Here we see Cory Baxter, of House fame, dancing to the classic DDR #banger “exBLEEP ethBLEEP”, and you probably don't realize what a rare spectacle that is to behold.
This game was released at the beginning of 2008, or in DDR chronology terms, between the home releases of SuperNOVA2 and X, with an interface based on EXTREME2 (2005). It was developed by Keen Games, rather than Konami themselves.
It features 40 songs, roughly half as many as you would find on contemporary PS2 releases. The licensed Disney Channel songs, for which the game is named, comprise only half of those, meaning it has fewer total high-profile licenses than either adjacent standard release.
None of the licensed Disney Channel songs are presented as they were originally recorded. They're all covers, credited to the media of origin rather than the performers.
Of the remaining songs, 17 have to be unlocked before they can be played. The accessibility of 14 of those is... slightly questionable.
3 are borderline inaccessible to a majority of even knowledgeable players.
The unlock system of DDR Disney Channel Edition is, first of all, centered around playing on different difficulties. I'm pulling most of this information from RemyWiki, which doesn't currently specify how often playing a song on a given difficulty is likely to trigger an unlock, or whether the chart needs to be successfully cleared. It just states that songs are unlocked at random, from a selection for each difficulty. A forum post elsewhere suggests you might unlock a song after each clear, the first few times you clear songs on that difficulty... which would at least be very convenient relative to once every N songs.
Of course, the immediate annoying thing about that is that not everyone is going to want to play on every difficulty. An experienced DDR player is generally going to find Beginner charts so boring that they would never even consider playing them under normal circumstances. A little girl who just wants to take simple orders from the TV and move her body vaguely in time with a cover version of the theme song from That's So Raven may never dare to overcome the challenge of clearing even a cover version of the theme song from Kim Possible on Expert, and thus never claim what would potentially be her prize of “Monkey Punk”.
An aspect of it that's just a bit awkward is that the reward pools seem arbitrary. Clearing a song on a given difficulty doesn't necessarily net you a song that’s about as challenging at that same level, or something along those lines.
The most annoying thing is that, from what I gather, the game itself does not communicate any of this, and the manual must not either. A casual, competent DDR fan could pick up this game and not pick up on how its standard unlocks work. If you're not cutting the teeth of your feet on DDR Disney Channel edition from Beginner through Challenge charts, you'll have to turn to the Internet to learn what's there to unlock and how... and information about it may have been spotty at the time.
The iconic Konami original song “PBLEEPNBLEEP MAX ~BLEEEEEEEP~” is possible to unlock in this game, by clearing a song on Challenge difficulty. There are technically two, but realistically, there is only one song in the game with a Challenge chart, and you have to unlock it by playing on Basic difficulty first, possibly a few times.
So far, this is not the most annoying and obscure scheme for unlocking unlockables in DDR’s history. Other mixes require you to clear particular challenges, or songs under certain conditions, or even fail things. Unlocking “DROP THE BOMB -System S.F. MIX-” in DDRMAX requires you to either clear a particularly challenging ONI course (gimme one sec), or clear 500 regular gameplay stages, which is more than playing each of the game’s other 70 songs seven times over. And then there's the infamous code to unlock “MEMORIES” in the North American PS2 release of EXTREME, which was officially revealed over two years after the game’s release (and over a year after EXTREME2’s) via a Flash game that was part of a Burger King promotion.
SO HERE'S WHERE IT GETS FUNNY
DDR Disney Channel Edition was released during a certain transitional era of DDR where the PERFECT!! step judgement was becoming not PERFECT!! enough. In early 2002, the arcade release of DDRMAX2 introduced the accuracy-focused nonstop challenge mode, “NONSTOP CHALLENGE” mode (AKA “ONI” mode), in which several songs are played back-to-back, and inaccurate steps are harshly punished – you have 4 lives, any step judged GOOD or lower (more than ~5 frames early/late @ 60 fps) takes one off, and you get 1-3 lives back per stage depending on chart difficulty. (The course that unlocks “DROP THE BOMB -System S.F. MIX-” is 21 songs long without a break, while including some of the hardest charts in the game!) Later that year, DDR EXTREME revived the mode, and introduced the tighter judgement MARVELOUS!!, then specific to that mode, with a margin of error of +/- ~1 frame vs. PERFECT!!’s ~2 frames. While arcade DDR releases were on a 4-year hiatus, the MARVELLOUS!! [sic] judgement appeared in non-CHALLENGE NONSTOP and non-non-CHALLENGE CHALLENGE courses in the North American PS2 release of EXTREME, and was made optionally available during regular play in EXTREME2. 2006’s SuperNOVA retained the option and reverted the spelling to MARVELOUS!!, and from 2007’s SuperNOVA2 onward, the judgement has been incorporated into standard gameplay.
Managing a Perfect Fullcombo (“PFC”, no step judged GREAT! or below, synonymous with AAA in earlier games) has long been understood to be difficult for the average player to accomplish, and something only an elite player can do with regularity. In DDR’s early years, claims of AAAs on the harder charts were legendary, and often assumed to be lies. From Aaron Chmielowiec’s History of the Japanese DDR Community:
Not only overseas, but even locally where there were players at this skill level, people were crying "fake" at these accomplishments by their own fellow Japanese players, even on the simplest of songs. Some even tried to use mathematical "proof" in the form of Poisson distribution to show that the odds of getting an AAA were so low it wasn't feasible.
I lived and breathed DDR as a kid, and I could count my AAAs on one hand. (I've only intermittently played the DDR simulator StepMania on keyboards since then due to disabilities, and still have trouble avoiding a few pesky GREAT!s.)
