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A lot of Playstation 3 owners have been waiting a long time for Dance Dance Revolution to make it to the PS3. Four long years later, it's finally arrived. Was it worth the wait?
The first thing I noticed when I opened my DDR box was a brand new, sleek black dance pad. it definitely looks a lot "cooler" than the old white dance pads on the Wii and the PS3. The pad pretty much works the same as always--just plug it into an available USB port and you're all set.
The options on DDR should be familiar to anyone who's played it on the PS2 or the Wii.
1) In "Free Dance" mode where you can just dive into dancing. You select the number of players (single player or multiplayer) and then you can choose any song at one of four difficulty levels (beginner, basic, difficult, expert).
2) "Club Mode" is where you basically have to proceed thorugh different levels of difficulty to win the game. unfortunately, the developers decided to put in things which seem more like gimmicks than anything else. There are features like "TRICKS" which will suddenly change the difficulty level in the middle of a song. As you finish songs in other "clubs", you can move them to your own "club". Honestly, this section was much more confusing than it should have been, and the confusing and poorly written explanation of "How to Play" at the beginning only made things worse. Konami should have stuck with keeping this simple.
3) "Dance Off" mode is where up to four players can take turns dancing. There's something called a "combo roulette" which does things like speed up the dancing, shift the top arrows around, make the arrows bigger. But what it ends up doing is make the competition confusing and frustrating. Seems like another situation where they tried to innovate, but ended up just causing confusion.
4) There's been a lot of talk about how the new Dance Dance Revolution makes use of the Playstation Move controller. Turns out there's only one menu option in which you can use them: "Move & Step", which is basically "Free Play Mode" that uses the Move Controllers. So you can't use the Move Controllers in Club Mode or Dance Off Mode.
To start, you need to adjust your position so that you and your mat are in the middle of the screen--and you need to stay in that position throughout the song. I thought that maybe like Just Dance, the game might at least featured some hand movements that looked like real dancing. But that wasn't the case. Instead, there are four new kinds of arrows (pointing diagonally to each of the four corners of the screen) added to the mix. To get points, you need to swipe your hand to that corner when you see the arrow. The controls are precise, of course, and you do see a visual "swoosh" when you move your hands in the right direction.
For some inexplicable reason, when using Playstation Move controllers, not only does XMB navigation not work, the "X" button on the Move controllers doesn't even work. So you're in an awkward position where you're holding two Move controllers, but when you need to select a menu option or even just move to the next screen, you need to drop the Move controllers, pick up your Dualshock controller, make your selection, and then pick up the controllers again. It's a rather sloppy piece of programming on Konami's part.
5) The remaining modes are "How to Play" (for anyone who doesn't know how to play DDR yet), "Training Mode" (which lets you break down any song at any difficulty to practice it--again, no Move support), "Music Store" (which lets you access DLC), "Workout Profile" (which tells you the number of calories burned), "Records" (which displays the high scores for each song on your system for Free Play Move and Move & Step), "Video Manager" (which lets you export videos to YouTube and Facebook) and "Options" (which lets you
The graphics are much better quality than on the Wii or the PS2, of course. When you select the songs you see a high-resolution image of the song's album cover. For the most part, the graphics are crisp and the colors bright. During the dance numbers, you'll see a video of yourself, taken with the Playstation Eye, in the background (sometimes clear, sometimes stylized with a solid color). I first found this a pretty cool feature, but sometimes the stylized images were so garing and distracting I just had to turn the camera off.
The playlist, as usual, is a combination of licensed tracks and Konami's in-house music composers.
According to You (Orianthi)
Animal (Ke$ha)
Bad Romance (Lady Gaga)
Battlefield (Jordin Sparks)
Celebration (Kool and the Gang)
crushcrushcrush (Paramore)
Dancing in the Street (Martha and the Vandellas)
Hey, Soul Sister (Train)
I Got You (Leona Lewis)
I'm Yours (Jason Mraz)
Love Like This (Natasha Bedingfield)
Love Shack (The B-52s)
Mission (Everything But the Girl)
My Life Would Suck Without You (Kelly Clarkson)
Need You Now (Lady Antebellum)
Plastic Beach (Gorillaz feat. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon)
Rio (Duran Duran)
So Fine (Sean Paul)
Venus (Bananarama)
We Are Family (Sister Sledge)
dreaming can make a wish come true (jim and NRG Factory feat. Anna Kaelin)
In the Zone (UI, NPD3 style) and KIDD KAZMEO
Let's Get Away (NAOKI fear. Brenda Burch)
MAGIC PARADE (Lea Drop feat. Katie Dellenbach)
One Sided Love (D-crew with Melissa Petty)
Private Eye (atomsoak ft. cerol)
Rescue Me (NAOKI feat. fracus)
Rhythms Inside (DKC Crew)
The Island Song (TAG feat. Eric Anthony)
TIME (NM feat. Aleisha G)
As another reviewer mentioned, there are a number of aggravating annoyances. You can't pause when you're in the middle of a song. No buttons will work, and even if you hit the PS button, the song will keep on going. So if you get a phone call in the middle of a song, you just have to let it play all the way through.
You have the ability to capture your performance in Free Play Mode, Dance Off and Move & Step on video. I can see the usefulness of recording songs with a dance game like Singstar Dance where you're dancing to "real moves". But here, you're just hopping up and down and waving your arms randomly. Something tells me that this isn't the sort of thing most people will be sharing on their Facebook page.
