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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program
In this video, I go over the following items:
Dance Now: You can dance by yourself, do a dance battle, or complete a song with a dance partner.
Party: Up to 20 players have a dance-off to see who can get the highest score.
Dance Studio: You can create a solo or 2-player dance, take a class to learn dance routines, or try the workout programs.
Get More Songs: The PlayStation Network will be offering downloadable songs.
Galleries: You can view saved photos and videos here.
Options: Allows you to link to Twitter and Facebook, and allows you to turn singing mode on or off.
I also go over a few of the drawbacks, and then I show you how much fun this game is to play.
I've uploaded a few screenshots in the "Customer Images" section as well.
Enjoy!
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Back in 2009, Ubisoft's "Just Dance" for the Wii introduced the concept of dance games using "real dance moves". It and its sequels were a huge success, selling over 10 million copies and counting. The game appealed to people on many levels. Individuals could play it to learn real dance moves and get a great workout. Families and friends could play it together and have fun with the choreographed routines. A year later in 2010, Microsoft introduced "Dance Central" for the Xbox. It brought to the table accurate full-body motion tracking of the Kinect and sold 2.5 million copies.In all this time the Playstation has been somewhat left out in the cold. Singstar Dance was an early attempt to cash in on the "real dance move" craze, but at the end of the day it was a karaoke title with dancing spliced in as an afterthought. "Everybody Dance" is Sony Computer Entertainment's long-overdue dive into the genre. And it's a pretty good one.
As the game starts you need to set up the Move controller by pointing it at the screen. As with Just Dance, only one controller per player is used which you hold in your right hand. The system supports a maximum of two players.
There are a couple menu options:
Dance Now: Here, you can dive right into one of the 40 songs that the game comes with by selecting an album cover using your Move controller. Each song has an "energy level" indicator from 1 to 3. Since the Amazon listing doesn't have the song list as of the time of this writing, I'll list them here. They are:
Amerie 1 Thing (2)
Barry White You're the First, The Last, My Everything (1)
Basement Jaxx Where's Your Head At (3)
Billy Idol with Generation Dancing with Myself (3)
Bodyrockers I Like The Way (2)
Carl Douglas Kung Fu Fighting (1)
CeCe Peniston Finally (1)
The Chemical Brothers Hey Boy Hey Girl (2)
Chromeo Night By Night (2)
Dam-Funk Hood Pass Intact (1)
Deadmau5 Ghosts 'N' Stuff feat. Bob Swire (2)
Diana Ross Upside Down (2)
Duck Sauce Barbara Streisand (2)
Elle Goulding Starry Eyed (1)
Elton John I'm Still Standing (3)
Fatboy Slim Praise You (2)
Groove Armada Superstylin' (2)
Ida Corr Vs Fedde Le Grand Let Me Think About It (1)
Jay Sean featuring Lil Wayne Down (1)
Kool and the Gang Get Down On It (1)
Lady GaGa Born This Way (3)
LMFAO Party Rock Anthem (2)
M/A/R/R/S Pump Up the Volume (3)
Miami Sound Machine Dr Beat (3)
New Kids on the Block You Got It (The Right Stuff 2)
Nicole Scherzinger Don't Hold Your Breath (1)
Ok Go Here It Goes Again (3)
OutKast The Way You Move (1)
Puretone Addicted to Bass (2)
Raphael Saadiq Radio (2)
Republica Ready to Go (3)
Rihanna Rude Boy (1)
R. Kelly Step In The Name Of Love (1)
SNAP! The Power (3)
Sublime Santeria (1)
Tiesto v Diplo feat Busta Rhymes C'mon (Catch 'Em By Surprise 3)
Tinie Tempah Pass Out (1)
Usher featuring Pitbull DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love (2)
Usher featuring will.i.am OMG (1)
Willow Whip My Hair (2)
Overall, I'd say the artist selection is "hipper" than Just Dance or Dance Central, the kind of set list you might see from a DJ in a club. This may be an advantage or a drawback depending on your musical tastes.
Once you select a song, you can choose one of three levels: Beginner, Intermediate, and Professional. Beginner and Intermediate are about the difficulty of a typical song in Just Dance, with basic dance moves. Professional, on the other hand, adds things like complex movements, spins, jumps, and more expert-caliber choreography. Master any song at the Professional level, and you'll surely wow them at your next wedding or party.
Finally, you can select a length of the song. "Normal" songs range around 3-5 minutes, while "Short" versions last about 1-2 minutes.
Game play itself is fairly simple. As with all the other dance games, your goal is to match the on-screen dancer by mirroring his or her moves. While Just Dance has a silhouette to follow and Dance Central uses a hipster doofus cartoon character, Everybody Dance displays a real video image of a human dancer in a gray color. I personally prefer this, as it's easier to pinpoint the precise moves to follow. It's a nice touch that the video image looks like the artist, and the choreography does a great job of capturing the artist's style; in many cases, the moves mimic the same ones the artists perform in their video.
