Critical

That's right. I'm posting this from my hotel room in Las Vegas right now. It's been a busy few days. (AARGH! I hate this laptop keyboard. For no good reason, it keeps moving the text cursor to odd places.) I eventually managed to find a decent DDR machine (There's almost as many arcades as there are casinos, and all of them for some reason have DDR USA. The only place with a proper selection of Bemani is the Adventuredome at Circus Circus (or, if you read the sign horizontally instead of vertically, "Cicricrucsus". Which reminds me that I really want to get a cameraphone - yes, I know they're lousy cameras, but I don't want to showcase my nonexistent 1337 photography skillz, I just would sometimes like to spare myself the effort of writing a thousand words to describe something.) In any case, I passed a couple more new songs (none 8-footers, unfortunately) but don't have the notecard I recorded them on at the moment. I think I just figured out what this laptop's problem is - it has a touchpad, and my thumb may be tapping it. I seem to recall that some newer laptops have a button that lets you toggle the touchpad on and off. But I still haven't gotten to the main reason I wanted to write this, which is the Blue Man Group. We saw their live show at Luxor, and it was easily the coolest thing I've been to all year. Sorry about the stream-of-consciousness nature of this posting, but look at the timestamp - I really should be in bed right now. Speaking of recording DDR accomplishments, a company called Roxor Games (which has also apparently commercialized Tux Racer, which I coincidentally played at one of the arcades I looked for a good DDR machine at) is working on a dance game (a "transgrade" for DDR machines) called In The Groove. Which apparently continues their trend of turning Free games into arcade games, as it's based on Stepmania. Anyway, it appears to have all sorts of cool features, such as being able to use any USB mass storage device as a "memory card" which can save personal high scores and accomplishments as well as screenshots of score screens, digitally signed by the machine to enable online ranking systems and bragging. There's also, from what I've heard over 50 modifiers, all of which can be combined (although some combinations are redundant, such as Hidden and Stealth). Add to that some rather intimidating new play factors (mines and more than two simultaneous arrows) and you've got a pretty cool game. I plan on making a trip to the test machine in Seattle sometime soon.