Central Time

Last night, I got my first taste of Harmonix's newest video game. No, it's actually not Rock Band 3. They're also at the forefront of the whole XBox Kinect thing, with what many reviews have described as the best launch title for this device, Dance Central.

I was curious about the game from the moment its coming was announced earlier this year. I used to really enjoy the Dance Dance Revolution games -- basically until Rock Band kicked them off the top of the mountain. How appropriate that the makers of Rock Band might come up with the next generation dancing game to reinvigorate the genre.

The thing is, though, I don't own an XBox 360. I went the Playstation 3 route (which I'm happy about every time I watch a Blu-ray movie). Dance Central looked interesting, but probably not interesting enough to buy the console and Kinect essentially for one game. Not to mention that I've heard Kinect wants some depth in your living room to function best, and my condo doesn't really offer that.

Well, my curiosity was satisfied when one of my friends picked up Dance Central and invited some of us over to give it a try. It is, as expected, a hell of a lot of fun. It's also fairly good exercise, if that aspect holds appeal for you; if you really throw yourself into the routines, you will get winded if you stay at it for long. (Actually, the game even has a Workout Mode, if that's what you want to use it for.)

It's an obvious quantum leap above DDR. I suppose Wii DDR players have been able to use the remote and nunchuck for movements with the hands, but the other consoles have never had this. Even then, not having to hang on to a controller is more authentic and enjoyable. Where DDR still felt fundamentally like a game, Dance Central (like Rock Band) feels like a reasonable facsimile of the real thing. I don't think you'd see people doing these routines at a club or anything, but plenty of the individual moves are actual dance moves.

There are shortcomings in the game, but many are excusable for a variety of reasons. The 30-odd song set list seems pretty short, but the old DDR games didn't have much bigger. (They also didn't use entire songs as this game does. And a significant portion of those songs were cloying J-Pop that were only rarely fun to play anyway.) This will expand over time, as Harmonix will be releasing downloadable songs to expand the Dance Central library.

One one player can play at a time. This may be an insurmountable limitation of the technology, period. You can at least understand this would have been a very difficult limitation to overcome as they worked on the game, since the technology itself was being created at the same time. Something for Dance Central 2 to address, perhaps?

If I already owned an XBox 360, this game probably would sell me on getting a Kinect. But it's not quite the jaw-dropping experience that convinces me that I have to make a $400+ investment to go from the nothing I have now. Still, a solid effort from the best music game developer around.