Metal DDR platforms for around $150.00 US. Not too shabby considering many of the hard plastic platfoms sell for over $100.00. But are they worth it? Will they make it so you'll never want to go to the arcades again? Let's find out!

So a friend of mine ordered two of the Dance Dance Revolution Metal Arcade Dance Platforms, and I ordered two of them as well. Between the two of us, I have tested four of these pads (and have assembled two of them myself). Note: These pads claim to work on a PC as well as a Playstation (PSX), but the ones we got didn't come with the necessary cable to hook it up to a PC so this review will only cover using the pads on a PSX or a Playstation2 (PS2).

The boxes:

First, let's start with a few pics. Here are the boxes they came in. Pretty schnazzy, eh? Well, those boxes weighed in at around 45lbs each, so remember: lift with your legs, not your back!

Some assembly required:

The platforms came in 9 metal squares (4 of them had plexiglass arrows taped to them) with a whole bunch of screws and metal connector pieces. There were instructions on how to assemble them, but there wasn't really much you could do wrong aside from not figuring out how the 9 pieces latched on together, but you'd have to be complete moron for that. (Shut up, Casey - it was late and I was tired) Here are a few pics of a fully assembled platform: Top | Bottom | Two Pads.

The guts (arrows):

These pads basically consist of a bunch of metal, four arrow platforms, and a circuit board. You've seen the metal, and here are a couple of pics of the arrow platforms: Front | Back. If you look at those two pictures, you will see that each arrow is basically one giant contact sheet. That white stuff you see around the edge is just standard foam like you could buy at the grocery store, and the three strips are just thin sheets of foil or some other material that conducts electricity. When you press the arrow down, the plexiglass bends down and the strips of metal touch the contact sheet and it completes the signal. One of the cool thing about these pads is that if you're the type of person who likes to take things apart and try to improve them, the design allows you to do that very easily.

The guts (the circuit board):

If you look at the bottom of the pad, you will see that each arrow has an RCA connector coming out of it that goes into the circuit board and eventually out to the PSX (or PS2). So now that you've seen everything else, it's time to look into what possibly could be the worst wiring I have *ever* seen on a professionally made retail product (and I'll use the term "professionally" quite loosely because of this). Let's take a look at the circuit board, shall we? Here's a pic of the circuit board. Upon opening up the housing for the circuit board, a couple of intriguing questions come to mind:
1) Why is there white dual-sided sticky foam (with only the one side peeled off) stuck to the board?
2) Why is there a strip of masking tape stuck to the board just underneath the RCA jacks?
3) Why are there open, non-protected wires running horizontally through the housing?
4) And most importantly, what were the makers of this platform smoking when they decided to ship it like this?
Unfortunately, I can't give definite answers to these, but I'll do my best. The circuit board is held in place by some more dual-sided sticky foam. (I guess they must have stumbled onto a big sticky foam sale when they were pricing the parts for these platforms) Upon removing the sticky-foam and the masking tape, we're left with an even more gruesome picture. Beneath the masking tape are a bunch of leads that have been scratched off and wires were soldered to them. I guess the tape was put there to keep them from touching the RCA jacks that are millimeters above. Underneath the sticky-foam was the circuit board. Nothing special there, I'm guessing that the sticky-foam was stuck on there to keep the connections away from the PURE METAL that makes up the housing for the circuit board. (Kudos to the designers for deciding to house an open circuit board in complete metal) As for the horizontal non-protected wires running through the housing, all I can think of is that either they completely ran out of budget when they got to the wiring, or the designer was actually an idiot savant whose one specialty happened to be making arrows for dancing games.

How does it play?

