Hey everybody I'm back once again, it's been 2 years since the original Dance Dance Revolution Pad roundup. Back in 2002 the market was brewing with new concepts to make gameplay better for the home user. Since then, numerous innovations have been made and pads have gotten improved constantly since the days of the original Ultra DX and the Ignition. While we don't have the ultra high end models on hand such as the Beat Gear metal platform, we did manage to gather up 8 of the leading pads on the market at this point in time. This year it was a mass invitation roundup so that many of the sites claiming to be the best could bring out their products and show everyone what they were made of.

Invitations were sent out to quite a few companies but in the end BuyNShop, Redoctane and Levelsix were the only ones to answer the call, Playasia suffered from stock issues which kept them out of the roundup this time around and Lik-sang, DDRNation, Madcatz, Konami and Mymybox failed to answer the call with any products.

The roundup for 2004 includes the following pads:

BNS Ultra NX
BNS Ultra DX X-Treme
Redoctane Ignition 2.0
LevelSix Deluxe Dance Pad 2.1 PS Edition
LevelSix Deluxe Dance Pad 3.1 PS Edition
LevelSix Deluxe Dance Pad 3.1 XBOX Edition
Nonslip DDR Dance Pad XBOX Edition
Nonslip DDR Dance Pad PS Edition

For testing we busted out the following adapters:

BNS USB Dual PSX converter (Use Start + Select + Up for DDR Compatibility)
Boom USB Single PSX converter (Using Inland 4 Port USB Hub to work in WinXP w/ USB 2.0)
Gemini PS - XBOX/NGC converter

Games/Programs used:

PS2 DDR Extreme (Import)
PS2 DDRMAX2 (Import)
PS2 DDRMAX (Import)
PSX DDR 5th Mix (Import)
PSX DDR 4th Mix (Import)
PSX DDR 3rd Mix (Import)
XBOX DDR Ultramix (courtesy of Redoctane.com) (NTSC-U)
PC Edition of Dance Dance Revolution
Stepmania (PC DDR Simulator)