Factory Disincentives

This week, Dance Factory was released for the PS2. This is the game I mentioned a while back, that allows you to use your own CDs to dance to. Put in any disc, it spends about a minute analyzing a song and generating dance steps for it, then you're on with the stepping.

Here's the breakdown:

On the good side, the "step generation" actually does work, and not too badly. You really need to be using music that has a strong, regular beat to it. Given that, it'll correctly find the rhythm more than half the time, and generate a dance-able pattern.

Try to use music that's a little more complex, or that's missing a strong beat throughout, and you get mixed results. It'll be right on target for big chunks of the song, and then just lose the rhythm in obnoxious ways. But realistically, who could have expected it to work for every song? It works better than I expected it to. I mean... take a look at your music collection, think about the "dance music" in there, and assume that more than half of is going to work pretty well. That's a whole lot more music than DDR ever offers, and none of it is that maddeningly annoying J-Pop. So here, Dance Factory earns a big mark in the plus column.

On the so-so side is the actual step patterns. They're usually possible, but they're not always completely sensical. It's amazing enough that a program can find the beat and generate the steps. It can't really analyze the structure of a song. though. It can't recognize "this is a verse, that's a chorus, and that's a bridge." So you won't get some of the fun repetitions in patterns of a human-generated step pattern. You won't get "verse B" being like "verse A," but with variations. Instead, you'll often get a pattern that stops mid-verse in favor of something new. It's not a "bad thing," really, but it does make you appreciate the human-generated patterns in ways you probably never did before.

But, on the bad side, the art team on this game needs to be taken out and shot. There are four major strikes in the "look" of this game:

1) The arrows are not compressed onto half the screen, as in DDR and In the Groove. They run the full width of the picture. In this day and age, it's foolish not to design for people with big-screen TVs and/or 16:9 aspect ratios. This layout is bad for both. When a "left-right" jump comes, depending on the steps immediately before it, you may not see one of the arrows.

2) The backgrounds during the dances are horrible. There are more than two dozen to choose from, but each is worse than the last. They're all too busy, too full of movement, and in many cases colored too closely to the arrows themselves. You can easily lose track of the arrows -- the whole point of the game.

3) In both DDR and In the Groove, the dance arrows are laid out in the order: Left-Down-Up-Right. For no possible reason I can think of, Dance Factory has reversed the Down and Up arrow placement. I was having a bout of "up/down dyslexia" that I could not understand, until it finally dawned on me. If you've played a lot of DDR, then the "proper" arrow order is subconsciously etched in your brain. When you really focus, you can get the transposition here right. But if you hit a complex pattern of steps and start to go on auto-pilot for even a second, you're screwed. And like I said, I can't think of any reason why they would have changed this for this game.

4) There is no option to change the color of the arrows. I have both my DDR and In the Groove configured to display quarter notes in red, eighth notes in blue, and sixteenth notes in yellow (or green, depending on the game). Here, all arrows are a psychedelic morphing red-blue-green. They'll rotate colors somewhat differently depending on whether they're falling on or off the beat, but it's not easy to tell what's going on.

Unfortunately, when the analysis is all done, the bad things about this game far outweigh the good. Sure, Dance Factory broadens my steppin' possibilities by literally hundreds, if not thousands of songs. But I can't really have that much fun playing them, because the visual layout of the game makes it harder to play than it should be, in almost every respect.

Now, I already have more untouched video games piled up than I'll ever hope to complete. My usual policy with new games is to just take note of things I'm interested in upon release, wait for the price to drop to $20 (as they usually do around six months later), and then pick them up. If I had done that for Dance Factory, I might have felt it worth that $20. But buying it new like I did? I should have done what I normally do.

I might still give it the recommendation for people who are actually not big DDR enthusiasts. I say this under the theory that a lot of my interface complaints may not be as big a deal to someone not so familiar with the way it's "usually" done." For the veterans, though, I say rent first and decide for yourself.

...especially considering that in just a few weeks, official DDR games are being released for both PS2 and Xbox.

In short, if you are a "dance step writer" for the real DDR franchise, don't worry. Your job is not really in jeopardy.