Yeah... I've only played DDR a year and I can honestly say I'm already bored with the same old songs. It's got to the stage where I'll at least A anything that's a 9 or under first go, if not AA it. I'm going for my first AAA on Heavy but in all honesty it's just too frustrating, though I am sure it'll happen if I keep trying A on Heavy. It's annoying when you get that one great...
They have released new-ish arcade mixes over here, but Dancing Stage Fusion really is a pile of tripe. I just don't like the interface and they lopped off so many good songs also. I usually play on a Euromix2 or DSF and I feel it's a shame that there are no Extreme mixes about this area. I originally started playing on a 6th mix with memory card slots though (Flash in the Night = Awesome), and many people would consider me very lucky for doing so, since those machines in Britain to my knowledge are far less common than Extremes. When I was in America I even got the stunned response of "6th mix? WHERE?!" when I was asked what version I usually play on after I went insane over an Extreme machine I saw. Nearly every machine I saw in America was an Extreme... Since my favourite song, A, was Extreme exclusive at the time (it isn't anymore, it's on DSF too), you can imagine how happy I was to finally play it!
Most of the mixes round here either lack ten foot songs completely or have really bad ten footers (and only that one ten footer on that machine too). As a result I moved to ITG, which is about 50 miles away but easy to get to. I wouldn't necessarily say the songs by sound are better (anything by Inspector K rules though), but the songs to play are so much better. It really was like a new lease of life in dancegames, and I haven't even been playing that long compared to some. There's also more opportunity to start to freestyle due to the more responsive pads and forced threes and fours, which is what I've started doing now that there are only two tens I can play on DDR (Max300 and Paranoia Survivor).
To my knowledge there's only one ITG2 anywhere near me in Britain, and it's in London. I get the feeling we're going to be very slow getting anything over here and especially in the southwest where I am, though compared to us with DDR Extremes we did get that ITG2 pretty quickly. Sadly I am 200 miles from London and rely on public transport to get about, so as you can imagine I don't go very often! The simple fact is we lack players in this part of the country, and as a result I doubt we'll get much here. Looks like I'm going to be going to London if I want to play on an ITG2!
Still... Whatever happens, at least there are still machines round here, and even if there are mixes I prefer, at least I can still play without having to go too far. Can't complain about that.