Tick tock boogie

by ERIK LEIJON

After playing demos of Boogie (Wii/EA, EA Montreal) at E3 and at the EA Montreal company launch barbecue two weeks ago, my excitement for this jack-of-all-trades singing and dancing title had reached a fever pitch. After about one hour of playing, it became evident that Boogie was made for five-minute spurts, since the game is a plethora of good, only partially realized ideas.

It’s unfortunate Boogie doesn’t entirely live up to its promise, not only because a new Wii game that isn’t a half-assed port or retread is a rare occurrence, but it is so utterly obvious which aspects of the game are successful and which aren’t that a future Boogie could very easily rectify these problems.

The game is a series of either dancing levels or singing levels. The dancing levels involve jerking the Wii remote either up, down, left or right to the beat (there is no set pattern to follow like in Dance Dance Revolution), building up your cute dancing character’s boogie metre. If the metre is filled, dancers can then either perform button-specific combos or head poses. These levels are the gaming equivalent of South Park’s Monkey Phonics; a metronome sound emanates from the remote’s speaker, so even the tone deaf can easily follow the tick, tock, tick, tock. Since one doesn’t have to follow a specific set of commands, dancing is reduced to moving the remote randomly to the beat, thus giving every song a similar feel (as proven by the near-identical scores I got on every level).

The singing levels are a less stylish SingStar, and would work well if it weren’t for the horribly cheesy song selection. It’s bad enough that most of the songs are old disco tracks, but all of them are performed by atrocious cover bands. One of my favourite songs, Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” sounds like Eiffel 65 unearthing the corpse of Robert Miles. Boogie prides itself on being a fun party game, but compared to the audience-grabbing Guitar Hero, there is considerable progress yet to be made. The two-player dancing challenges are nowhere as confrontational as they could be: characters have the ability to move around the stage but can’t come into contact with each other. It would be fun to avoid opposing hip checks while trying to keep the beat. There’s no singing multiplayer—an omission that sticks out considerably.

The story mode features five amusing characters (including a dead ringer for SpongeBob’s cohort Patrick Star), each with their own separate storyline. Each story takes around 25 minutes to beat, and, taking a page out of the ass-backwards Nintendo book, the cutscenes are still pictures with only text, so the fun story is nearly ruined by archaic presentation. PaRappa was endearing because of the well-produced cutscenes and that title came out a decade ago, so EA Montreal really has no excuse for taking this route.

I did notice the clever Army of Two (another game developed by EA Montreal) reference, and the long-winded text had a few good jokes worth reading. Another feature is the option to record and edit every performance. It’s a fun mode that could have been better had specific goals or missions been included. Being forced to replay the entire song when editing was a pain.

Despite these problems, I want to see a Boogie sequel. The characters have the potential to be hot property for EA. The overall concept of the dancing levels is fine, but every song and stage needs its own unique variations. Boogie could be a title that benefits from having original music written specifically for the game. Elite Beat Agents was another clever dance game brought down by lame, generic disco covers. It would be tough to karaoke to a song you’ve never heard before, but Boogie has the advantage of allowing players to dance to them and become familiar with the beat before grabbing the mic.