Okay, enough shanking the wiring, let's get into the good stuff and see how it plays! I've broken this out into a few categories: Durability, Feel (singles), Feel (doubles), and Quality. (Be sure to read the quality section before you get too excited about these)

• Durability: As of the writing of this review (3/12/02), these platforms are easily more durable than any other platform on the market. Period. They're made from a strong metal, they've got rubber stoppers all over the bottom of them to prevent a player's weight from cracking the metal, and the plexiglass doesn't move much when you step on it. I've heard that these pads can sustain weights up to 300lbs (which would be a 250lb person jumping on them really hard), but I have yet to test that. However, my friend (around 200lbs) and I (under 140lbs) both gave these pads a good pounding - WITH SHOES ON (which seems to be the best way to play on these) - and there was no sign of damage whatsoever. I honestly can't see these pads breaking under any sort of normal conditions simply because they're reinforced in almost every way. The good news is that if something does break, it would probably be something in the arrow and you could probably replace the offending part for under $10.

• Feel (singles): This is the best part about these pads. Having tried almost every single pad out there (3 or 4 types of soft pads, hard plastic pads that come in 4 pieces, hard plastic pads with the circular buttons, Komani DX pads, etc...) I can easily say beyond a shadow of a doubt that these platforms are as close to feel of the arcade stage as you can get without building your own custom platform. Playing on these platforms is like butter. Okay, actually it's nothing like butter, but it's really amazing. Once I got over the fear of damaging the pads (this fear will come with just about any hard pad you buy), I was able to play 9-foot songs pretty much just as well as I could on an arcade machine. In fact, on my 3rd game, I full combo'd Ecstacy Maniac Single with only 3 Greats which is 2 Greats less than my highest score in the arcade! If you look at the pictures, you will see that I have the platforms on a large piece of wood. While you can play with these directly on carpet if you want, it's nice to put them on something a little more flat just to prevent them from bending. You can get wood like this at your local hardware store. Mine is large enough to put two pads on, if you want to do that, just make sure you have a large enough vehicle to transport the wood!

• Feel (doubles): I played doubles on these platforms by spacing them out the appropriate distance (measured from the arcade stage) on a large piece of wood I have. You could put them right next to each other (with no space inbetween), but since the arrows go right to the edge of the platform, it wouldn't be the same as the arcade. The only problem with playing doubles on raised platforms is the small hole that's left between them if you space them properly. The hole didn't really affect me too much, but if you're not careful, you could probably sprain an ankle or injure yourself pretty bad. In the near future, I will definitely put a piece of wood or something between them that will be flush with the platforms. Once you deal with the spacing issue, again, the feel is the closest thing to the feel of the arcade stage you can get without building your own custom platform.

• Quality: If you've read this far, you're probably about to ALT-TAB out and go order one of these. Well let me go ahead and stop you right now, because what's in this section may change your mind. The first problem we noticed is that after lifting up the pads after a bit of playtime, some of the screws had fallen out the bottom. It didn't seem to affect much, but if left untreated, this could definitely result in damage to the platform. Solutions to this could involve getting nuts to put on the other side of the screws, or just simply making sure to screw them back in whenever they fall out. With such incredible durability and feel, a few screws falling out is hardly anything to complain about. But remember all that shoddy wiring in the pictures above? Well it looks like it may have come back to haunt the makers of these platforms. While playing on my friend's first platform, every once in a while, I noticed that the game would advance or make a selection when all I did was step on an arrow. To make a long story short, upon heavy investigation, we found that the "Start" button will intermittently get pressed (i.e. the signal will be sent) when you step on an arrow or even when you plug in or remove a memory card occasionally. This happened randomly, but it happened on ALL FOUR PLATFORMS, and it was very easy to reproduce (like once every 50 or so steps). We did a lot of tests, and we concluded that this problem was some sort of logic error in the circuit board and that every platform manufactured will probably suffer from it. But in all honesty, this problem is more annoying than anything else... Sure it sucks to select an option when you only wanted to cycle through them, sure it makes training mode hell, and sure it annoys the hell out of you when you're playing 5th Mix and it keeps changing the ordering of the songs, but it works and it doesn't seem to affect when you're playing a song. So up until now, everything has been forgivable (at least in my opinion) and I'd still say to go out and buy these platforms. BUT... Here's the kicker. One of the pads had another problem where after a while of playing on it, it would completely stop responding AND it would lock up both controller ports causing neither of them to respond until you unplugged both controllers and plugged them back in. This happened intermittently about once every 8 or 10 songs, but it made the game completely unpredictable and completely unplayable in my opinion. After more tests and some electrical engineering common sense, we determined that this problem is either a result of the shoddy wiring, or it's another problem with the circuit board. We strongly believe that it's the wiring because we were only able to reproduce it on one of the four pads, but who knows... Maybe it just happened yet on any of the others haven't reproduced it yet with the others. Either way, you're taking a big risk if you buy these platforms. There is a solution to this problem which I'll get to below, but it will involve some minor wiring soldering so if you have no knowledge or desire to do that, then you might want to stay away from these platforms.
  
