Plum

The only if, but, or ackshually, is if you REALLY like anime OSTs and Touhou. That's fair, I like playing Marisa Stole The Precious Thing too.

But otherwise SMX does a very good job of bridging the gaps between old eurodance era DDR, ITG, and songs people under the age of 30 might recognize. It gets regular updates with new songs, like basically once a month for the past few years now. The pads, in theory, handle long term use with less maintenance than traditional DDR pads^{[Citation Needed]}, which by the way are still using the same design as they did in 1998. The extra center button is super easy to pick up, the UI is miles better in every way, it doesn't fall to pieces without an online connection or require any of the network related garbo that DDR does.

It's just straight up better. And since most people haven't caught on to that yet, the lines at cons tend to be a lot shorter too!

I have videos of us playing together, also their suit is amazing and I wanna know who made it. I have never so strongly wanted a fullsuit than I did watching them and pretty jealous of their energy while playing too

Their online handle is XxFOREVERFAITHxX which will bring up a few sites, including a youtube channel that I suspect will have a very well made video going up in the coming weeks. They also run https://www.blackcheetahstudios.com/ as well.

Unfortunately none of their non-business contacts are on sites I use, so I'll just have to send an email. Good news is, I already know who made the suit!

I have videos of us playing together, also their suit is amazing and I wanna know who made it. I have never so strongly wanted a fullsuit than I did watching them and pretty jealous of their energy while playing too

I do not think this is a hot take either, if you've put any real amount of time into both I think this is the only conclusion you can come to. I'm not really a longposter so I'm just going to bullet point my way through here real quick.

• The user interface is just better. Even works with paws on. I like buttons too, but the average punter can operate a touch screen while plastered. Probably. If you know what you're after, it's way faster, and it's otherwise more responsive, intuitive (and I hate that word), and just overall better.

• Sound is better too. This is a very low bar to clear, sound on modern DDR cabs isn't great, but it is cleared easily.

• If you like old DDR, it's got more good old DDR songs than new DDR does. The shit people were bangin' out back in the day. Obviously there's no Konami licensed songs, but there's plenty of other stuff. Good stuff, just no anime music.

• Pads are good. My experience is limited but I'm willing to bet a big five dollars that SMX pads will continue to feel good when given the Dave & Busters treatment for years than a DDR pad will. Plenty of DDR pads out there feel god awful because they're not carefully maintained.

• Timing is better. Timing on modern arcade DDR sucks ass and I will not accept any arguments otherwise. You can make it work fine at home but on Actual Arcade Cabinets it's crap, has been since they swapped to PC hardware in X. High level players go to a lot of trouble to replicate the actually bad, but official timing of arcade cabinets and I think that's dumb.

• You want a cab? You can buy one, directly from Step Revolution. They have multiple types of cabs even. Or you can just buy the stages and a monitor with the software running on it. It's not cheap, no, but compared to buying any DDR cab that was supposed to have an LCD in it, it sure is. And you can just go throw that on network, no fuckery.

• You an op? You can run the cab properly, on network, without paying a cut to Step Revolution or dealing with weird private network fuckery. And the pads work better so you have less insufferable tank top wearing sweaty nerds asking about the sensors.

• The company that sells the game does, probably, give a fuck about the people actually playing the game. I'm sure some of the devs at Konami care, but do you think Konami cares at all about the end user experience past it being enough to get mroe credits? Hell no. SR seems to actually want to make a game worth playing, both for old sticks in the mud such as yours truly as well as the typical drunk punter wanting to give it a go.

I still get if people want to play DDR, because it's DDR, that's fine. But it's not the better game, not by a long shot. And I think it's worth going out of one's way to play SMX instead, if you really care about such things.