The more accurate your moves are, the more points you'll rack up and you'll be awarded one to five stars at the end. You'll also be rewarded for "streaks" of contiguous successful moves. As with Just Dance, if you stand still and just wave your arms in the right way, you'll be able to rack up points. But of course, the fun in this game isn't in collecting points, it's in performing the real dance moves.
As much as the game is derivative of previous dance games, there are a couple features in Everybody Dance that are truly innovative. While you're playing the game, you can watch the original artist's video playing in the background. Press the "triangle" button and it switches to a live video image of you. You'll even see a "trail of light" that shows your Move controller's motion. This feature is extremely useful when you're learning the dance moves, as you can precisely compare your body position and moves to the on-screen character's.
Once the dance is over, you'll see your point total, number of stars, and longest streak. You'll also be able to view a 30 second video clip of your performance, as well as 10 snapshots that were taken during the performance of you in various poses. You have the option of saving them to the PS3 hard drive or posting them to Facebook or Twitter (and to the PS3 Community).
By default, you dance in solo mode until a second player turns on their Move Controller. Once that's done, the menu changes to "Battle Mode", where you can compete against each other in any of the songs in Beginner, Intermediate, and Professional levels. Alternatively, you can also select "Dance Partners", where each player gets his or her own unique choreographed moves in a single dance routine. Bear in mind that for two players, you need at least 8-10 feet of space in front of the Playstation Eye so that both of you fit comfortably on the screen, and even then you may end up bumping into each other or hitting each other.
"Party" mode is another pretty cool innovation. It starts off by asking you to take pictures of each person who's participating, from 2 up to 20 people. Then, it'll pair two competitors at a time to a dance-off. The two selected dancers can choose a song, difficulty level, and song length to compete to. The rounds keep going until you stop, at which time you'll be shown the overall winner (based on number of songs won, awards won, and longest streaks), rankings, and the biggest rival.
The "Dance Studio" menu offers three options: Dance Creator, Dance Class, and Dance Workout. "Dance Creator" lets you record and play your own routines, either solo or with a partner. You're shown a full-screen image of yourself (with the music video playing in the corner) and you basically record yourself dancing. You can then play your (or others') saved routines from the Dance Now, Party, or Dance Creator menus (complete with very accurate scoring).
"Dance Class" is a great way to learn the dance moves, highly recommended for the "Professional" difficulty level. The system will break down the song into short sections of about 30 seconds each, and you loop through each section 4 times. Surprisingly, it took me only one or two times going through each section to master it for most songs, even at professional level.
With "Dance Workout", you start out by setting up a new profile. You take your picture and set your weight using the Move Controller. Then, you select a pre-defined workout which consists of similar songs bundled together at different difficulty levels. Each workout consists of 3 songs and lasts about 10 minutes (Professional+ workouts consist of 5 songs and last 15-20 minutes). There are 12 workouts in total across the different difficulty levels.
As you work out, a calorie meter is displayed on top of the screen showing you the target calories for each song. As long as you match the hand movements, you'll get credit for the calories, but of course to get a true workout you need to be "honest" and really do all the motions you're asked to do with your whole body.
Choosing "Get More Songs" will quit the game and take you to the Playstation Store to download additional DLC. As of this writing (October 21, 2011) there were no songs available yet, but expect that to change very soon.
"Galleries" is where you can go to visit all your past saved performances, either ones you saved to your hard drive or uploaded. You can also visit the "Community Gallery" which shows the 30-second videos and photos that others around the world have uploaded. You can vote for videos you like which will help them rise in popularity. As of this writing the game has only been out for a few days, and yet there are already hundreds of videos out there, a few surprisingly good, most not so good. Some observations: men currently seem to outnumber women by a large margin, and grown men should *really* think twice before uploading a video of themselves dancing to Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair".
You have the option of turning "singing" on and off. If you turn singing on, you can sing into the Playstation Eye microphone, or into a USB microphone or wireless headset. After each song you'll get a "singing rating", but that's about it--it doesn't even record your performance.
Everybody Dance is an interesting game to rate, mainly because it naturally leads to comparisons with the games that came before it. I'd say from a "pure fun" perspective, Just Dance still holds the advantage. From a "motion detection accuracy" perspective, Dance Central's full body tracking is arguably superior than the Wii or the PS3's "one-handed solution" for these kinds of games. If you come with pre-set expectations from either of those games, you might be disappointed.
