Cons: Quest Mode Poorly implemented Achievements lack of upgradability outside of purchases
The Bottom Line: Its a fantastic game that more kids should be playing to help them shed some pounds. Weightloss made easy in the privacy of your own home.
bigtruckseries's Full Review: Dance Dance Revolution Universe for Xbox 360
Normally, many parents would think that shelling out $80 for a video game would be far too much. As I stepped up to the counter at Gamespot, the pricetag of $79.99 continued to pound at my thoughts. However, when the tax was added to the subtotal and I reached into my wallet to pull out a crisp $100 bill, in the back of my mind, I firmly believed that this purchase was absolutely necessary. I must have this game, I thought. This game is the game that all American gamers should have. The game that all casual gamers should have. There is an obesity epidemic in America. Too many kids are sitting on their couches playing Halo 2 and Gears of War. It is time to leave the couch behind. It is time to get moving.
It is time to get DANCING.
Dance Dance Revolution Universe for the Xbox 360 is at its core, the same DDR game you’ve already seen in your local arcade. Similar to DDR: Ultramix for the XBOX console, DDR: Universe makes use of Xbox Live allowing you to play online against other players, download game content and post achievements to add to your gamerscore.
THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GAME
All DDR games have the same core gameplay. There are patterns of arrows that scroll on the screen which are linked to specific beats in the music which is playing. You progress through the game by hitting a button, or, the dance mat button which corresponds with the arrow that is up for play. If you hit the arrow perfectly, you get a "perfect" grade. If yur timing is off, you may get "good" or "boo" - which means your timing is terrible. Perfect stepping allows you to win each song with a high grade and progress through the song list.
There are over 70 songs which are mostly dancehall or techno and for completing them, you get Xbox achievements. The achievement for completing any 10 songs is always 50 GamerPoints and the achievement for purchasing new tracks in quest mode is 30 GP.
The game is comprised of 4 difficulty levels:
BEGINNER is the easiest. The dance steps are spaced well and there aren't many jumps or holds. It will take longer on this level to burn calories though.
BASIC is considerably harder than BEGINNER but once you master the first mode, BASIC will feel comfortable. In this level the steps are faster, tighter and you will end each song breaking a sweat. In this mode, there are alot of transitions from jumps to step combos.
DIFFICULT level is extremely tough. In this mode, you'll have to master 'triple steps'- you must step on 3 arrows within 1 second. Sometimes the triple step is the same arrow, sometimes opposing arrows amd sometimes its a compination of the 3. The steps are also tightly placed and fast paced.
I tip my hat to anyone who can master EXPERT level. In this level, you have all the toughness of DIFFICULT Level but, now you spend more time splitting concentration over both feet. In many cases, you'll have to coordinate holds, steps and jumps without more than 1/4th a second to think. Its extremely hard but, if you do make it here, your caloric loss will be jaw dropping.
ONI level is a joke. The step placement, jumps, holds and transitions are packed so closely together that dancing to them resembles running. In my opinion ONI mosde feels tacked on and simply ridiculous. Consider the fact that it is not even offered in the majority of songs in the game.
CONTROLS & MUSIC
DDR: Universe comes packaged with a dance pad for the aforementioned $79.99. The Dance Pad is the primary control of the game and features A,B,X,Y buttons as well as a large D-Pad that you’ll be using for your steps. For a game like this control (and music) is everything so naturally, it is important to focus on the quality of the pad.
The Konami – Bemani dance pad that is packaged is actually very well designed. It doesn’t slip and slide much, but if you use it barefoot, sometimes it will get very wet as you sweat and the plastic will start to bunch up a little. The pad features a ring of light guide button that operates just like the one on the 360’s controller – updating you when friends come online and allowing you access to the system’s operating system.
The only problem is, when you sign into your gamer profile, you must sign in with the pad, not a controller. If you sign in with a controller, the console will ignore the pad and you won’t be able to use DDR on Xbox Live. This can be a headache because you’ll need the controller in case you wish to text someone who sends you a message or if you want to quickly navigate through menus without using your feet.
The sound quality of the tracks is excellent. There are plenty of songs I never heard before such as: Secret Chiefs 3’s “Horsemen of the Invisible” and Slam’s “Pendulum”. There is also a remix of game music such as Castlevania and Gyruss. Of course, there are plenty of other game tracks that would go great on here. How about the Halo theme? How about old NES tunes?
As I said, most of the tracks are designed around dancehall beats but plenty of them are also techno and "Japanese-Pop" which have been programmed by Naoki, who is the lead sound composer for DDR games.
GAME MODE
There are many different modes in DDR:U but “Game Mode” is the easiest to get into since it most closely resembles the arcade version. You simply step and jump through various songs that are played randomly to the rhythm and attempt to complete each song with a grade higher than “D”. If you miss a step or two, you’ll still get an “A” rating but, if you miss too many, your score will quickly drop. A perfect step routine will net you a “AA” rating.
