If you’re a Dance Dance Revolution fan, like myself, you’ll find yourself getting tired of the tunes and wishing you could dance to your own music collection. Yes, Konami includes some terrific tracks, including the original cuts. But DDR tunes all have a similar flavor, which of course is very much in the dance/club music vibe.
Enter Dance Factory, a budget title published by Codemasters. The premise of this DDR clone? You guessed it: It creates step patterns to your own songs, creating a custom DDR experience. This should allow the enthusiast to jam to any song they want. In theory, this should be a no brainer for any DDR fan. But did they pull it off?
Happily, they did. Creating your own dance tracks is simple. You just insert your music disc (as Dance Factory keeps running in the PS2’s RAM), and then instruct the software to make a dance track out of the music track you’ve selected. The data for the track is saved to memory card (but not the song itself, of course). This means you’ll have to swap out CDs if you want to use different artists, so I’d advise making a CDR mix album so you don’t have to do that.
Obviously, at this point, you are wondering, “Hey Rob! Does the software do a good job of making a dance track?”
My answer to you is: “Yes…. if you choose the right songs.”
I experimented with tunes from all kinds of genres. And what I discovered was this: the more simple the rhythm of the tune, the better results. Putting in some jazz created a choatic dance that was near impossible. A good rock n’ roll tune, however, works great! I put in some Jeff Beck, and the resulting dance track was pretty solid, even offering some pretty neat patterns.
There is one thing that Codemasters did that was pretty weird, however. They reverse the “down” and “up” arrows from the order that they are in standard DDR games. As DDR’s competitors don’t do this, I don’t know why they felt the need to do so here. This will frustrate DDR veterans as their instincts will be thrown off. I did find, however, that I was able to adjust pretty well.
The graphical look of the game is pretty generic, although you can unlock new themes and “creatures” (things that dance on the screen). That said, the game offers a large array of options, including Eye Toy support (!), competitive play, and workout modes that count calories. It also comes with five licensed tracks that are already good to go.
The game offers three levels of difficulty, and when you create a new dance track, it creates a track for each difficulty level. The hardest level is somewhat like DDR’s “standard” mode (and DDR freaks can attest that “standard” is actually “hard” on Konami’s game). Sometimes the software creates some patterns that are pretty ridiculous, but that can be rectified by having the game create a new one for you. Also, you can create your own tracks in the editor, instead of using the software’s auto create function, but this is much harder than it appears.
The biggest weakness of Dance Factory is that there is no substitute for a real Dance Dance Revolution track, programmed by an expert. While Dance Factory does an admirable job in generating tracks for you, there will always be a number of things that seperate it from a “real” DDR track. This includes weird/impossible step patterns, unnatural gaps between steps, and lack of special effects (tempo slowdown, etc.). And of course Konami’s original has a certain flavor that is hard to beat.
So while these issues keep Dance Factory from ruling the dance floor outright, there is no reason why this budget priced game (already dirt cheap on the discount racks) can’t at least share the floor with Konami’s dancer. DDR fans looking for a chance of pace musically should love Dance Factory, and casual dancers will appreciate the added flexability the game gives them.
Grade: B.