Man I love ITG so much! It's so much better than DDR, isn't it?

KONAMI won't like this thread...

 Anyway, they're equal.

EDIT: In before ban lol 

Nah, DDR is better than ITG, simply because it's more casual-gamer friendly and contains a wide variety of music, while ITG is mostly hip-hop and vocal music, with some techno, and is pretty lifeless.

Ok before another "ddr vs itg" thread starts, let's remind the posters about THINKING before they reply.  This especially goes to any elitists that may have joined this forum.  Talking about the game is ok, but dont debate whether it was godly or crappy cause it leads to disaster in the end

ITG was good. it would have been nice to see Koanmi do something with the series, but thats out of the question.

Each has its' Advantages, but I'm not sure what I would do if each one cost the same price and I had to choose one.

I would probably go witha  Japanese SN3 or whatever the next mix will be if they do it right :|

If by ITG you mean r21/r23, then of course it's better due to custom song support. Of course, no company would continue to make money off something like that...

As far as normal ITG2 goes, I tend to side more with DDR because I have more favorite songs. If the pads on either one are bad though, I'd gladly play the other. I'm just not very picky that way =p

I like both. ITG is filled with awesome trance, drum and bass, happy hardcore, and techno (What hip hop?) and has tons of modifiers, modes, and scripted courses, like StepMania. DDR has awesome everything else.

I'm a DDR fan.  The biggest reason I prefer DDR is the music.  I don't care about difficulty as much as I care about playing the songs I enjoy listening to and DDR aligns with my music tastes more.  Konami writes better step charts too, in my opinion.  They seem to be focused more on moving your body in a fun way than they are on matching every prominent sound in the song with an arrow.

With that said I do not think ITG is a bad game (how could I when it and DDR are so similar?)  My honest personal preference is just towards DDR.

Hopefully the competition between the two games will promote better dancing games all around. 

Yes, I agree AgoraPerry.  I think the competition between the two games will promote better quality, on-sync games like SuperNOVA, because the two games are definitely in fierce competition.

I mean, they're both owned by different companies, and are both still being manufactured.

Oh wait. 

I agree, DDR absolutely does have the best music. Even Naoki, who does a LOT of generic euro stuff, can produce great stuff, like Tears and Poseidon. The difference in stepcharts to me is that DDR is fun while ITG is challenging. Not to say that ITG doesn't have fun charts, or that DDR doesn't have challenging charts, but that's a general assessment. While DDR has the problem of often making songs too easy, ITG has the problem with making charts that don't make sense, or that step to something that you can barely even hear.

Anyways, I prefer DDR because it has more songs to choose from (Yeah, yeah r21 whatever, a lot of people don't have an r21 machine near them), the music is of better quality, and the steps are generally more fun for me. ITG is a good game, but I'm not gonna boycott Konami to bring it back. It seems like ITG continues to live in that crappy Pump Pro game or whatever. 

DDR > ITG just because of the songs...fact!

 and ITG charts makes a lot of sense to me, I mean, people would think the same seeing everyday someone playing Chimera or Bemera.

 EDIT: gramatical errors.

Pump It Up > all

I think DDR is better because it seems to appeal to a lot more groups of people than ITG does.  From what I've seen, ITG seems to only concern itself with the most difficult step charts of any particular song; as such, I don't see ITG appealing much to the casual gamer or even the hardcore gamer that hasn't played any dancing games before.  It is a fact that ITG was created after DDR; after DDR had already become a popular arcade game around the US.  Being created at this time, it is not surprising that ITG targeted DDR players, but in doing so I feel they left out many potential users.  In short, without DDR attracting new players I don't think ITG could last.

csdthegreat "What hip hop?"
 
 Music Pleeze?  =)

You say ITG couldn't last?

Ridiculous, and I'd like to see try you back it up with empirical evidence.

I know a good deal of people from the Rocky Mount region (In North Carolina, if you've never heard of the tournaments, which you should have) who STARTED dance games with ITG.  Within MONTHS, they could play and pass consecutively 11s and the majority of 12s.  This isn't to say that everyone can become good this fast, but to say that people are deterred from playing ITG because of its difficulty is absurd.

