On the day Kinect became available for purchase I was at the doctor’s office, suffering from a severe case of vertigo due to an ear infection. Just moving my head was enough to make me nauseated. So on that evening, my Kinect enjoyment was limited to watching my husband and a friend playing Kinect Adventures, with arms and legs flailing around in my peripheral vision. A few weeks of medication later, I can now join in on the fun of looking like a dork, without the limitations of holding a controller or having to stand on a mat or Balance Board (or fall off of it!).
Dance Central was one of my husband’s selected Christmas presents for me, among a pile of other games, and while I was a lot more inclined to play Dance Masters, I soon found Dance Central to be more to my liking.
The game is presented a bit in a Rock Band fashion, with a series of songs to be played in three available difficulties, and offering challenges every four or five songs. But unlike Rock Band, all tracks are unlocked on the list right from the start, although you can’t progress further down the list until you play and beat the challenges.
Dance Central is very user-friendly. You browse the menus with simple arm movements, selecting songs, difficulty level, a dancer and then presenting you with a tutorial “Break It Down” mode that teaches you each step of any given song before you actually start “performing”. The moves are presented on the right side of the screen in the form of flash cards. The entire time, you can see your silhouette on another small screen so that you can see what you’re doing and how well you’re mimicking (or not) the dancer.
Your teacher/choreographer will voice instructions so that you know what to do, and if you’re not doing so well you can slow down the beat with a simple arm gesture, repeat everything in slow motion until you get the hang of it, and then go back to regular speed.
To clear each move in Break It Down mode, you must do it well three times or ace it right away on the first try. Once you have gone through each set of moves, your teacher makes you put it all together and repeat the linked moves. Particularly helpful for me, since I can’t dance, the exception being some ballet learned in my childhood, and Portuguese traditional folklore in my teens, and I don’t think neither of those help here.
While performing, Kinect does a really great job at tracking your movements. Furthermore, the flash cards for each move highlight the parts of your body that need to be moving, and the game highlights the dancer in red if you’re not moving a certain part of your body correctly.
At some point in your performance, you reach a Freestyle section in the song that gives you no flash cards to look at and basically lets you do whatever moves you feel like. In my pretty much non-existing dance vocation, no on-screen flash card equals “…and now what do I do?” followed by a jaw drop when the game started flashing a fast sequence of snapshots of my previous “dancing” efforts. Hilarity ensued, and I couldn’t stop laughing at myself and my craptastic rhythm-impaired movements, let alone keep on “dancing”.
You earn points for doing the moves right, and even if you don’t get one completely right, you are still awarded some points. Of course this process is less forgiving the higher the difficulty level. As you progress, you unlock some more dancers, alternative outfits for them and new venues. Leaderboards will tell you how you’re doing in comparison to your friends, a Dance Battle mode adds a competitive aspect by having you and a friend alternate sections of a song to see who scores the most, and you can turn on Workout Mode to track the calories you burn while dancing.
While Dance Central does a lot of things right, you know me, I can still manage to find something to complain about: the Freestyle fast-forwarding snapshot awkwardness. Basically, it’s like the game takes all these photos of you, puts them together in a slideshow, plays them forward and then backwards. It’s choppy and weird. And even if it was saving a half-decent video of your awesome moves, there is no Kinect Share option. However, the fun and enjoyment of the gameplay more than enough make up for this!
Many Break It Downs and some songs later, I am still giggling and snorting at my sad performances when Freestyle comes around. But I have promised to myself that I WILL get that Funkytown butt/hip shake and other cool Saturday Night Fever moves right. Eventually…