Dance Dance Racing

Hit the arrows to drive

Each player has a lane of four arrows: left, down, up and right. Arrows scroll up the lane to the beat of the song, and you press the matching key or step on the matching panel when an arrow reaches the outlines at the bottom. Some arrows are holds, which you keep pressed until the end of the green bar.

Every press is judged by how close it is to the beat: Fantastic within 45 ms, then Excellent, Great, Decent and Way Off, up to 200 ms. Each hit kicks the car forward, and between hits it slows back down to a cruise. A miss only costs you the kick you didn’t get, but three misses in a row send the car into a short spin.

Every 20 hits in a row fire a turbo, which adds 25% to your speed for 2.5 seconds. Driving close behind another car gives you a draft, so your kicks carry you further.

Circuits and songs

The home screen is a world map with a strip of circuit outlines. Each of the 145 circuits is shaped like a country and has its own song in a style picked for that country. Iceland’s is “Glacier Run”, icy electronica at 123 BPM, and Israel’s is “Coastline Pulse”, Mediterranean dance-pop. A race lasts as long as the song, and the number of laps is set from its length.

The songs are original instrumentals made with the ACE-Step music model. Every song has one chart, which was built from the song’s own beats and rhythms, so there is no difficulty to choose.

One to four players

The lobby has four seats. Player 1 uses the arrow keys, and other players join by pressing an arrow on their own keys: W A S D, I J K L, or 4 5 8 6 on the number pad. A gamepad or a USB dance pad joins the same way. Seats nobody takes are filled by computer drivers at three skill levels: Rookie, Pro and Ace. The computer drivers play the same chart under the same rules.

With two or more people, the screen splits so that each player has their own view of their car and their own arrow lane.

Dance pads and timing

Dance pads report their buttons differently from one model to the next. Remap pad on a seat card lets you set each panel and test the controller live, and the mapping is saved for that device. A pad’s Start button starts the race from the lobby.

The settings menu has an audio offset you can change in 5 ms steps, and Calibrate timing, where you tap along to a metronome on the device you will play with.

Before each race there is a warm-up that shows each arrow and waits for you to step on it. In your first races it then drops a few arrows in time with a metronome before the cars roll up to the start line. Enter skips the warm-up.