Dance with Intensity

Dance With Intensity is the freeware I began DDR with, this is a tutorial which I hope will help you feel comfortable with the soft quickly. Dance with Intensity is not as evolved as Stepmania, but is still pleasant due to an efficient interface and profile handling. If you are several people playing DDR at home, it is very convenient to manage separate profiles with different saved scores. Still Stepmania offers many extra features.

Software set up and install

To set up the software, you need to create a folder "dance with intensity" and unzip DWI-v250-full.zip inside. Let us begin by lanching DWI without any songs and do the options setup (double clic on DWI2.exe).

Notice that at launch the game displays the number of songs added since last time, then the total number of songs, at the top left corner. Make sure the warning "not for sale" appears on your screen ; if not, rescale your screen (this will affect only the resolution on which DWI runs, not your usual display).

Go to options and change the following parameters:
In Game Options
Turn game over to end of music (otherwise the game does not let you finish a title if you miss too many arrows) and Users profiles on On.
In Background Options
Danger display on Off (this is annoying when you lose) and AVI quality on 10.
In Gamepad Options
This is where you map your dance mat to the game's controls.
In System Options
Default Sort affects the way songs are sorted in their selection screen : choose "All music (separated)" and set Time Limit on Off, to have infinite time to choose your song. If you begin, make sure default difficulty is on light.

Musics

Musics for Dance Dance Revolution are grouped in separate folders such as "Dance Dance Revolution 1st mix". These folders have to be located in the "Songs" subfolder of Dance With Intensity. Go get your first titles on the dance school page. Then head to the links. The game looks for new songs at every start, this can take a while. You will save time by launching DWI through the file DWI-skipsearch.bat.

Profiles

With DWI you can manage as profiles as you want. A profile consists of a name, a picture and all the stats of the player. To add a profile, for instance ddrpcgamer, create a subfolder named ddrpcgamer in the folder profiles of Dance With Intensity and put in it a little .png picture. The name of the picture must be "user.png".

Sounds and skins

You can change the voice commenting your dance. Just download an "announcer pack" and put it in the folder Sounds. Activate it in the options, menu announcer/sound selection. You can find new skins for Dance With Intensity as well (folder skins, " skin selection").

The game

At title screen choose Arcade mode, then choose between single, solo and double. double is a one player mode but you play on two mats at once. By hitting the up arrow you discover another mode, solo, which is played with two extra arrows. Few titles are compatible though. Select your profile, and you reach the title selection screen.

On the right of the screen stands the list of folders and songs. In the picture above, Heavy and Hits songs are folders containing respectively 15 and 60 titles. To open or close a folder, just highlight it and press start. You navigate through the songs with left/right arrows. Up/down arrows change difficulty between Light, Standard, Heavy and Complex. All the difficulty levels may not be available depending on the song. Little square icon below the difficulty bar indicates the current difficulty mode : in the picture this is a L for light. Just below, the number of feet indicates the difficulty of the particular song you have selected. The specificities of the song are further developed by the diagram on the bottom left corner:

• Freeze: number of Freeze arrows: you must maintain these for a while
• Chaos: number of arrows in half or quarter times
• Voltage: maximum frequency of arrows
• Air: number of jumps (two arrows simultaneously)
• Stream: total number of arrows

Next to the songs you have already played, your best grade is displayed : E, D , C, B, A, AA, ou AAA (perfect from the beginning to the end). Press start to confirm your choice. Maintain start and you get a special options screen.

With Speed the arrows are crossing the screen quicker, boost makes the arrow accelerate or decelarate while they cross, and appearance let the arrows appear at the last moment. Turn does rotations on every arrows, dark hides the arrows completely and scroll reverse have them scrolling top to down. other option is still mystery to me.
Let us go forward to the game screen!

You have to press the mat when arrows come at the top of the screen, right in front of the still transparent arrows. BUT the display is there to show you WHERE you put your feet, not WHEN. The when is given by the rhythm of the music, this is all DDR is about !
Long yellow arrow are freezes, you have to keep the foot on the mat the whole time. Top of the screen you find the public meter, it reflects your performance. A useful little trick : F12 activates the assist tick, it helps you to find the good tempo. Likewise with F3/F4, you accelerate/brake the game, letting you the time to analyse a tricky arrow combination ! Every arrow you hit is awarded by one out of five performance level, depending on the accuracy of your tempo: miss, boo, good, great! and perfect!! As long as you are above great! you grow your combo counter (24 on the picture).
At the end of the song you get your results with your final grade. If you did not get a E, you pass and get another song. After three songs you have a global score and you are directed back to the title screen.
This ends my tutorial to Dance With Intensity, now go burn the floor !