Boogie

Tired of the dance club scene? Want to shake your rump but scared to share your wild moves with a unappreciative public? Have no fear, dear friends. With Boogie, Electronic Arts waltzes in and brings a dance hall full of disco, rock and pop direct to your living room. Great balls of fire! Did EA stuff a USB-powered microphone in this box as well? You bet your blue suede shoes they did. But can EA fit all your song and dance dreams into this over-sized box? Let's boogie and find out.

Boogie-ing wouldn't be much fun without some tunes. The jam list is a mix of 39 popular songs from the 70s to today that would make Casey Kasem proud. A fairly diverse sampling of Cindy Lauper, Boy George, The Commodores, and Britney Spears are just a few that made the list. While most of the songs are playable right out of the box, some must be unlocked by spending earned "tokens" or finishing a character's story in Story mode.

These songs are available in all of Boogie's two primary game modes: Dance and Karaoke. There are also Story and Party modes, as well as a Video Maker mode for saving performances. Players earn tokens in the game which they can redeem in Shop mode for new songs and character wardrobes. Practice mode gives players the chance to work on their dance moves before venturing on to the stage. These modes, as well as an Option mode for making adjustments to microphone and singing volumes, are presented in a straight-forward menu system.

Dance mode is a simple rhythm game that has players moving the Wii Remote up, down, left and right in time with the music. Points are awarded during the performance based on how well players keep the beat and incorporate special combo moves to the routine.

While your character dances, items such as point boosts and extra tokens drop down on the stage for the character to collect. The beat of the music is heard through the Wii Remote's speaker, but there is very little challenge in following the constant rhythm. Unfortunately, dancing in Boogie isn't much fun because it doesn't feel like dancing at all. Drumming the Wii Remote in time with the music feels silly and not in the good way.

The Party mode adds some direct one-on-one competition to the dancing. Players compete on stage simultaneously and aim to win the most points in a best of three, five or seven performances. As with normal Dance mode, items drop down for the player to collect, but Party mode adds items that can freeze opponents or warp their controls. Sadly, dancing with someone else in Boogie isn't any more fun than dancing alone. Messing with your opponent's ability to dance isn't as much fun as it sounds and receiving a higher score is a shallow accomplishment given the nature of the "dancing" in Boogie.

Maybe you are not much of a dancer and all you want is to sing along to "Kung Fu Fighting". Installing the microphone is as easy as plugging the USB connector into one of Wii's two slots and waiting while the Boogie disk installs the device drivers. Pick the song from the list in Karaoke mode and belt it out for all to hear. The lyrics appear at the bottom of the screen under your dancing character of choice. Above the lyrics is a musical scale with colored blocks corresponding to the lyrics.

As the song progresses, a vertical line moves from left to right across the scale and intersects with the blocks when it is time to sing. The blocks are staggered at different levels vertically on the scale, indicating pitch. The scale is fairly helpful, but the separation between the music scale and the lyrics takes takes getting used to. A player's performance is given points for each song based on accuracy in singing the lyrics. Performing each line in the song will also generate immediate feedback such as "bad", "decent", "excellent" and "super".

Want to save your performance for when your inevitable big break comes? No problem. Video Maker mode can save the player's performance in a music video for posterity (or blackmail) in one of thirty available save slots. Video Maker also has some limited effects that can be applied to the video such as grayscale, x-ray and thermal, along with flying hearts, fish and stars. Video Maker does a good job of saving your vocal performance to the music, but the actual video portion of Video Maker is not very useful as the videos are not shareable online or exportable to SD cards.

Story mode consists of five characters each with their own tale spread across a mixture of singing and dancing. The routines in this mode are performed exactly as they are in normal Dance and Karaoke modes. To advance the story, the player must score enough points in each performance.

The stories themselves are pointless, and the absence of voice-acting in a voice-oriented game is annoying. I would recommend skipping this mode entirely were its completion not required for those hoping to hear the game's entire song list. Fortunately, the actual story in between the singing and dancing in Story mode is short and the developers thoughtfully provided a skip button for fast-forwarding through the text.

Boogie's graphics are heavy on the cartoony side, but the game has enough style to look visually distinct and appealing. The music naturally weighs more in a game like Boogie than the graphics and fortunately, the Dolby Pro Logic II sounds good. The lack of voice acting in Story mode shows laziness on EA's part, however. The small amount of dialogue notwithstanding, the usage of text and the incomprehensible garbled sound effect in place of real voices borders on absurd.

Karaoke mode shines above all other modes thus far in Boogie. Come back for Stage 2 as we try to get our groove back from Dance mode.