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Best foot forward.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

It was an unusual dance contest that drew nationally ranked competitors two weeks ago to a rural property in the hills southwest of town. It attracted teenagers and twentysomethings, who came clutching bottles of Gatorade and Mountain Dew.

To be fair, nobody claimed it would be a dance contest in anything other than name. Based on the sound, it seemed to be a competition for who could make the most noise with their feet.

Anyone who's ever seen gamers go sole-to-sole playing the Japanese video game known as Dance Dance Revolution, aka DDR, is familiar with the rat-ta-tat-tat of shoes hitting metallic foot pads. If you've spent any significant amount of time in front of the blinking pink lights of a DDR machine, you may never get that sound out of your head.

But there was more than just a whole lot of racket taking place. Although it looked nothing like dancing, there really was some finesse in the way the top players followed the patterns of blinking lights and arrows, taping their feet on footpads to the rhythm of the music.

The contest featured...

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