In all honesty, I think this summarizes DDR's main weakness. DDR was the king of the hill of motion gaming since it first launched as an arcade game in 1998. But the world has moved on. Now that you can dance "real dance moves", stepping on arrows seems a bit passé.
Don't get me wrong, die-hard DDR fans will love this new game, the improved graphics, and the new music tracks. It's still one of the better workouts you can get, especially when you practice over and over again to nail a difficult song. And of course, no other game can match it in terms of precision.
But everyone else will probably find more satisfaction in newer games like Singstar Dance for the PS3, Just Dance 2 for the Wii, and Kinect Dance for the Xbox where they can not just pattern match but actually learn real dance steps. In that regard, DDR seems almost antiquated.
overall, I'll give it a rating of "It's OK". Even if you can get over the annoyances, there's really nothing very noteworthy nor innovative about it. It's basically the same as it was in 1998--the "improvements" the developers tried to make (including use of the Move controllers) seem for the most part forced and contrived, as if they knew they had to be innovative, but knew that there's just not that much more that can be done to stretch a 12-year old platform.
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My wife and I used to absolutely love DDR. We would play for hours on end into the night. I had high hopes, and was excited to pick this up on the day it came out.Pros:
DDR is finally in HD, lots of nice eye Candy
Downloadable Content, if it would work that is.
Cons:
Surprise! Paper pads suck, and there are no decent alternatives.
A lot of the songs really aren't "dance" tracks, and only one or two techno songs similar to what made DDR fun in the first place.
For starters, the PS Store errors out when you try to open up the section to buy new songs, but maybe I have to wait until the next PSN Update.
Second, the paper pad really, really blows, but this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anybody who's played DDR before. So far I haven't seen anybody interested in making better ones, either. I did have my trusty Red Octane $100 pads stored away in the closet, plugged them in, and low and behold, they worked...sorta. The left and down arrows work, but up and right are swapped when you press them :'( I figured they wouldn't have worked, but I can dream...right?
The song selection is kinda meh. Seemed like they were more interested in getting 'popular' music than music you should be dancing to. Jason Mraz? Really? I'm dancing to Jason Mraz??? Give me back my Afronova and Captain Jack! To add to that, I haven't figured out yet how to, or if you can unlock songs, or if buying them is the only way.
Overall, a disappointment, but I'll hang on to it a while hoping for some decent replacement pads and at least some good DLC.
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I was hesitant with purchasing this game at first. I was hoping to find one of the original DDRs that were sold for the PS2 but for the PS3 because my PS3 isn't backwards compatible. The sample songs listed above seemed to be cheesy and did not incorporate the J-pop songs from BeForU and Naoki that I have grown to love over the years. However, I recently found out by going into the PS store that it's possible to download songs from the original games! The song packs are $5/each. So it's definitely worth it! From what I've seen, all of the discs are there. I'm springing $20 for the two supernovas and the two DDR extremes. :D AT LAST! A SINGLE GAME THAT CAN HAVE ALL THE SONGS WE LOVE!!!Read Best Reviews of DanceDanceRevolution Bundle Here
DDR3 regular mode is ok once you get some songs unlocked. DDR Club mode is horrible. Someone should get fired for this feature. Why does club mob suck so bad? It has a sucky selection of songs. It alway plays SLOW, no BEAT songs in beginner mode, it is very difficult to get it to leave beginner level but one mistake it sends you right back to it. Probably the worst is that club mode could be really good excersize if the programming didnt suck and I didnt have to hear HEY SOUL SISTER, Im Yours by Jason Mraz or Need you Now by Lady Antebellum over and over again. What are those songs doing in club mode anyways? If those songs were played in a club the DJ would be kicked out on the street.Sigh... what a disappointment.
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Being a DDR fan since the early PS2 era, I was excited to hear about DDR finally making a jump to the PS3, since both Nintendo and Microsoft got to enjoy 3 installments of Hottest Party and Universe respectively before Sony could get their DDR fix.First off, I'm not gonna lie; the game is great. Its well worth the $40 bundle especially since most game retail at $60 with no additional accessories. Yes, the soundtrack has lost its lust over time and instead of putting in an amazing techno soundtrack like the early era, it is now full of the top 40 hits you hear on the radio. Not bad for mainstream fans, but older fans will be disappointed.
Fortunately, us core DDR fans are gifted with downloadable content with past DDR games which range from DDR/Konamix to SuperNOVA. Sadly there is no Extreme 2 track pack, which happens to be my favorite in the series. After downloading the track packs, I am now enjoying the game much more.
The Club mode isn't as bad as I expected. Granted playing the same 10 songs over and over and over and over again on beginner gets boring fast but once you start unlocking songs about an hour or two in, its not so bad.
The dance pad that came with the bundle is better built than my old PS2 pads. They don't slip as much, but they do move when I play fast paced songs on Expert so after every song, I have to readjust the pad. Nothing major though. I would love to see some PS3 metal pads though.
Honestly, my only real complaint other than half the soundtrack being lackluster is the lack of downloadable songs. I thought Konami promised a massive back catalog of old songs. I would easily drop another $40-50 on songs if I could download past favorites. Imagine having the arcade experience of 300+ amazing songs on one home console. *sigh* One can only dream...
My final word: Its worth the $40 I spent. I wouldn't pay more for it though.
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