WEBmikey: Dance Factory / PS2 : 2 of 5

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Dance Factory / PS2 : 2 of 5
9.14.2006 11:19 PM \| Link	Such a tragic story - I remember seeing a magazine ad for Dance Factory back during the summer and instantly getting excited about every DDR maniac's "dream game". I'm sure everyone who plays as much as I do has hoped for the same thing - to be able to dance to any CD of music! Well, I survived the wait (including a couple of delays by the developers), and got the game - I had to buy it just to support the Bemani industry. Sadly, Dance Factory is more like Dance Frustration. There are some good points - the game does its job with generating dances for your own CDs, and the waiting time isn't too bad. Some of these dances are fun and the general graphic look of the game (which has to be fully loaded in PS2 memory) is fine with me. I really like Endurance mode, since it's fun to dance through a whole CD. OK, on to the bad stuff - the song analyzer is downright stupid (granted, I'm sure it's not an easy coding task). It tries to key off any prominent sound in the song, so anything with a syncopated beat can causing the timing to go wonky. Sometimes it guesses an incredibly slow beat for a fast song, and vice versa. It does an OK job with stuff like Kumi Koda and Heartsdales, but unfortunately can't deal with Morning Musume since their songs have so much going on that the waveform must be fairly even. But, even if I could forgive the bad dance timing, there's simply no accepting the switched arrow order - the up and down arrows are reversed from standard DDR, meaning that my well-trained brain who sees steps as pre-defined patterns naturally screws up. I can make the switch for the easier modes, but it's too much pain in Pro mode, which would be the most fun to play. Finally, I just have to say that the whole "creature" thing is a tremendous waste of code for the ugliest, most unnecessary feature ever included in a game. I would be twice as sad if DDR SuperNova wasn't just around the corner - I'll have some "real" fresh dancing soon! Labels: games


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