Dance With Intensity is a Dance Dance Revolution simulator for Windows-based PCs. It allows the player to run through any of the songs provided with the famous Konami game(s), as well as user-provided songs, using MP3 files and step-files (with the extension .dwi).

It first emerged onto the Internet on December 14, 2000 in version 1.0, and has since then progressed all the way up to its current incarnation (version 2.40.00). It currently uses DirectX 8 and has a totally skinable interface. It also allows the user to display song-specific backgrounds (in handy-dandy png format), animations (.avi) and custom announcer files.

Amongst its features are such diverse elements as:
(taken from the official website)

  • Freeze Arrows
  • Downwards-scrolling arrows
  • BPM changes and pauses
  • 6-panel solo mode
  • Multiple folders (for separating songs)
  • High Score Records
  • Background animations
  • The Most Annoying In-Game Announcer Since DDR itself

    One of the more intesting, and useful, elements of the program is built-in support for dancemat controllers, either directly plugged in to the PC or through a PSX-PC adapter.

    It can be downloaded for the extortionate price of nothing from http://dwi.ddrei.com.

  • Dance With Intensity has updated once since the above writeup, to 2.50.00. That update was in August of 2003 and no visible activity has been seen since. SimWolf, the programmer who designed DWI, says on the website (dwi.ddrei.com is one of many mirrors, and is now dead along with the rest of DDR East Invasion; try dwi.ddruk instead) that DWI3 will be coming When It's Done(TM) (my words, not his), but for the meantime DWI works the same as it has for the past two years.

    Not that that's a bad thing. DWI was a conceptual springboard for the (grossly more robust) simulator known as StepMania, and the code format DWI uses for a song's basic information (title, artist, speed, other minutiae and oh yeah STEPS) is still considered the standard, to the degree that (a) nearly all other simulators, including StepMania, still read it and (b) DDR:UK, a website that provides access to adaptations for nearly every DDR song in existence, still has yet to change from a solely DWI-based format. Plus, DWI tends to run easier and less intensely, so players on older computers tend to only be able to use DWI.

    However, numerous features of StepMania have made it the more popular dance game simulator, including more gameplay modifiers, an easier system for modifying the interface (DWI "skin" or SM "theme"), and numerous gameplay features that eventually became part of In the Groove, SM's sister project, have made StepMania arguably the most popular program of the two.

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