

The backup dancers aren't great, but the environments sure are. It's just regular DDR with a calorie meter. It doesn't feel like Konami put much thought into this, though. From there, you basically play through a list of songs until you've met your goal. Here, you enter a few details about yourself and then set a number of calories you'd like to burn.
WII DANCE PARTY AND MAT FREE
Now if only there was some way to freeze a song without automatically losing, like some kind of superadvanced pause feature.Īside from groove circuit and free play, you can also play workout mode. This should be made much more obvious than it is.
WII DANCE PARTY AND MAT PLUS
By holding the plus button, you can autofail. If you wind up eating a missile or generally screwing up at the start of a song, you might as well start over-but how? Once a song has begun in Hottest Party, there is only one way to stop it (aside from shutting off your console), and it isn't intuitive at all. You aren't competing against any sort of artificial intelligence, just a score.

The computer gets the same score every single time, misses the exact same number of notes, and tends to earn a high B. In that regard, these "battles" aren't battles at all. They just hover around and try to slip through at inopportune moments. The game makes it sound as if they're attacks you inflict on your foe, but neither player has any degree of control over them. Basically, you and a computer-controlled dancer step your way through a song while hand or foot missiles float around the screen. However, most of the songs are fun to dance to overall, no matter what your taste in music. Of course, for every excellent version of a song such as "Hot Stuff," there's a horrible, slow track such as "Heavens and the Earth," or something so stupid ("We Will Live Together") that it had to be written on ecstasy. There's a good version of "Clocks," a solid cover of the Fresh Prince's "Summertime," as well as "Blue Monday," "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'," "Little L," a surprisingly palatable rendition of "Disco Inferno," the absurdly titled "Rhythm is a Dancer," and "99 Red Balloons," which is a total foot-crusher. But in groove circuit, you wind up dancing to the same songs over and over again.Īnd that's too bad, because the song list is pretty solid. You're guaranteed to play everything at least once, and you'll probably enjoy something you didn't expect to like. Although we appreciate the freedom, we think a guided tour through the tracklist is a better way to go. Right off the bat, you have a huge list at your disposal, as well as objectives like "Get a B rating in three songs." Any three songs. Specifically, it doesn't have you progress through its tracks in any particular order. If you've played a DDR game before, you pretty much know what to expect. This is Hottest Party's single player bread-and-butter, and it should be somewhat entertaining for both novices and veterans alike. Groove circuit, on the other foot, has you traveling through venues and completing various challenges before battling each area's boss character.

In free play, you just pick a song, a venue, and a difficulty, and then dance away. When you begin, you have three play options: free play, groove circuit, and workout mode. So, every time you play DDR, you have to reset them. Of course, you can turn the hand movements off and tweak a few other options, such as freeze arrows and other gimmicks, but none of these preferences are saved if you turn off your system. If you see one of these coming up the right or left side of the screen, you move your right or left hand. New to Hottest Party are diamonds that correspond to hand movements. If you're new to the series, it's all you can do to keep from tripping over your own feet, whereas veterans lithely skip all over the place, seemingly hitting all the arrows at once. In case you're new to DDR, it's a rhythm game that has you stepping all over a mat to hit arrows that match the corresponding arrows flowing up the screen to the caffeinated beat of a popular dance track. The diamond means you shake it like a Polaroid picture. As a result, it's much easier to dive into, even though it doesn't add anything to the series. But unlike later PlayStation 2 releases, Hottest Party isn't completely encumbered with random modes and features. And if you're like us, you do enough of that when you're really dancing.īut aside from the lame Wii Remote action, Hottest Party is another DDR game with most of the modes, moves, and crazy arrows seen in previous versions. Instead of going for grace and gusto, Hottest Party goes for random, nervous twitches. One of the most timeless questions in the world of dance is: What do you do with your hands? Do you stick up your thumb like a hitchhiker? Flap your arms like a chicken? Wave them in the air like you just don't care? There are lots of options, and that's why Konami's Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party for the Wii is a little disappointing.
