Reviewed: June 26, 2002
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
THQ
Developer
Metro Graphics
Released: May 20, 2002
Genre: Music
Players: 2
ESRB: Everyone
5
7
6
4
4.9
Supported Features:
Britney Spears is a cultural phenomenon that proves brilliant marketing and talented PR reps can turn any cute blonde into a pop-music mega star. I have nothing against the girl – I just don’t think she is as talented as the industry would have us believe. She can dance with the best of them, but I have yet to hear her sing a song that wasn’t electronically enhanced to the point where you can’t tell where her voice stops and the back-up singers and synthesizers began. I would really like to see her compete on Fox’s new show American Idol just to see if she would even make the final cut.
Regardless of my opinions, the world is undeniably crazy in love with Britney, whether it be teenage girls wanting to be like her, or teenage boys wanting to be with her. When someone reaches this level of stardom you can use their face and/or name to sell just about anything – including video games. Athletes have been slapping their name on sports games for years and now we get a dancing game with America’s favorite Mousketeer.
It’s only natural that Britney’s Dance Beat focuses on dancing, as that is what Britney does best. This isn’t the first dancing game to hit the PS2 and it probably won’t be the last considering THQ has secured the Britney license through 2005. Unfortunately, Britney’s game pales in comparison to games like Unison and Dance Dance Revolution.
This game is exclusively targeted for Britney fans. If you are looking for a good dance/music game then keep looking. If you want a handful of Britney’s most popular songs and some exclusive videos and concert footage then you have come to the right place. There’s even a clever (albeit short) game stuck in the middle of all the multimedia glitz.
My game dancing experience is rather limited. I’ve done the DDR-thing in the arcade and I was totally addicted to Unison a couple years ago, and now comes Dance Beat. While Unison made innovative use of the dual analog sticks to perform the dance moves, Britney uses a very clever interface that is easy to learn yet difficult to master.
The interface consists of a circle down in the corner with a sweeping hand that spins around passing over the various button symbols and/or D-Pad directions. You must press these buttons as the transparent hand passes over the symbol. As with most dance games, timing is everything and you are ranked accordingly such as Perfect, Good, etc.
You can also perform combos by chaining together a series of successful moves. Each time you get a 10-move combo you will send a “bad move” over to your opponent, and they will be doing the same to you. Bad moves vary for each of the six dancers and can include such despicable acts as moving your icons around the meter, changing the symbols at the last second, or making the sweeping hand really narrow increasing the difficulty significantly.
As you successfuly make moves and combos the meter at the bottom of the screen will slide toward your dancer. Missing moves will cause you to lose valuable space on the meter, so the entire audition is basically a "tug-of-war" and whoever has the meter on their side at the end of the song wins.
While the interface is quite creative it is implemented rather poorly in that the button presses and speed of the hand are not consistently based on either the beat track or the melody. You might be tapping the buttons to the beat only to have it all shift to correspond with the syllables of the lyrics.
There’s no elaborate story to motivate the player through this relatively short game. You pick one of six wannabe back-up dancers auditioning for a chance to join Britney on her next tour. The cast is almost humorous in its attempt at political correctness. You have the token Asian, African-American, Hispanic, Latino, and Caucasian in both male and female flavors. You’ll no doubt be picking your character based on their “bad moves” rather than their ethnic representation.
The game features a practice mode and a two-player competition mode, but the core of Dance Beat is the Audition mode. In this game you pick one dancer and audition in a series of 10 songs; actually only five songs including; "...Baby One More Time", "Oops...I did it again", "Stronger", "Overprotected", and "I'm a Slave 4 U." Your first five competitions are short versions of the songs then you go back and redo the same five songs in their entirety. If you’re thinking five songs aren’t that many then join the club. When games like the upcoming DDRMAX are releasing with over 65 songs, Britney pales in substance.
Control is clever and intuitive and will test your hand-eye (or foot-eye) coordination to the ultimate limits. Things start off easy enough as you methodically tap a single button when prompted. Then the dial starts spinning faster and more symbols (both quantity and type) are added. Difficulty ramps up significantly after the first six or seven auditions and you will soon find yourself trying to hit ten or more buttons per pass, many at the same time.