QUEST MODE
The real problem many people will have with DDR:U is the “quest mode”. In this mode, you must “travel” across a map of North America, dancing in “missions” so you can gain money to move to the next city. The manual and the in-game interface barely explains how quest mode is supposed to work with the exception that you must perform really well.
What surprised me was that even after a perfect routine, I still got a “failure” at one point.
What wasn’t mentioned in the manual was that, there is a “dance meter” and you must fill it in order to move ahead and win the stage. The problem is however, many songs aren’t long enough to actually fill the meter so you’ll end up dancing to 3 or more songs just to move ahead – in between each stage getting the “failure” result until you finally fill the dance meter. If it sounds confusing, believe me, it is…especially to a beginning player or better yet…an uninformed player. More care should have been taken writing this manual.
Quest mode is also the only way to unlock new songs since you must unlock them by “buying” them by completing Dance Competitions or FAN BASE challenges.
The Unlockable songs are: Bongo! - WaveGroup feat. Scott D. cachaca - Mokky de Yah Yah's Drivin' - NAOKI feat. Paula Terry Healing Vision (Gridlok Mix) - DE-SIRE Koibito - Togo Project feat. Sana Love Me Do (The Acolyte's Mix) - Akira Yamaoka MAXIMIZER - CLI-MAX S. My Only Shining Star - NAOKI feat. Becky Lucinda PARANOiA EVOLUTION - 200 Return of the Toe Jam - Big Idea Stop Violence! -B.L.T. Reproduction- - Togo think ya better D - sAmi Tir Na N'og - World Sequence Treble, Bass, and Attitude - The Acolyte xenon - Mr. T {Wikipedia}
Unfortunately, The Songs can only be unlocked through Quest mode which is a departure from typical DDR gameplay that allows you to unlock songs simply playing the GAME MODE.
Why not make the songs unlockable through high score instead? The way the game is designed, having unlockables based on High Score would help ensure players kept playing.
WORKOUT MODE
The primary reason I bought this game was for exercise. The game is extremely physically intensive to the point that a 30 minute routine would have you sweating bullets. Fortunately, the game’s developers made an attempt at weight-loss tracking by implementing “workout mode”. First you enter your body weight into the system. Then the computer will calculate burned calories based on that weight. Workout mode tracks you throughout every dance step -whether or not you complete them – and then tells you how many calories the game estimates you have burned.
In 2 hours, I typically burn 300 calories but for completing 9 songs, I burned close to 600. If you ramp up the difficultly level, the extra steps will cause you to burn calaories faster.
What’s great about this, is you know the physical exercise is helping you lose weight, yet, the game is so enjoyable that it doesn’t feel like work. Completing song by song, it is easy to stay up playing this at night and blow 3 or 4 hours away without realizing it. You can take a look at the game’s calendar which allows you to track your calorie burning sessions day by day and when you wish to start over, you can delete it. Xbox 360 has a large HDD so you’ll be able to store records for years without problems.
I do however wish that WORKOUT MODE was designed to keep you working out to randomly selected music. Instead, you must play QUEST MODE to actually step to music that doesn't force you to constantly select a track. Of course, the time spent selecting tracks is a good time for a breather !
XBOX LIVE
If you do play online, it really isn’t very interesting since you can’t actually see the person you’re playing against. Hopefully a move will be made for DDR:U2 that allows you to use the Xbox Live Vision Camera but for now, you’re online challenges will resemble your offline challenges. You’re also gonna’ need the $50 Xbox Live Wireless headset because you won’t be able to chat without it. Would you believe some nut at the design stage actually put a headset 2.5 mm jack in the dance pad itself? It would be impossible to jump around and step with a long wire from the pad to your head so just forget it cause you’ll never be able to use it. Keep in mind that the official wireless headset is the smallest and lightest on the market so if you went and got one of those larger models, you may end up throwing it right off your head in a complex dance routine.
Xbox Live does keep perfect track of your achievements but, what I would have liked to see is a way to integrate Workout Mode into xbox live so people could keep track of the calories burned and weight lost – sharing data with other users of the game.
GRAPHICS
DDR:Universe similar to the recent Arcade releases looks great on Xbox360. The graphics are not much different from the PS2 despite 360’s more powerful processor, but what is possible is playing the game in 720p or 1080p on a LCD/Plasma Widescreen display.
The games graphics are bright and colorful with animations and backgrounds that are similar to typical Japanese anime/manga designs. Some songs even feature music videos such as Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch” and Jamiroquai’s “Feels Just Like it Should”.
