Buyer Beware

So I stepped up to the foam HVG2 "Professional" Dance Pad.  Since I hadn't played in a while, it took me a couple weeks to realize that the right arrow just plain sucked - it wouldn't catch signals half the time, and send spurious signals the other half.  I'd take it back, but I already threw out the box and lost the receipt.

Comments

[Badman]

Yeah, I recently bought a cheapo second pad. It turned out to be made of vinyl, which sticks to my feet. Surely there has got to be some happy medium between $30 cheapo pads and $250 metal pads.

[Chris Weiss]

I'm no DDR supahfreak, but I've been reasonably happy with the Red Octane pad. It's textured vinyl, which shouldn't get too sticky. I hadn't thought of the "right arrow contact is broken" excuse though - that's awesome. I think I'm going with "the ground in the cable is shorted - all of the arrows only work half the time" justification for my scores...

[Jamie Fristrom]

Hi Chris! Long time no see. I tried commenting on your blog but it seems all broke.

[Hamumu]

I have a cheapo vinyl, and an expensive vinyl (and a bonus cheapo - they shipped it to me on accident when I ordered the good one, and let me keep it when sending the good one to me, hooray!), none of that fancy foam core stuff though. These are the things I have learned, and can now share with you:

1 - I also have a protective plastic mat that goes over the pad. Does wonders for the foot sticking issue, though sometimes it comes loose from the pad a little. The trick to any DDR surface (outside of actual arcade wood/metal) is socks. You may think they're too slippery, but try it, they're really not. Barefoot is just too sticky for precision footwork! Much much less so on the plastic, but stilla little sometimes.

2 - Really fun and really damaging: playing Decathlon on the Activision Anthology, using the dance dance pad. It will MURDER you trying to do the running, and the long jump is really fun, because you have to run and then jump up onto the X button (tricky though because you have to avoid hitting Select and Start - I reset it a few times). Anyway, it's not the damage it does to you which I am complaining about, though. That's just plain great exercise. What happened was we destroyed the pad. Turns out rapid fire heavy stomping is hard on it.

[Badman]

I live in Texas. Socks are too hot. My first pad had a cloth cover, which was perfect...it also had a foam interior, which eventually got divots in it from so much use that it actually interfered with registering the arrows, so I took it out.

Then it ripped. Now I'm stuck with sucky sticky vinyl. Maybe if I rub it down with some alcohol or something...surely I can google this.

[Hamumu]

You need the plastic mat. I stopped using socks long ago actually (it does get sweaty!), and the plastic mat works rather well for not sticking. Not perfect, though. Look at one of those dance dance gear sites.

[Jeremy Statz]

I've got a foam pad with plugs for both a PS2 and X-Box, and have used it for months without issue on Max1, Max2, and Extreme... until I picked up Ultramix for the X-Box. For some reason when plugged into the X-Box it refuses to register the right arrow if any other arrows are being pressed at the same time, which for all practical purposes makes it totally useless with that system. Bah.

[Jamie Fristrom]

That's funny. My problems were with the xbox and ultramix too. Maybe it's the xbox that's the problem...

[madsax]

The foam-core pads are awesome. I have a pair of them from RedOctane, used them on the PS2 versions. My perfects went up significantly... a lot of the cheaper pads have the issue of not being able to push more than two buttons at once. So if you accidentally push left and down together, or left and x (whatever is in the bottom left corner), your right foot won't work at all. The best pads out there will both do more than two buttons at once, and also remove buttons from down-left and down-right so that you don't accidentally whack them.
Fun stuff :)

[Noel Llopis]

Give this a try: http://www.ddrfreak.com/library/faqs-modding.php I did it with my cheap DDR pads and it works great! (just when you thought that DDR couldn't get any geekier...)

[Bizzy]

I have the Hvg2 Dance 2888 pad -- actually, I have 2 of them, one of them has ripped. There is a 90-day warranty, but absolutely no information on how to contact Hvg2. Does anyone know how to contact Hvg2?

[ANonymous]

Somewhat related: I bought HVG2 VGA A/V Cable for my Xbox 360 recently. It crapped out on me in less than a week. Thank god I'm too lazy to throw away receipts. Stay away from HVG2 products.

[Snowbird]

Does Hvg2 exist as a company? I cannot find their website or any contact info? Thanks for any help in finding them...

[Snowbird]

Does Hvg2 exist as a company? I cannot find their website or any contact info? Thanks for any help in finding them...

[Snowbird]

Does Hvg2 exist as a company? I cannot find their website or any contact info? Thanks for any help in finding them...

[Snowbird]

Does Hvg2 exist as a company? I cannot find their website or any contact info? Thanks for any help in finding them...

[Jigsaw]

Did anyone reply to Snowbird about her question if Hvg2 exist as a company? Just bought the Wii Fit Battery Pack. The instructions are in such bad English that some of it does not make sense. Some of it contradicts other instructions. Seems like a liabilty case waiting to happen. I'd like to contact the company.