In the options menu you can pick whether you want to use the D-Pad or the symbol buttons for dancing. Regardless of which mode you choose, sooner or later you will be using all four directions and symbols, often at the same time. You can also hook-up a dance pad (or two), which makes things even more challenging.
Britney’s Dance Beat was the perfect game to test my new MadCatz Beat Pad. These two products go together so well I’m surprised they aren’t offered as a bundle. Regardless, if you want a little exercise while you play Dance Beat then this is the perfect way to get it. Personally, I found the game was hard enough when I was trying to hit a sequence of a dozen buttons using my gamepad. Spreading these buttons out on a large mat made the game impossible for me past the fifth audition. It became some kind of evil Twister game, but without all the fun groping.
So with only six dancers, five songs, and ten auditions, what reason do you have to play this game for more than two or three hours? Backstage Passes! Your auditions are scored and as you gain more and more points you will unlock various backstage passes that allow you to go to the video vault and view all sorts of cool never-seen-before video footage of Britney. There is even a nifty 3D interactive tour that lets you watch Britney perform each of the five featured songs live in concert – actually it’s a rehearsal, but they have all the lights, smoke and pyrotechnics, so it’s like your own private show.
And now comes my biggest complaint with this game. You spend all of your time intently focused on the circular dance meter. You never get to appreciate the exceptionally well-animated dancers or colorful backgrounds or live video inserts of Britney's videos playing on the wall screens. For all practical purposes they could have just had the meter take up the entire screen. And with no replay option you can never “see” how you looked while dancing. Sure, you can watch the preview and see the computer perform all the moves flawlessly, but it’s just not the same.
The visual style of Dance Beat is very generic. The menus and interface are all simplistic yet brightly colored like something out of an Austin Powers’ game. The backgrounds for the auditions range from gorgeous to generic, but as mentioned earlier, you seldom have time to appreciate the scenery or even the dancers for that matter.The dancers are where this game really shines making it all the more disappointing that you can’t watch them move unless you are observing rather than playing. Metro Graphics has teamed up with House of Moves to motion capture Britney’s dancers and even Britney herself. The results are stunning and eerily life-like. The introduction with a CG Britney is surreal and downright sexy.
The backstage video segments are all pretty standard PS2 MPEG video quality. The video gets really interesting when it turns interactive in the 3D virtual concerts. Using some killer technology you can pan around in 360 degrees while Britney does a final dress rehearsal on stage. My only minor complaint with this portion of the “game” is that you cannot control the location of the camera, so you are not always afforded the best view of Britney.
The game opens with an excellent montage of video clips playing against a cool remix “Stronger”. The menus and rest of the interface are quite simple and very colorful and there is always some cool music playing. The five featured songs all have several remixed versions that play during videos or menus, but it’s still the “same five songs”. The audio quality is good but strictly stereo. You would think that a music game would have better audio than this – at least Dolby surround.
The speech is something that has been puzzling me since I first played this game. I can neither confirm nor deny that Britney spoke her lines. I can’t find her name in the credits – perhaps we are just to assume that she did her own lines, but I’ve heard her talk several times before and something just didn’t sound right during her opening monologue.
Britney’s Dance Beat is short. If you have any skill at all with such games you will probably finish each character in and hour or less. That gives you a total of six hours of gameplay for the single player. Of course you may not unlock all the backstage passes, which means going back and doing it all over again. And if you want to unlock the secret “Baby One More Time” video you will need no less than 9,999 points.
The two-player competition will be the only thing that will spark any extended gameplay, but even that won’t be enough to generate any late fees at the local rental store.
It’s amazing how your perception of a game can change based on the time spent playing it. I played Dance Beat at the THQ booth at E3 and loved it. But once I sat down to play it in private I realized the game was over before it had even started.
This game is all about Britney, and unless you happen to be a loyal fan with a PS2 you probably won’t give this title a second glance. Being a Britney game you are instantly limited to only the songs that she performs, but when the designers limit you to only five of these songs you have a demo; not a game.
Even padding the game with exclusive video and concert footage isn’t enough to give this title the substance required to recommend it as a purchase. If you’re a Britney fan then rent this game – if you are a Britney stalker then go ahead and buy it, but you may want to wait for budget pricing.
And yes – I padded this review with gratuitous images of Britney just like the designers did with the game.