Walking Like An Egyptian

One of the things I really like about the DDR games on the xBox 360 is they have the actual music videos for the 'real' songs. DDR Universe 2 has two in particular that I really like. Safety Dance and Walk Like An Egyptian. Walk Like An Egyptian is the fastest song in the game (at least that I've unlocked so far) and is 8 feet on expert. I finally managed to pass it today, and even got a B rank. Woo!

DDRU2 has a 'calorie tracker' feature where it uses some undoubtedly non-scientific function to turn your weight and the steps you entered into a number of calories burned. Now, I remember watching Bung and Tmiv play DDR back in University and while they may have been making the same steps I'm pretty sure Bung was burning more calories with his unique way of stomping to Boom Boom Dollar. So the number from the game needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If anything my number is probably higher since I tend to flail around a bit while I play. At any rate, the claim is I burned 400 calories today. But what does that even mean? Apparently that's about an hour of high impact aerobics. Perhaps an hour of pole jumping! A little less than an hour of tennis. 2 hours of throwing a frisbee around. 45 minutes of ultimate. An hour and a half of golf! So, a decent enough workout I guess. Hmm, maybe I should take up golfing again...

Achievements

I've been playing Dance Dance Revolution Universe 2 on the xBox 360 lately. The 360 is designed with an achievement system built into it and I've been trying to get the achievements in the game. Some of them are for just doing normal things like unlocking songs or passing them on any difficulty but a few of them are incredibly hard and annoying. Now, hard isn't something I normally shy at. I got plenty of hard achievements in World of Warcraft and was quite happy to do them.

No, the problem here, I think, is that they aren't for playing DDR. They're for doing a bunch of obscure challenges that use the songs and the dance pad but are actually detrimental to playing the game. Silly things like play a song at triple speed, with no top bar, and the arrows appearing halfway up the screen, without missing a single step. Except for the up arrows. Hit an up and you lose. So if you're actually good enough to pass the song with a speed increase and not seeing all the arrows properly you're probably screwed because you're going to instinctively hit the ups and lose. So in order to actually do it you'd need to practice the song with those weird conditions over and over and over until you did it perfectly. And then do it for 48 other different weird sets of conditions. Sorry, but I'm just not willing or able to do that. I haven't gotten all of the achievements in any xBox 360 game yet and DDRU2 won't be the first one.

BMI: 22.01 (+0.03)

Wii Fit Age: 28 (-3)

Let's D-D-R!

There are two problems with Wii Fit. It's boring and you have long delays between different events as you navigate all the menus. The mini games are neat the first few times but get tiresome fast. Even now after a year break I just can't get into it. But I do want to build up some sort of stamina so I can consider some sort of physical activity in the future. I'm thinking maybe an exercise bike or something of that sort so I can watch Star Trek while building endurance. But for now... Dance Dance Revolution!

I plugged my pad back in after at least a year off there, too. I hit random and forgot that I wouldn't get to change the difficulty setting after the song was chosen. (In the arcade you get to see the song first since the difficulty varies drastically song to song even at the same setting.) I was on the 3rd difficulty setting and actually ended up perfecting it. My first AA result in the game and it came after more than a year off. It turned out the song was only a 5 difficulty (out of 10) but still, pretty sweet. And then two songs later I couldn't stand anymore I was so exhausted. Endurance definitely needs work. And to think, I don't have anyone to hit me with a sword...

BMI: 21.68 (-.41)

Wii Fit Age: 27 (+1)