Having said that, Everybody Dance does do both of those things pretty well, and is an excellent game on its own merits. The innovations that Sony brought to the table, including more advanced choreography in original artist's own style, the community features, the accuracy of the "Dance Creator" (which is definitely superior to the same feature on Just Dance for the Kinect), and the ability to dance side-by-side with the on-screen character all catapult Everybody Dance into the same echelon as those games. And of course it is easily the best dancing game available for the Playstation Move right now.Everybody Dance is Playstation's exclusive dance game from the developers of the Singstar series. After playing other PS Move dance games (Singstar Dance, Michael Jackson: The Experience), I was worried that the tracking/scoring may not be very accurate. However, after playing my first song I was pleasantly surprised. This game has the best tracking I've seen in a PS3 dance game. I received "Flawless" or "Awesome" where I felt I nailed the dance move and "Ok" or "X" where I could have done better.
There is a wide variety of songs to dance as well. Hip hop, pop, slow jams, etc. The game is really good at allowing everybody to dance. There aren't too many songs that are exclusively feminine. Very good mix here. There is a lot to choose from and there will DLC coming soon to keep things fresh.
One thing that I didn't know about the game was that the dance routines are different for each difficulty which is awesome. It's like, you learn a basic routine for Beginner, then in Medium they add more moves and even more moves for Professional. It really increases the re-playability of the songs.
Workout mode is pretty cool. You choose how intense you want your workout to be and the game will put some songs together accordingly. It keeps track of calories burns and could be helpful for those looking for a good exercise.
It has Facebook/Twitter/Community features that allows you to share your good times and it works as expected.
Everybody Dance is absolutely the best dance game on PS3. Great presentation, songs, dances, gameplay, etc.
Read Best Reviews of Everybody Dance Here
Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program My wife typically does kickboxing or zumba workout videos but now she finds that this game is more fun and you get just as good a workout if not better. Adding wrist weights really wears her out.WHY THIS GAME IS FUN:
*Very easy to pick up and play. You don't need instructions. It is all pretty much self-explanatory.
*Great visuals and nice presentation. It is easy to follow the dancing person in the middle of the screen.
*Dance moves are fun and not overly complex or fast.
*3 different routines for each song which allows you to gradually learn and improve your skills.
*Fun for 2 players to play simultaneously either in "competition" mode or "partner" mode.
*Displays the music video and lyrics so those who aren't dancing can watch and sing along.
*The "Dance Create" mode allows you to record your own dance so that you or others can play it back and follow along. You can really go crazy with creativity (or silliness) here.
*The best part is not yet available at the time of this review and that is the online store where you can buy more songs. If you have played the Singstar game (which is a fantastic karaoke game btw), the concept is the same. Eventually, you'll get bored with the included songs, so the ability to buy more songs gives this game a much longer life.
WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED:
*A continuous play mode would be nice so you can really use it as an aerobic workout video. Custom playlists and shuffle play would be necessary.
*It can be difficult to determine whether you have done a move correctly. There is a slight lag before you get your feedback and you have to avert your eyes from the dancer to see the feedback. The controller can also easily get out of sight of the camera depending on your setup. These are non-issues if you play the game purely for fun (i.e., not competitively).
OVERALL: I had a surprisingly good time playing this game and was working up a sweat pretty quickly. It is a great game for families or parties. Don't have the expectation that this is a "competitive" game. The included songs are a very good mix but I'm looking forward to adding more songs that I like. Hopefully, the online store will have a lot of songs available because this is what will really make the game shine.
UPDATE Nov 2011 As of now, the online store only offers a 4 pack of songs for $9. Lame and expensive. The store needs to offer a ton more songs and allow individual song purchases. The long-term survival of this game depends on the online store and the early returns are not good.
UPDATE Aug 2013 The online store for add-on songs is still poor. You can't buy the songs from directly within the game, you can't preview the songs before purchase, the songs are expensive ($2.50 each), and the selections are very limited. In order to buy additional songs, you must exit to the playstation store. If you aren't familiar with the song, you need to go to youtube to listen to it. The whole process is very inconvenient.
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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program "Everybody Dance" is pretty much a direct copy of the "Just Dance" games made for the Wii with a few minor differences.The way the game is played is that you hold the PS3 Move remote in hand and copy the dancers' actions on screen. "Everybody Dance" features a pretty current crop of today's pop hits, which is a good and bad thing. The good is that the game is pretty relevant to the tunes heard in clubs and on radio today. The bad is that there really isn't as much variety as found on the "Just Dance" games, and because the focus is only on current music, "Everybody Dance" will probably feel pretty dated in just a few months. (Of course there will be tons of downloads made available from the PS Network to keep it semi-current I'm sure)
What I love about this game, and similar titles, is that it gets the kids up off of the couch, jumping around and having a blast instead of just giving them a thumbs only workout. The motion capture feature actually tapes you doing your moves, and has become a source of great laughs watching everybody's moves.
I can really see this becoming a hit of the holiday parties we'll be hosting over the next few months too! And for the price, you can't beat what is sure to be a fun game for almost any age.
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