While the graphics are nice, I wonder why don’t the designers actually use video footage of dance halls/clubs showing people actually stepping to the songs? What you do have is a little avatar person that can resemble yourself but their aren’t very many options. There’s a White girl, a Black Guy, a Hispanic, an Asian and little else. It would be much better if you could design an avatar similar to yourself like you can with Mortal Kombat Armageddon’s player creator.
What can be quite annoying unfortunately is the character avatar and some of the visuals can become so distracting, that you let arrows simply whiz by and miss out on the step which decreases your score. Sometimes the flash of the graphics causes you to completely neglect certain steps since you are overwhelmed by the brightness of the screen. There is an option to deactivate certain background features but you’ll actually have to have some experience with video game interfaces for that. Most casual gamers won’t recognize this immediately.
WHAT’S NOT SO HOT ?
DDR has not been properly set up for Xbox 360 with the Casual gamer in mind.
Firstly, the FAN BASE challenges are nearly impossible to achieve unless you cheat. In the Fan Base challenege, you must dance near-perfectly to a song in order to meet a quota. The problem is, the easier difficulty modes don't offer enough steps to complete some of these challenges and the Difficult and Expert modes are near impossible to beat. The rapidness of the dance arrows and their complexity are so rdiculous that if a human being were able to actually make this many steps, they'sd probably have a heart attack soon after.
You probably won't be able to get 15 of the XBOX360 achievements through regular play. You'll probably need a Pro Action Replay to cheat the computer. A turbo enabled controller would also help.
Another problem is replayability. There is plenty of replayability here but its tied to your love of the music on the disk. There are over 70 songs including some that can be unlocked, but that’s all. Once you do master the game and unlock everything, you’ll only replay songs to get higher scores, without actually being able to get more songs that you specifically want to listen to. Yes there are downloadables on Xbox Live.
Right now, XBL is offering a 800 gamer point pack that you can download which comes with:
Broken My Heart (Cusimo & Co. Starlite Remix) - NAOKI Feat. PAULA TERRY Me and My Friends - THE DANDY WARHOLS Audiophilosophy - Neverakka AM-3P - KTz ECSTASY - d-complex ON THE JAZZ (Smooth House Mix) - Jonny Dynamite! Beside You - Intuition White Hot - R.A.S.T. CANDY STAR - Luv UNLIMITED KISS ME ALL NIGHT LONG - NAOKI J-STYLE feat. MIU {Wikipedia}
Ecstacy, Audiophilosophy, Kiss Me all Night, Broken My Heart and AM-3p are pretty good workout songs on BASIC level. but the rest of the songs are duds.
I am left wondering, why with its huge 20GB or 120GB hard disk drive, it is not possible for me to use songs that I already own, program my own dance beats and then use them later since I actually want to dance to these songs. Why it isn’t possible for people to mix and program their own beats and then trade them via Xbox live?
The Answer is simple:If you had the ability to make your own tracks, you'd never need to buy another DDR game.
The game does include an Edit mode and the manual states you can create your own dance steps. However, if it is present here, its extremely hard to find, and the unintuitive design of some of the menus makes finding it nearly impossible.
What also bothers me is the lack of coherency in the song list. Why is it that Earth Wind & Fire’s “Summer 99” is here but an even better dance song like “Boogie Wonderland” is not? I’d like to see a song list taken from America’s top dance hall beats with more emphasis on Hip Hop & R&B. I was left wondering, why is a recent song like Chris Brown’s “Run It” here, but more interesting songs like Kings of Krunk’s “We don’t give a damn”, or R Kelly’s Chocolate Factory album present? Considering Xbox 360 has rating features I doubt it would be a big deal having more explicit songs on the system – considering there are radio edits that cut out profanity. DDR is missing out on some common dance hits that actually have fluid dance steps. When you play the game, you can see that some care has gone into programming the dance routines, but you may start to wonder exactly what kind of rhythm this person actually had. Some of the songs have great steps but some others have very unintuitive routines.
What really bothers me is that there is no PAUSE button. Once you start a song, you cannot pause it. If you wish to leave the song, you must step on the SELECT button and hold it till the round ends. You will lose because of this and that score will be recorded. Also, in Quest mode, once you enter a challenge blindly without knowing what kind it is, you can't back out of it. You must forfeit the song only once it has begun.
WAS IT WORTH MY $80
Given time, you’ll become a pro at Dance Dance Universe. Once you master the fast paced songs you’ll be able to cruise through most of the Quest Mode. After that, you’ll want to purchase the game's expansion on Xbox Live. Of course, once you have mastered this game, you’ll probably just end up buying the next release DDR:U2 which is currently in the works, and if they make a 3rd installment, you’ll purchase that one too.
This is a fun game, highly innovative and fun to play.
Despite the drawbacks, it is definitely worth the money and more than its worth in the help it will give you getting fit. Played long enough and routinely, you’ll notice a difference in the way your clothes fit and start to shed inches and that in itself makes it a must-buy.
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