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After going on vacation six months ago, a friend and I agreed to exercise together once a week. Our preferred method is a mutual passion: dance games. As such, he and I have been playing StepManiaX (SMX) at an arcade in the region.
In my college days I spent a lot of time playing Pump It Up (PIU), eventually buying a cabinet of my own. My interest waned as I began to work full-time and had less free time, and even though I held onto my cabinet, I played quite infrequently. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, I started to play again as a form of exercise, but I never took it as seriously as I did in the mind-2010s.
Now the PIU machine is set up in my basement, but I still dawdle when it comes to playing it. Wires and bolts are piled on the player-1 side of the pads, and I haven't even bother to set all the levelers yet. I occasionally boot it up and play some songs for half an hour or so, but the machine deserves more attention than I give it.
The problem is that I've become enamored with SMX. Both games have five pads per side, but SMX arranges them in a plus-sign pattern (similar to DanceDance Revolution), while PIU arranges them in an X pattern. I thoroughly enjoy the structure of the charts in SMX, much more than in PIU, and my friend and I play lots of cooperative Teams charts together, which I almost never get to do in PIU.
During our exercise sessions, I can play SMX for 90 minutes or more without breaks at a fairly high level of difficulty. A few nights ago I powered on my PIU cabinet to play some moderately-difficult charts, and I found myself getting utterly exhausted and sore after only 15 minutes. The reason, I soon discovered, was that PIU often requires 90-degree twists of the body to perform crossovers, while SMX usually only requires 45-degree twists. This activated my core much more than I'm now used to, and I have a weak core, which tired me out fast.
A different friend of mine is an absolute PIU fiend, and he excels at very high-level charts. We plan to start visiting him soon and reintroduce ourselves to the game. It may help me not to stall out in my weight loss once again.
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[Last updated: 2024-05-16]