I cut my arcade pseudo-dancing teeth on Dance Dance Revolution, it was the first game of its kind that I played, and it’s the one that I have the most experience with. Like anything that’s remotely popular, this game has spawned imitators that have tried to expand and improve upon DDR’s formula of stomping on arrows in time to a silly song. One of the apparently more popular ones is the Pump it Up series, and recently I had a chance to play one of the games in the series: Pump it Up: Premiere.
Pump it Up: Premiere stays pretty close to the system introduced in DDR: arrows scroll up from the bottom of the screen and when they cross the line at the top of the screen, you have to stomp on the corresponding arrow on your footpad, in time with the music, of course.
Where the game diverges slightly, other than the almost unilaterally terrible selection of songs, is that the arrows are not the up, down, left, and right found in DDR, but they are in the four corners, up-left, up-right, down-left, and down-right, with a 5th button in the center. My understanding is that this helps people ‘be more expressive’ when they’re pseudo-dancing. I didn’t notice myself expressing myself more, but I did feel like I was a little more bow-legged than normal trying to stretch my legs to the four corners of the pad. I also noticed that since I was ‘trained’ on DDR that I couldn’t find the arrows most of the time, so I missed the steps quite a lot, and managed to fail after only one song.
I haven’t yet decided if I want to try and pay another dollar to play one more song, the price to entertainment time ratio was a little low for my taste. Well, that and the terrible covers of terrible songs.
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