Dance Central 2 Game Review

Do you want to dance? Do you want to get fit? Why don’t you do both at the same time with Dance Central?

And the good news is that Dance Central 2 is even better.

Dance Central is a music video game for the Xbox 360 that uses the Kinect motion peripheral. This means that you can control the whole game using gestures, including body movements and voice. No remote control or cables needed!

When you play the game, you follow a series of dance moves performed by avatars on the screen, and there are also “flash cards” on the screen to help you. The moves range from a simple shuffle step to an advanced series of upper body motions. As you dance, your body movements are tracked by Kinect to give you a score.

And it doesn’t just track your feet. It has full body tracking including your feet, twisting of your joints, and noise recognition such as clapping or snapping your fingers. It also takes pictures of you and plays some of them fast-forward mode, which is quite amusing.

There are five modes in this game:

Break it Down: If you are a beginner, or if you don’t have dancing skills, this practice mode helps you to learn more advanced dance moves in a step-by-step process. It allows you to practice each move separately so you can master the moves.

Performance: You can dance alone, with your aim being to score as high as you can.

Workout: This is similar to performing on your own, but as the name suggests, it focuses on fitness, so your workout time and the number of calories you burn are also tracked. You can dance and exercise at the same time!

Dance Battle: This involves a competition or battle between two players, and the player with the highest score wins.

Challenge: After you have got at least four stars in all the songs in a difficult category, you unlock a challenge based on the level of difficulty. The game is made more challenging by mixing sections from four or five songs so that the dance moves are also mixed.

There are dance routines for everyone, whether you are a beginner or an expert. But be warned: it’s tracking is highly accurate, so unless you know what you are doing, there is a learning curve.

Dance Central 2

The original Dance Central is great fun, so why is Dance Central 2 even better?

Well, if you’ve played the game before, or read the reviews, you’ll know that there were some criticisms of the original game. So let’s see how Dance Central 2 is even more fun.

The original game has no story/career mode in it, it just had a list of songs organized by difficulty level. Dance Central 2 has a more fully featured story mode. The characters in the game all belong to distinct dance crews, each dressed in wildly different costumes. So as you play the game, you travel through the world of underground dance crews, and work your way up the ranks of the best-known dancers in the world.

In the original game, you have to keep changing from player 1 to player 2 which is rather a nuisance, and if player 2 watches what player 1 is doing, player 2 will almost always win. Not fair! In Dance Central 2 you can now play (or dance) simultaneously, and player 2 can even drop in or out of the song at any time. So Dance Central 2 is not only more fair, it’s also a more social game.

Some people feel that the original game does not have as much content as other rhythm games. In Dance Central 2 there are more than 40 new dance hits and classics, and you can also import all your songs from the first game into it. So you’re actually doubling the list of songs in Dance Central 2 right from the start!

Dance Central 2 has a revamped tutorial mode, meaning that you can take a quick peek at a song’s choreography while choosing it from the song list, and you can also navigate all the menus with your voice. Read more

2011
10/23
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Battlefield 3 Beta – Review: Not What We Were Hoping For

Overall

From all of the hype surrounding the game I have been watching the trailers and reading everything I can about the game to get more and more insight in to what this game was going to offer that the Call of Duty series was not. There are obvious differences like the ability to operate vehicles, the destructible environments, and the fact that EA is not charging for their online stat tracking like Activision will be. These differences if incorporated well could seriously put the hurt on Activision and the Call of Duty franchise, along with the fact that Battlefield 3 is using the new Frostbite II engine and Call of Duty MW3 is still using the same engine that they used for MW2, so Battlefield is supposed to have the edge in the graphics department. Put all of this together and you have the potential to unseat the king, but in execution so far it just doesn’t pan out.

To be fair I have never really played the other Battlefield games so I was coming in to this one fresh, the game still is in Beta so things might change and I’m sure there will be some additional refinements and tweaks before release. The Beta also only features 1 map and doesn’t have vehicles so the map variety and vehicle usage can’t be measured just yet. I just don’t believe they can make enough changes and fix enough of the holes to make people switch from Modern Warfare to Battlefield.

Online

Being that it’s currently a Beta I’m not going to harp on the lag that I experienced or talk about the time it took to find matches because I imagine that these items will be ironed out in time for release. There are noticeable features missing though and that is what I’ll focus on here. First and foremost unlike in most Xbox 360 online games there is no way to quickly mute members of your team or the opposition. This is really annoying if someone in the game has a mic that is on the fritz or is blasting their personal soundtrack while playing.

Another problem that I anticipate them resolving before the game launches is when you’re in a party and you join a game, there are instances where you’re put on separate teams, if you’re lucky enough to be put on the same team you’re not put in the same squad. Squads is another issue, if you have the game automatically place you in a squad, all you can do is leave that squad, once out of a squad you can’t create a new squad and invite players to it, or join a specific squad it’s either join the one the computer puts you in, or fly solo.

Gameplay

As of right now the Beta only allows users to play online, and only one online game mode so obviously my impressions are limited to what is available to try. The game type available to play is “Rush” which is similar to “Demolition” from Modern Warfare 2 in which one team defends two points and the attacking team attempts to destroy them. As the attackers one you destroy the first two you move on to the next two, then the final two, which is a unique way of keeping the game going without constant round breaks. It does give the appearance of the defenders “falling back” to their next posts as you continue to press forward.

Rush mode is fun and I’m a fan of objective based gameplay rather than just team death match so I’m glad they put this in the Beta. My only problem (which honestly isn’t a problem with the game but more a problem with the players) is that the game type heavily favors team work, and when everyone is out there trying to figure out the game and just blow things up no one really cares about team work so you certainly lose a lot of what could make this game type fun.

Speaking of blowing things up, one of the big differentiators of Battlefield 3 from other war games is the destructible environments which are made possible thanks to the Frostbite II engine. This is a great twist in gaming because you can just shoot out a wall to get to an objective, granted it takes a lot of bullets or an explosion but it’s do-able. Also if you’re pinned down by enemies it’s only a matter of time before what ever you’re hiding behind is whittled away and you’re left without cover. It really is great to see the pillar you’re hiding behind take damage and get smaller during a gun fight. It really keeps the suspended reality going and makes you think and move faster than other games. I’m hoping that the environment destruction doesn’t weigh down the game too much and put a drag on performance, I’m also certain that this feature will be completely abused by players who just try to destroy buildings and walls and it will get annoying.

Graphics

This is where I know I’m going to annoy people. The graphics in some environments were good, but only the environments, the character modeling was horrible and could have easily been an original XBOX game. It didn’t have the feel of high-end graphics that are supposed to crush the competition. I was expecting much more from the look of the players, to customization, to realism but was completely let down. The environments and structures were good but nothing that hadn’t been seen or done before and it all felt a little to familiar. Again this is based on one Map but it just seemed “blah” the environments in Modern Warfare 2 were better and the character models easily blew these ones away, so unless they weren’t using the latest builds or the final renderings just to hold back some cards I don’t think visually this is going to live up to expectations. Read more

2011
10/22
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