles, so a little flickering here and there doesn't bother me much.  I've also given a few pads to friends who are occasional players and didn't mind the occasional flicker 'cause they were still much better than their beat-up soft pads.

That's what this is about. The ability to "rip" the songs from PS2 mixes you already own for use on the PS3.

I wouldn't think they would.  I believe that if Konami uses a licensed song in a new mix they have to pay more royalties, maybe renegotiate for the song's use if they didn't deal with that in the original agreement, but if they just print up more copies of an existing mix, that should be covered by the existing licensing agreement.

(If anyone is in the industry can provide solid info on this issue, please speak up.)

Bemanistyle just posted a news article to the effect that Singstar owners will be able to transfer PS2 tracks onto the HD of their PS3s,and speculated that this could be a growing trend for rhythm games.

A quote: "I for one know I'd LOVE to see the ability to load all of the PSX and PS2 pop'n music songs onto an HDD and have the option of playing them on newer engines for the games."  Change Pop'n Music to DDR, and you have one of the two things that would get me to jump platforms.  (The other is PS3-compatible Ignition pads.)

I've posted elsewhere that I would love to be able to play older DDR games - PSX especially - using a newer interface, and this is pretty close to what I wanted.  If, when DDR debuted on the PS3, Konami took the initiative - which would certainly guarantee that they'd sell more copies of their existing mixes, BTW - I'd become a happy next-gen owner.

piepiepie75, I'm one of those players who can rarely get to an arcade, doesn't have a modded PS2, and was looking forward to those songs.  Surely I'm allowed to express a mite of dismay that two classics I thought would be in this mix aren't listed after all?  (And, to anybody who's reading, don't start on Stepmania.  Not everyone can dance at their computer.)

...Well, in the Supernovas we saw a few instances of multiple mixes of the same song in a game. Maybe we'll get the originals too.  Wouldn't bet on it though.

These Xmixes, what they be?  On first read it sounds like a long mix of songs that would function as a nonstop course, except the songs blend together as opposed to being discrete stages.  If so... yum.

As for the licenses... well, I've heard of a few of 'em.  *shrug*  I'll see how fun they are to dance.  I'm a little disappointed that Butterfly and DUB-I-DUB are remixes rather than the original flavor.

By myself 95% of the time, but when I go see a movie with friends we DDR together, and on those rare occasions when I have a visitor we often stomp arrows.

I've brought DDR over to my sister's house and tried to indoctrinate her family.  She was a little too intimidated by my hot-dogging to try, I fear.  My brother-in-law tried it and enjoyed it, and would have gotten some As if he didn't have giant feet and keep returning to the center.  (His heels and toes overlapped both the top & bottom arrows.)  The kids didn't know what to do, but they had fun trying and watching.  The funniest scene came when I was dancing with my brother-in-law while my sister was bathing the kids before putting them to bed.  After AAing a tough song I turned around and saw a birthday-suit-clad, dripping wet, 3-year-old girl watching with a very serious expression.  When she saw the show was over she went back to the bath.

I'm a longtime fan of ReBoot, the first fully-CGI TV cartoon.  I have a website called "Slack & Hash's Domain," Slack and Hash being a spoonerization of Hack and Slash, two robot characters on the show.  Since Slack is my ReBoot avatar, and she's a robot, well...

It's kind of ironic, now that I think about it, that I use Slackbot as a DDR nickname.  Slack does not have feet, only a trackball, so she couldn't dance if she tried.

SpeedDemon1 - I've since raised my score in bag to an AA.  I had to run it at 8x speed to do it. :)

 AgoraElliott - If you do a birthday challenge, please post the results for us to see!

maxninja114 - You might create some themed custom challenge courses for your club to try.

The ESRB has just posted the rating for DDR X. Everyone 10+; Lyrics, Mild Suggestive Themes, Mild Fantasy Violence. I assume that fantasy violence is in some BGMs.

So far I'm the only one who liked Stellar Master Mode in Supernova. However, I firmly believe that any accomplishment-based unlock system should have a time-based (or number-of-songs-played-based) unlock mode as a backup, so nobody will be left out as long as they keep at it.

I agree with Maxninja - I'd like to hear about the development of DDR from the inside.  If the blogger wants to write about stuff I'm not interested in, OK, I won't get all upset about it, but I won't bother to read it either.

Reeny^3 speaks the truth.

Really, how many players are actually annoyed to see song levels that they don't enjoy playing or can't play, as long as they also have levels that fit them?  In the case of Challenge-only songs, I can see how lighter players feel gypped. (I don't like that myself - but Konami has stopped doing that, right?)  But it's not like some PIU machines which have some songs with only one or two difficulty levels either far below or far above your level, so that song is useless to you.  Better that there be something for everyone, difficulty-wise.

Hmm... I play an hour a day, every day.  it's my workout.  However, I don't imagine a lot of people are as methodical about it as I am.  I'll bet a lot of people play it only on weekends, or accoding to some other non-daily schedule.  If I'd written this poll, I'd have asked how many hours they play per week.

Here's a mod I thought up some time ago. It seems obvious enough to me, so I doubt I'm the first person to get this idea.

A maximum speed mod. MS or MAX for short. Let's say you have a song that runs at 150 BPM. This would raise the arrow speed to your target. If you set the mod to MAX 450, then the arrows would run that fast. If you have a song which has speed changes - say, 100-300 BPM - then the fastest arrows would be at 450 BPM, and the slowest ones would be sped up by the same miltiplier - 1.5x - to 150. Stops would, of course, not be affected.

For the above examples I've used numbers which make for easy math, which means that you could get the exact same effect as using 3x and 1.5x. However, this mod would be very useful with songs that you can't use regular speed mods to reach a "sweet spot" - for example, the many 170-180 BPM songs out there (my sweet spot is 400-460 BPM), or slow junk like Oops I Did It Again. (You might get an unpleasant surprise if you used it in The Legend of Max, though!)

This would be most useful if you could set the maximum speed yourself, say in the Options > Game area. One speed would be enough, I'd think, or maybe two to account for two-player games. So, it'd be most effective on console games.

The most obvious downside to this is that it could become a crutch for the lazy. They could become so used to their favorite speed that they can't dance at anything else. But then, one could make a similar criticism of speed mods in general, and I certainly can't dance fer spit on 1x.

That's entirely possible. Some official sites don't keep up to date. For example, Sony's PS2 Grestest Hits list doesn't include DDRMax2 or DDR Extreme - or anything after June 2007, for that matter.

I imagine the ESRB rating will pop up eventually.

Hmmm... It's being released next month, and the ESRB hasn't posted a rating for it. Considering they've got to put that rating on the game case, it seems they're cutting it rather fine.

An addendum: I really love the background videos in "Pump It Up." Many of them are worth watching at least once on their own. You can't say that about many DDR videos, and most of the ones you can say it about are not by Konami - Move Your Feet & Take On Me, for example. I'd love to see some videos with more appeal than random, funky one-second clips. I know that it's much too late even think about this for DDR X, but it might be worth considering further down the road.