The only reason you say ITG is too hard to appeal to the casual player is because you can't play the expert charts, but you can read them.  The simple fact that you can contemplate and understand that Summer expert has intense 16th runs at the end is because you've been playing long enough to understand the arrows.  Someone who has never played a dance game isn't going to be able to look at Bloodrush vs. Waka Laka and tell that one is significantly harder than the other.  Similarly, I'm sure when you started playing DDR, and looked at Max 300 on Heavy, you may have thought "Man, how am I ever going to be able to do that?". Yet that didn't deter you from playing DDR did it? The challenge to one day be able to simply pass it, let alone AA or AAA it only made playing more fun.

And another thing, the music in ITG attracts a lot more casual players, standard gamers if you will, than DDR could ever hope to.  Honestly, if you took a survey of 1000 gamers at random, what are the odds of J-Pop coming up as being a genre enjoyed by a majority, or even a significant number of people polled? 

Honestly, I'm detecting a lot of ignorant posts in this thread.  ITG has mostly hip hop music? What? Have you even played it before?  

And piepiepie, I'd really like you to name a few ITG charts that don't make sense.  And also, I'm going to hazard a guess that you've never played Pump Pro.  My friend got the upgrade for his Zero Cabinet, and tells me its quite good.  I haven't personally played it, so I don't have any opinion to give, but its pretty clear by your tone that you haven't played it either, which makes you look pretty stupid because you're bashing it without ever playing it.

Well, those 16th streams in Lemmings on the Run have made no sense to me ever, no matter what I've tried. Assist tick...slowing down the song, I've never figured out what those are stepping to. Everytime I ask an ITG player, they just tell me it's an "Assumed beat", which I don't really get. There's also several 9's in ITG2 that seem to go "8th note streams, 16th cluster, 8th note streams, 16th clusters...repeat)  I'm not saying DDR doesn't do this. I mean, I can name NGO (What are those steps at the slowdown near the end going to?) and Pluto Relinquish (The steps at the slowdown with the heavy piano in the background don't make sense to me on Expert and Challenge...) just from the most recent game, but I think a greater number of ITG songs do it. P.S. Yeah...hip-hop is not really a prevelant genre in ITG. I can only think of a few songs that would even vaguely fit the genre. 

By the way, I don't know why people say J-Pop is a majority of DDR. I mean, let's just look at all the new songs in SN2 (Counting new from CS songs, but not Groove Radar Specials)

26 songs are in English

9 are in Japanese 

 The rest are either Instrumental, In another language, or do not have enough lyrics to really classify it (Like MARS WAR 3, or Trip Machine Phoenix)

Furthermore, throughout the main series, there were virtually little to no Japanese songs until about 5th mix, and even then most of the songs ended up being in English. And let's not forget where this game was originally, and is still largely, marketed to...JAPAN. I'm SOOOO tired of people complaining about J-Pop in DDR when the majority of it is in English.

 And your other point: Do you really think either DDR or ITG is playing to the "casual gamers" market? I mean, if you were to take your aforementioned poll, the genre that would probably come up would be something that neither DDR or ITG has a lot of. Probably something like Punk, Heavy Metal, or rap. Plus, I don't know a lot of guys my age who think that Dance Games aren't "gay". Who does like DDR? Well, girls for one, especially younger ones. And Otakus love the game because "Zomg, it's like from Japan, we're totally one step closer to being true Japanese people, OOH!" 

And no I haven't played Pump Pro, nor have I really played PIU at all (I really want to, but there's really no arcade machines out here), but I have seen the charts and videos from Pump Pro and I'm...not impressed. Especially compared to the other Pump games I've seen. And VVV makes Faxx look like  adecent chart. Most of my friends who are PIU fans really don't like Pro either, and I remember a lot of PIU players basically spreading hate about it when it first came out. 

Yes, you're right, there are a lot of pump players who hated on Pump Pro before it came out.  My friend who has the cabinet I was talking about? Jboy, yeah, he hated on it.  Now he says its pretty cool.  It always seemed to me that the pump players needlessly hated on Pro because it changed so many aspects of the pump series, and, stuck in a rut, just like DDR players when ITG came out, they *****ed about it.  Not to say in the slightest that there weren't legitimate fears and reasons behind some of the negative reactions towards Pro, but a lot of it was just ignorance.

And my example of J-Pop was stereotypical, yes, but that was on purpose.  When you ask someone who doesn't play DDR about the games, I can guarantee that 9 times out of 10 the words "asian" and "j-pop" are going to come up.  When I talked about J-pop, I was referencing the desirability to play the game from an outsiders point of view, based on the stereotypical genres associated with it.  You're "SOOOO tired of people complaining about J-pop in DDR" because thats how everyone who doesn't play views it.  Thank you for that quote to emphasize my point beautifully.  Casual gamers will not be attracted to play it because of their stereotypes. 