Pulling off a Marvelous Fullcombo is an order of magnitude harder. DDR streamer OMG KON! has been uploading PFC videos to YouTube for over 15 years. The counter in his latest upload is sitting at nearly 3,000 unique PFCs, almost exclusively on songs’ hardest available charts, but under 250 MFCs. His first MFC came after over 1,400 unique PFCs.
Obviously there's only one reason why I would be explaining this.
Those last 3 unlocks require you to score 3 separate MFCs.
You get “MOMENT 40” for one on Beginner, “exBLEEP ethBLEEP” for one on Basic, and “SAKURA” for one on Difficult.
Exclusively difficulties that no one with the skills to pull them off will naturally be grinding out scores on. Also, this is an edition of the game that makes a TV give simple orders to little girls to move their bodies vaguely in time with a cover version of the theme song from That's So Raven, virtually no one with the skills to pull them off would ever play it more than briefly as a novelty anyway, and if they did, they probably wouldn't even bother going for these unlocks as bragging rights. None of these songs are that special, all are more accessible in far better DDR mixes.
And no, of course the game doesn't tell you anything about how to unlock these songs either. Old forum posts suggest they and their unlock methods were discovered when people ripped the game disc.
Incidentally, engaging with this game’s lower-difficulty unlock quests may draw your attention to the fact that every Beginner chart is rated as a 1, regardless of what it's rated in other games. I don't think they reworked anything, I think they just conflated, by current metrics, the bottom quarter of difficulty ratings into the lowest possible for the whole Beginner label, despite the fact that SAKURA’s Beginner in particular was originally rated at or above the level of many Basic charts in the game.
Of course this timeline would be even more horrific if achieving an MFC on Expert or Challenge unlocked something, but only marginally, really, if you generally possess the ability to maintain a rhythm to within a couple of frames; arguably, one might find it harder to do with a sparser stream of actual steps to keep time with. But trying to keep time as you would normally won't save you here anyway because this game’s timing is broken.
Several YouTube comments and reviews of this game elsewhere mention timing issues. I don't know if it's just offsets or if it goes deeper, like something with input polling, but... A/V sync in DDR recordings on YouTube seems iffy at the best of times, but watching videos of some of Disney Channel Edition’s original charts made me feel uneasy. It felt like something was running at the wrong BPM, yet somehow the steps were always only off by about the same amount. It is 𝚌𝚞𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚍.
Take a look at the judgement distribution on the results screen in that video of “exBLEEP ethBLEEP”. Typically, you would expect someone who was able to unlock this song in the first place to remain pretty on-point, hitting most steps precisely on time, with fewer and fewer errors falling further and further away from that zone. Instead, we see that a significant majority were judged sub-MARVELLOUS.
And if you look at the actual gameplay again, you'll notice that there isn't a MARVELLOUS in sight. Mmmhm, thaaat’s right! If you fancy yourself to be the type of creature who would go for MFCs in a DDR game with goofed-up timing, guess what? You have to find where the sync actually lies and stick to it without adequate visual feedback! Because this game is a game based on a game where your MARVELLOUS!! count is an optional statistic you can enable, released in a time where your MARVELOUS!! count was becoming a prominent consequential element of gameplay, and it's caught somewhere in the middle and doesn't know which it's supposed to be.
That forum poster who attempted to share specifics of the unlock system actually contacted the developer about it, including the requirements to unlock these 3 songs. Apparently, they were told the requirements were “AAAs”. So I reckon the third-party devs responsible for this literally didn't know what a MARVEL(L)OUS(!!) was supposed to be in the broader context of DDR at the time. Or a PERFECT!!, or a AAA, really. Someone knew that The Best was technically achievable, and locked rewards behind The Best. Whoever it was could not have been anyone who had experienced the MARVEL(L)OUS(!!) timing window.
It's hard to imagine that this unlock method was actually tested, and if it was, it's hard to imagine someone looking at their best efforts, undoubtedly miles short, and thinking “Daaah, sure, it'll keep the whippersnappers busy!” and giving it a pass. Those whippersnappers who would be spared from any indication of these unlocks being in the game. Maybe there was indication at first, but some kind soul scrubbed away all relevant direction at the last minute.
So you see, now, how the absurdity underlying this plainly-stated information as I encountered it on RemyWiki:
Songs are unlocked randomly by playing on select difficulties. Only one song can be unlocked at a time. However, SAKURA, ex. eth., and MOMENT 40 take priority when one of their requirements are met.
Moment 40: Obtain a full Marvelous combo on any song on BEGINNER difficulty.
Ex. Eth.: Obtain a full Marvelous combo on any song on BASIC difficulty.
Sakura: Obtain a full Marvelous combo on any song on DIFFICULT difficulty.
... would compel me to spend too much time writing this post.
Including the censorship. Apparently, neither the word “exotic” nor “ethnic” would fly under the radar. Nor would “PARANOiA MAX ~DIRTY MIX~”, presented in-game as “P.N. MAX”, “PARANOiA” being a series of some of the most iconic songs in all of DDR since its debut. “There 4 You” was also changed to “THERE 4 U”. I choose to believe this wasn't just a stylistic decision, and they took issue with the idea of someone being there for “you”, picking up on some kind of sexual connotation, in a CA DMV sort of way. Thank the lawd Henson that the letter U can step in at a time like this.
One last detail I have to mention is that the topmost mode on the main menu is Magic Mode. It's a battle mode where performing well handicaps your opponent with visual gameplay modifiers, which do things like speed up the arrows, turn the targets invisible, or swap their lanes around. The mechanics of this mode include incessant, repetitive, obnoxious sound effects over the music. You can get a taste of it from the IGN trailer. Truly a special game.
In conclusion DDR Disney Channel Edition is very funny.