Dance Dance Revolution: New Moves - With Dance Mat (PS3)

My wife is fully satisfied with this game. So I can spend few hours in pub when she is dancing :)

I've been playing 'rhythm games' for quite some time, the first being Parappa the Rapper on the PS1. More recently I've played the raft of Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, Rock Band, Disney Sing It! and SingStar games. I've even had the misfortune of playing Rock Revolution and Rise of the SixString. Which brings me to Dance Dance Revolution.

I've never played these dance mat games before. I'd seen teenagers play them in arcades, moving about frantically, and scoring huge points. And I daren't make a fool of myself in public. This is where a console version of the game comes in. Now I can make a complete fool of myself in the comfort of my own home. I'll break down my review into bite-size chunks so you can make your own minds up based on what might matter more to you.

GRAPHICS: 4/5
The graphics of the game are mostly funcctional, but they are very dance-orientated in their design which fits in very well with the game. Lots of bright and sparkly effects, and it looks like a disco - no bad thing for a game of this genre. To be honest, it could have PS1-style graphics and it wouldn't really matter (at least not to me), but it's good that the graphics don't detract from the overall game.

SOUND: 4/5
Obviously for a game that focuses on music (as well as dance), you'd expect the sound quality to be top-notch - and it is. All songs are originals, they are crisp and loud, and the bass seems to be richer than it is in general games, so it seems the developers have boosted the bass, which is a good thing for a game that's about dancing. Rating loses one star for me because the commentator can get irritating very quickly.

MUSIC: 3/5
I rate music separately from sound because they are two distinct things. The sound is excellent, but the choice of music is hard to understand at times. Many of the songs sound nothing like the dance tracks I've heard in the arcades when teenagers were playing it. I know many of the songs, and surprisingly it's the non-commercial (i.e. non-chart) music that's the most 'danceable' in the game. As much as I like Lady Gaga, "Bad Romance" isn't really a dancefloor song to boogie along to.

INTERFACE: 3/5
The interface is a bit clunky, and menus (as well as the game) can take some time to load. It's not as seamless as I expected it to be. It works, but it's not the most intuitive system - not the worst either.

MOVE CONTROLLER: 1/5
Using the Move controller is very annoying. It's used purely to point corners of the TV, but the Move controller seems to de-calibrate too quickly. It also doesn't add to the overall experience, but thankfully it's optional. Having to hold a controller lowers the enjoyment factor, at least for me.

DANCE MAT: 4/5
The dance mat that comes with the game is very responsive. However, I found that it was very easy to not quite stand on the correct arrow, but that might be more to my own spacial awareness issues! I found that activating the power gauge was a bit fiddly, and sometimes it'd take 2 or 3 swipes to make it happen - by which time I'd already missed lots of easy combo points or else broke the combo in despair.

FUN: 5/5
Despite the few gripes I have with the game, it's a lot of fun for someone like me who's playing a dance mat game for the first time. There are plenty of slow songs to break you into the swing of things, and also enough difficult ones to push you to the limit. I played the game with my girlfriend, and we both made fools of ourselves, had some great fun, and probably lost a bit of weight in the process too.

Overall, I think if you pay up to about £30 for the game & dance mat, it's a pretty good investment for some party fun. It's far more fun than DanceStar, SingStar Dance, and the Michael Jackson Experience. The game needs to be fixed a little, mainly because of the strange choice of songs and the clunky interface, but otherwise there are far worse games you could buy in the dance genre (the ones that require a Move controller do a poor job).

I was interested in seeing a DDR game for the PS3, given the huge delay since their last release, but it appears that Konami have produced a product with the specific aim of insulting each and every person who purchases it. Despite the considerable delays between this game's announcement (two years ago, with the tagline "You really wanted it. So we really listened.") and its release, and then further delays between the US release and the release of this version, the game still shipped with none of the promised DLC, and an annoying trophy synch bug that wastes time every single time you want to access your profile or trophy list from your PS3. If Konami really did listen to their fans, they did so to draw up a list of things they were going to specifically not include in this game. Other minor complaints include the absence of doubles mode, the revised DDRX rating system and any of the characters from previous games. Mainly Emi.

Songs are unlocked through club mode, a system which claims to emulate the experience of dancing in a club by playing randomly selected songs back-to-back with randomly added modifiers. This fails for several reasons. The majority of the songs sound nothing like music that would get played in a club, loading times mean the songs have noticeable gaps between them removing the nonstop feel a club DJ is supposed to create, and the game's algorithm for selecting difficulty is patchy at best, and will sometimes make you plot through song after song of beginner and basic difficulty completely ignoring the fact that you're getting 99% Perfects, while on others will ramp all the way up to Expert in a flash and then slap on a couple of unreadable visual effects for good measure. As a dynamic difficulty selection scheme, it definitely needed more playtesting (which raises the question of what Konami were actually doing with this game's two-year development period, since it certainly wasn't generating loads of content or creating innovative mechanics). If you want to unlock harder songs you'll probably be playing this half-arsed mode for about two hours, maybe three. Also new to this version is the Groove Trigger and Chain Arrow concepts. Well, not exactly new since they're obviously just Star Power from the Guitar Hero series with a different name. They're not too bad and Groove Trigger does add a slight element of tactics to the game, so these mechanics are passible. Challenge Mode adds four diagonal arrows to the game, which does make things more interesting, and some effort has been put in to designing new charts with new techniques that use the extra arrows. However the presentation renders the 8-arrow mode almost unplayable. The diagonals share columns with the left and right arrows, which is extremely difficult to read, and the game likes throwing multiple different diagonals in the same column at you. Really they should have just included 8 columns. There's loads of horizontal space on widescreen TVs that this game isn't using.

Then comes the real problem. The songs. Only 20 are initially unlocked, and they're all terrible American licenses. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance is one of the better songs to appear in the first 20, and that's never a good sign, as Bad Romance isn't even one of Lady Gaga's better songs, and Lady Gaga isn't even one of America's better pop artists. A lot of these first songs (which you will be playing a lot whether you like them or not, because Club Mode is the only way of unlocking new songs and Club Mode doesn't let you pick your songs) are totally inappropriate for DDR, with plodding sub-100 tempos and sparse step charts resulting in the main challenge being staving off boredom rather than skill or stamina. A particular offender is Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours", which consists of a weak-voiced American guy singing inane soppy lyrics over an acoustic guitar backing assembled from those first four chords that guitarists learn before they get to playing real music which drags itself through the one minute and thirty seconds (making it feel like about half an hour) of its duration without going anywhere in a fashion that the FBI could very well use to develop torture techniques. I Got You, Dancing In The Street, Animal, Love Like This, Hey Soul Sister, We Are Family and Plastic Beach all also manage to repeat the theme of glacial tempos, uninspired charts and complete lack of any kind of structure. The overall effect produced is something similar to having holes drilled in your feet in slow motion. There are a few good Konami Originals, but nothing pretty exceptional, and nothing that could redeem the gigadeathcrime that is the initial song list and the decision to make players play these terrible songs over and over again.

In conclusion, buying this game is giving money to support the production of similar crimes against humanity in the future. Konami just don't care any more. I'm not even sure if their directors actually believe Europe exists.