And as a side note, I just went and played LotR.  You know the kind of high pitched 8th note stuff that acts as the melody in that section? Also, do you know what Add-Stepping/Metronome Stepping is?  If you know what both of those are, it makes perfect sense. 

Crap man, I kept thinking of stuff to say while I was reading and Nightmare kept taking them all.

Yea nightmare pretty much said it all.  Although I was hoping that another "DDR vs ITG" war wouldn't start cause I've seen too many of those >_>

 Whatever, maybe one year Konami will suprise us all by taking one of the ITG songs out of the vault they locked them in and use it in one of their games or something, and hopefully the steps will fit with the music as well.

"Hopefully the competition between the two games will promote better dancing games all around."

That kinda makes me laugh. Competition? Monopoly? Acquired intellectual rights?

I'd really like to see konami do something with ITG too.

Well, you can't really hold it against Konami for exercising their own copyrights on a competitor who not only used Konami's hardware for free to market their product (ITG1), but did so while violating Konami's intellectual property rights.

I mean, without the Konami cabinet conversions, ITG would've never seen the light of day. By doing that, Ward and friends made money essentially for free while using Konami's hardware that they didn't pay a cent for.

Were Konami to do something with ITG, they'd have to get the artists on-board, and like half of ITG is Ward. So save for seeing a few surprise appearances in later DDR mixes of some ITG songs that weren't Ward's, I wouldn't hold your breath.

on another issue someone mentoned Pump it Up PRO... Since I'm a Pump it Up player and have been with that series for a long time I must drop my 2 cents on PRO :

First off lets compare it price wise :

($1,075 w/o MK6 board) $1,600 = NX2 : 230 songs, includes full songs a good portion of remixes and an enhanced mission mode

($2,300 w/o MK6 board) $2,800 = PRO : 140 songs, progressive mode... a bunch of modifiers... no full songs.

 So basically PRO costs double the amount of a normal Pump it Up upgrade and does not come in the standard SX/GX cabinet design shipped with just about less than half the content of NX2. It's close to almost even on terms with NX1... but release of something like Pump it Up NX2 at the low price of $1,600 for an upgrade compared to the PRO just cancels it out.

 The other issue is some step charts have been tampered with and as a result became off beat since PRO runs on Stepmania 4. That being said the issue is exactly that : SM4 has no support for songs with different BPM tempo changes and pauses for each mode. Regular Pump it Up does that and as a result some step charts got messed up when converted for PRO.

 That being said... onward to In the Groove ...  I personally don't have a problem with ITG... it works as a 4 panel game... it just lacks variety in music... this is where the competition has ITG beat. You can play DDR or Pump it Up and come across more of a variety in terms of musical style. ITG spams the trance/electronic music far too much. ITG3 would have fixed that however it never got released... as it stands part of ITG3 ended up being what is known as Pump it Up PRO.

oh man, my post magically disappeared!

Yeah, I've had posts kinda vanish as well.

I think Konami might be in cahoots with the US gov't or something.

ITG3 wasn't really gonna solve anything music-wise, it held the same genres as 1&2, and that's ok. The game's released to a NA market, and the NA market listens to that type of music more.

Go to a club and take a poll of how many people are looking forward to the club playing their first J-Pop track of the night. They'll laugh and continue to dance to SOME of the genres featured in ITG.

ITG3 was going to bring in a new problem if it did release though, and probably one that would've killed the series' fairly high reputation, in that it was going to suck very, very badly. The charts were crap, the songs were mediocre at best, it all seemed like a totally rushed job (yay for leaks).

What I don't get about PIUPro is where the advantage in taking that over ITG or PIU comes from. It has a bunch of ITG songs where the charts are pretty much EXACTLY the same and converted to 5-panel, the rhythms are the same, the patterns are the same, I've played this before with one less arrow.

The PIU songs, I can get on an NX cabinet instead, along with tons of other quality charts, and they'll all be accurate instead of *******ized Pro versions. So why would I play Pro which houses inferior versions of both ITG and PIU songs, instead of just sticking to playing ITG and PIU separately?

Wait, this isn't a Pro thread?