Dance Central

The Short


Pros
- Full body dancing game with real moves
- Actually works well on the Kinect. 100% as advertised
- Doesn't throw a huge fit if you stand outside of its range
- Has the best menus of any Kinect game (the way they do it has quickly become standard)
- Excellent soundtrack of dance music, spanning many decades
- "Break it Down" mode is superb at teaching you advanced routines
- Graphics look fantastic
- UI and systems are intuitive and work well with the Kinect technology
- Songs expandable through DLC
- You could maybe actually learn to dance from this. Maybe.

Cons
- Only one player
- Characters are annoying stereotypes, and their voices are so obnoxious
- No actual career or single player...though this actually isn't that bad
- Progression via a "leveling up" system seems tacked on and pointless
- Could have really benefited from a "challenges" system like Rock Band 3 has

Get ready to dance some Lady Gaga with this Lady Gaga lookalike

The Long


I'm pretty sure it's a known fact now that the best Kinect launch title was Dance Central, hands down. Despite Microsoft pushing the crap out of these things, they haven't really released a whole lot of software for it, making the pickings slim and the quality games out of these slimmer. Which is why Dance Central is such an anomaly: it not only was released with the Kinect (it's well known that release games for new consoles are generally garbage), but it was the best and remained the best Kinect game until Dance Central 2 came out. It also was one of the few games that really made me feel like I'd finally bought technology from the future, because in it the Kinect worked. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let's "Break it Down" for you (that's a Dance Central pun. If you'd played the game, you'd be laughing so hard right now you'd have to take a break because you'd be physically incapacitated by glee).

This dude's got style 

The idea behind Dance Central is a simple one. The game will put on some popular music (like Lady Gaga or Soulja Boy) and you are expected to dance to it. A character will dance the moves perfectly on the screen, and you have to mirror his or her actions. Dance good, get points. Dance bad, fail hard and get less points. You can't actually fail out in Dance Central, which is good, but if you get one or two stars your dancer will generally tell you that you suck.

How you know what to dance and when is dictated by flashcards that appear on the right side of the screen. They have a bunch of moves with silly names and the part of your body that is going to move first highlighted in white. It gives you a few more in advance so you can prepare, and that's basically the game. It's difficult to just "sightread" the cards at first, but the game also features an advanced "Break it Down" mode (see? Get my joke now?) where you can run through all the moves in a song before you dance it, teaching you everything.

The menues have style and are actually easily navigateable, unlike 90% of Kinect games

There are hundreds of moves in this game, ranging from simple side-steps to crazy arm swings and spin-arounds. Learning them all could take you a very long time, and there is only a little overlap between songs. You can pick difficulties from easy to hard, which basically just means the hard ones have less move repetition and a few select, more difficult maneuvers. Since the easy songs are stupid easy (again, Poker Face is just walking back and forth and clapping), even if you have no dance moves whatsoever you can basically start from nothing and work up. Which is exactly what I did because I, unlike my wife, am an under-coordinated klutz. I'm actually pretty proud that I could sight-dance 90% of the songs in Dance Central 2 on Medium and still get five stars, which proves this game didn't just make me healthier (and give me style), it also helped me with my coordination problems (which I've legitimately had since birth. Seriously. Doctors said I'd never walk. Now I dance, suckers!).

The biggest thing about I'd like to point out is that even if the game hadn't ended up being super-fun (which it is, believe me, especially at parties) it actually works. You are doing some pretty advanced body-flailing, and the Kinect picks it all up. Not only that, as you mirror the dancer their arms or legs will turn red if that specific limb is off the dance. At first I thought it was just being super-lenient and generalizing. Then I did some of the harder moves. Then I thought the game was a huge jerk, being overly critical and not working. The I figured the moves out. Now I've accepted the fact that: yes, Dance Central uses the Kinect to do some amazing stuff, and yes I dance like a brain-dead monkey.

The characters, while great dancers, are also extremely obnoxious

I should probably devote a paragraph to describing just how awesome this game is, and I was totally determined that I'd hate or at least just mildly tolerate it. It's made by the guys who make Rock Band, who we've already determined make the best music games. This is why I shouldn't have been so surprised when the game was crafted extremely well and was really polished: it's pretty much par for the course for Harmonix. I guess I was probably more worried about the Kinect not actually working, but somehow they made it work. Dancing is fun and the game (despite not having many songs) has a wide range of music in a wide range of difficulties. If you are stuck on a song, Breaking it Down is an easy solution to learning all the moves and getting them perfect. Harmonix knew that 1. People, when they are being forced to look like idiots, are very impatient and 2. Getting frustrated because they can't dance or get stuck makes them impatient. The learning curve for this game is smooth, it has tons of tools to help you, and once you get over the initial fear of looking like an idiot you can actually have a really fun time with Dance Central. Seriously, nobody cares if you dance like a stiff metal robot. You got five stars! You're a dancing queen!

Goggy McGoggles here is getting his groove on

The game also looks amazing, and has tons of great touches. A circle under the dancer's feet slowly fills as you do a move, where varying levels of fill (associated with color) determine your rank on the move. It's easy and if you see it not filling up you'll know to try harder. The dancers moves very smoothly and are extremely easy to follow, except maybe on the stupidly-complicated moves. When you get a 4x multiplier, your scene changes from just dancing in a regular place to a DISCO RAVE PARTY (see picture above), which is also a pretty cool touch. The characters remind me a lot of the Rock Band 3 style of characters (except more limber) which I'm fine with.

What I'm not fine with is the retarded, obnoxious things these characters say before and after songs. I've watched some developmental interviews; Harmonix went so far as to make backstories for these tards, backstories we'll never hear or care about. I get it they are "street savvy" and "sassy" or whatever, but it comes off as them all being giant douchebags. Luckily they only talk before or after dances, but it still is just freaking obnoxious.

Moe is the least annoying, even though his hat looks like a giant Trojan cond...nevermind. 

The game also feels a bit stripped down. It's clear all the care went into developing the actual game to work with Kinect and have a bunch of moves, which I'm totally fine with. But it also is lacking in some areas. There are only 32 songs to dance, which is actually a decent amount (unlike Rock Band, you actually have to work to figure out these songs, and each difficulty requires a substantial time investment to learn) but still could have been more. There is no single player "career" mode, you basically just have quickplay. Sure you have modifiers like marathon (dance a bunch of songs in a row), exercise (it counts calories), and the option to turn flashcards off (proving you are boss hog at dancing), but really it's just variants on quickplay. You do get points for beating songs which "level up" your dancer...which means literally nothing. At all. So...ok then?

Learnin' how to dance with **ANGEL**. Sparkles mandatory. 

Despite being a bit bare-boned when it comes to features, Dance Central is still one of the very best games on the Kinect, and is still a great game in general (because saying a game is better than most Kinect games isn't really saying much). It only has one rather big problem: it now exists in a world where Dance Central 2 exists. Dance Central only allowed one dancer at once, which was another one of those "stripped down features" I talked about. Dance Central 2 (which added two player as well as a boatload of extra features) completely blows this game out of the water. Since you can export the Dance Central songs and dance them in its sequel, there is really no reason to own this disc unless you really can't afford Dance Central 2.

Still, it's worth getting if you want to try it out (though that's what demos are for), and as a product it is certainly high quality. Before Dance Central 2 came out, this was an easy five out of five. However, since that was then and this is now, I'm going to knock a star off, giving it four out of five. Hindsight is 20/20, Dance Central, and your little brother is way better.

Plus the sequel had Brodie, who is a character that isn't obnoxious, thus rendering Dance Central completely obsolete.