  Additional Quality Issue (added 3/14/02): I was putting together another of these pads, and get this... They completely forgot to thread the screw-holes on one of the metal pieces. Yep, the screws wouldn't even fit. So rather than take it apart and send everything back, I decided to take a trip down to the local hardware store (which was out of the part I needed), and then to another hardware store which finally had the two parts I needed. So I ended up spending around $10.00 just to thread four holes for them... Fantastic. For reference, and in the unfortunate case that this should happen to anyone else, you'll need a 4mm .70 thread pitch METRIC tap and possibly a tap wrench. In addition to this, the screws have been known to occasionally fall out of the bottom of these pads after a lot of use, so you might want to pick up some nuts as well to keep the screws in place. Here is a pic of the additional materials that I got. After writing this review, I thought giving these pads a score of 1.5 out of 10 might have been a little harsh, but after this, I'm lowering it to 1.0. The quality of these platforms is unacceptable for a retail product in my opinion. But don't get me wrong, if you go in knowing this is what you're getting and you're prepared to spend the time and effort on the necessary modifications, then these pads are easily the best thing currently available. Just be aware that "some assembly required" is quite the understatement in the case of these platforms.

A solution to the quality issue:

For those of you who are inclined, there does exist a solution to the quality issues mentioned above. The solution involves ditching the circuit board that came with the platforms entirely, gutting a PSX or PS2 controller (a PSX controller would be cheaper and easier), and wiring your arrows and buttons through that instead. I'm going to do this within the next few weeks, and if enough people are interested, I can post a follow-up tutorial on how to mod these pads to get around the quality issues. If you are interested, just send an e-mail to kevin@ddrseattle.com and let me know.

Solution update (3/15/01):

I happened to have an old gutted PSX controller that I tested out and it still worked. So i hacked in a quick mod to the pad where I swapped out the circuit board with the PSX controller and wired it up. And... IT SUFFERED FROM THE SAME PROBLEMS! I could hardly believe it. So after a few more diagnostic measures, it looks like the problem lies somewhere in the RCA connectors or the Start/Select/X/O buttons combined with the metal housing (like how close they are to each other or to the metal). Something is causing bad signals to get sent to the PSX, and it's really wierd. I'm certain that this problem can be fixed, but it looks like the necessary mod is going to be a bit more involved than just swapping out the circuit board. I'll update this with more info as soon as I have it.

Summary:

To sum up, these are the best commercial platforms on the market, and at the same time they're also among the worst commercial platforms on the market. The biggest challenge in making a DDR platform is getting the feel of the arrows, and they TOTALLY NAILED IT! The arrows feel better than any home pad or platform I've ever tried. Beyond that, the only thing that's left is to wire it up decently and a high-school electrical engineering student should be able to do that. It's a shame that they took such an incredible piece of work and then threw it all away with ridiculously poor wiring and what seems to be a bad circuit board. If you're a modder and you have the wherewithal to perform the necessary modifications to get these platforms to work properly, then these pads are definitely worth buying. But for the general DDR public, and for those who don't care to (or can't) spend the time and money required to get these platforms to work the way you'd expect, you'd be taking a big risk in buying these, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you happen to have $150 + shipping burning a hole in your pocket.

Thanks for taking the time to read this review. :)

-- GPF Lith --

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