So, there's this stupid arcade game you may have heard of, 'Dance Dance Revolution', which is all about leveraging the power of interpretative dance in order to overthrow the fascist regime in which the game is set and bring about world peace. You do this by viewing a series of arrows on the screen that describe a dance and interpreting them as instructions to stomp on agents of the police state, who are for some bizarre reason positioning themselves in a 45-degree-rotated square beneath your feet. There's a rail at the back of the machine, so I imagine that your in-game avatar is holding himself secretly under a bridge where the jackbooted enforcers are marching. Upbeat and uplifting music is played throughout in order to inspire you to greater and greater feats of treason in the name of life, liberty and the raver way.
Anyway, that's less than relevant, you know the game, right? Everyone knows the game. There's a home version, freely available, which runs on your Mac, Windows or Linux PC (and possibly some others, I forget) called StepMania. It does away with the political angle and goes for straight-up exercise, which is better than nothing, I suppose. Unfortunately, being a freely-downloadable fan project, and not a massively lucrative aracade franschise, you are seriously limited in the available music and tracks available. Most of the ones you can download from the Stepmania site are, frankly, really bad. The sequences are fine, but the music! Oh, the music... Radio 1 fare, the lot of it.
So, the obvious conclusion is to spend an afternoon timing and sequencing a steps file for one of my favourite pieces of guitar metal. One of my favourite pieces of guitar metal, as it goes, is the track J E N O V A from the first Black Mages album. You can buy the first Black Mages album here, although there are probably far cheaper places to get it. If nothing else, that's the Japanese import and Amazon will probably take six weeks to tell you that they can't actually get it for you anyway, but it'll probably be reprinted again sometime. Or you could pick a copy up on eBay. Anyway, you'll need one if you want to use the Jenova stepfile because it doesn't have the music in it, so you'll need to rip it from the CD to MP3 yourself, title it "07.J-E-N-O-V-A.mp3" and drop it in the directory titled same after unzipping that zip into your Stepmania 'Songs' directory.
[Edit: Updated stepfile and more now here]
There are still a few tweaks that need to be made, but it's largely playable. It's got a one-foot rating, largely because the built-in editor really sucks at dealing with ratings, but after discussion with Fice a temporary rating, pending certification, of "about somewhere between five and six steps" was assigned. Fice states that the track is 'evil', by which he mostly seems to mean "completely unlike most Stepmania tracks". Part of this was done on purpose. The irritating part. You're welcome.
I'm quite interested in feedback, if anyone picks that up and tries it - I'll probably spend some time on the other tracks from that album, or the second one, so anything I can learn that I didn't directly learn would be useful.