 |
  |
 |
  
 
| ||||||||||
|
Dance and Music Games
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
Have you played Sony's Parappa the Rapper, the surprise PlayStation musical hit with the cute cartoon hip-hop puppy dog? How about Enix and 989 Studios' Bust-a-Groove, the Parappa-inspired music and dancing game featuring more than ten stylistically diverse characters? Ever since game companies discovered that music and dancing games were attracting and hooking "mainstream" casual game players, all sorts of new titles have made their way to the market. Yet video game companies aren't immune to the one-hit-wonder syndrome that afflicts musicians, so Gamers Today has a few recommendations before you spend your hard earned dollars on one of the newest dancing games.
Umjammer Lammy: As the follow-up to Parappa the Rapper, Sony's Umjammer Lammy preserves a few of the more memorable Parappa characters while focusing primarily on a brand new hero - Lammy the guitar-playing lamb. Umjammer Lammy attempts to do for rock music what Parappa did for rap, challenging the player to learn how to perform songs in a number of different styles, but here the player controls a guitar instead of the vocal track. Though Umjammer starts strong with a reprisal of the memorable Parappa training session with Onion Master Chop-Chop, many of the stages' songs are just plain annoying and the game is far less fun than Parappa. If you manage to make your way through all of the stages with Lammy - and that's an "if" because of the annoyance factor, not the difficulty, you get the option to use Parappa instead. Here's hoping that Sony doesn't botch its next inevitable music title as it did with Umjammer.
Bust-a-Groove 2: The last Bust-a-Groove game had great graphics and music, but it also had fantastic, challenging one-on-one competitive gameplay. In Bust-a-Groove 2, the dancing is somewhat less challenging, the music isn't quite as good, and although the graphics are more ambitious, they're not always as polished as players would have hoped. Old favorites such as Shorty, Heat and Hiro return, accompanied by new dancers such as Comet the rollerblading waitress and Tsutomu the dancing Japanese boy. While there are familiar elements in the characters and backgrounds, Enix has overhauled many of the game's animations and interactive components - but not always for the better. For example, Groove 1's babydoll Kelly has become a police woman and club kid Heat has inexplicably been given a weird red cowboy hat. Thankfully, there are many cool new ideas and secret stages to counterbalance the game's occasional disappointments. Despite its flaws, Groove 2 is still worth checking out, but consider it a rental at best.
Dancing Stage and Dance Dance Revolution: Konami's newest entries into the dance genre have become hits both in arcades and at home, especially in other countries. In Japan, Konami's arcade hit Dance Dance Dance spawned sequels Dance Dance Revolution and Dancing Stage, titles which not only involve dancing but have players physically dance on top of a flat control surface to move their on-screen characters. Bearing more than a little similarity to Bust-a-Move, PlayStation translations of the Dance Dance titles were well-received, and Konami has even successfully been selling full-sized floor-mounted dancing controllers for the home games. (Though hand-held controllers can be used, the actual stand-up dancing is far more exciting.)
Parappa and Bust-a-Groove have done well in the United States, but it's not clear quite yet whether the next series of music and dance games will reach similar or higher levels of popularity. If European and Japanese arcades are any indication, Americans may soon be enjoying three other Konami-developed musical games: Beatmania, also known as Hip-Hop Mania, is a music mixing D.J game that uses special record turntables as controllers, Pop'n Music has players use large colored touch pads to synchronize their hand actions with music and on-screen signals, and Guitar Freaks includes two life-sized plastic guitars as controllers. A Sony PlayStation version of Beatmania was successful enough in Japan to be followed up by sequels full of even more music, while a Sega Dreamcast translation of Pop'n Music was released to some success in Japan and may eventually make it to the United States.
Considering how long graphics were at the forefront of selling new video game systems, many people are starting to ask whether music-heavy games are the next big step in video gaming, or whether they're just another passing fad. Video games based on rock group Journey and pop icon Michael Jackson may have faded into distant memories, but many people still remember the piles of unsold Sega-CDs for Make Your Own Music Video artists Marky Mark, C&C Music Factory and INXS, and Sony even had a PlayStation flop with the seemingly mainstream-ready Spice World. Today's music games may have lasting power because they depend less on the popularity of a given musician than the quality of the music and the excitement of the gameplay; it remains to be seen whether tomorrow's will live up to or exceed the high standards set by Parappa and Bust-a-Groove.
