The DDR, what's this?

DDR, or Dance Dance Revolution, is a musical video game which is played with the feet and an original piece of hardware, the dance mat. Below is how an arcade cabinet and a metal dance mat look like:

The core of the game is quick to get but hard to master: this is about putting your feet at the right place and right time on the dance mat following the instructions on the screen and the rhythm of the music.
Arrows are scrolling from the bottom to the top on your screen; when they get in superposition with the still transparent arrows, you put your feet on the mat. Not quite clear? Have a look at the page In pictures. The video below will shed some light:

DDR is a musical game, so you need a good sense of rhythm, but the game is also quite demanding physically as the songs go on and on. Many titles are pretty intense, even in the easy mode light! The heavy mode looks to the beginner like it has been designed for extra terrestrians ^^.

Dance Dance Revolution has been ported to many game platforms since Sony's Playstation One (complete releases list here), and to PC with FREE softwares created by fans (mainly Stepmania and before that, Dance with intensity). In my view, DDR is way better on PC than on console!! Indeed the work of a living community has allowed us to enjoy a huge title collection (by huge I mean thousands) and various software mods, like themes or live comments on your cyber dancer performance.

Well, what kind of music to play DDR on? To the connoisseur, at the core of Dance Dance Revolution there are the techno-dance japanese titles which are very widespread in the original versions of the games Dance Dance Revolution and dancing stage; most of the time, they are among the funniest because they are rhythmical and present a good synchronisation between the music and the arrows.
Despite all that, people tend to enjoy playing DDR on famous songs, which is also understandable...You can find some "hits" on every official version and many more among the titles created for Stepmania and DWI by fans: Rihanna, The Beach Boys, Offspring, Cascada... everyone can be satisfied.