Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix

I had always liked the Dance Dance Revolution series well enough, but since I didn’t own any of the systems that it came out on, I was restricted to playing it in the arcades, and at $1.00 or so a pop, I didn’t play very often. Well, and the crowds, I hate flailing around in time to techno music in front of a crowd.

I was pretty jazzed to find out that Konami had finally acquiesced and brought out a version of this franchise for the Game Cube starring characters from the Mario universe, so I could finally take part in the ‘DDR Workout Program’ that I’ve heard so much about.

For the sheltered few that may not know, Dance Dance Revolution games are rhythm/dancing games. Some goofy song plays and arrows (up, down, left, right, or some combination of them) scroll up from the bottom of the screen. They cross a silhouette at the top of the screen, and it’s your job to press the corresponding arrows on the giant dance pad at your feet, in time with the music of course.

It also just wouldn’t be a Mario game unless there was some goofy story involved. It’s kind of a nice change of pace to hold the stages together, rather than the other versions of DDR that just kind of throw some songs at you with nothing to really hold them together. They also like to break up the action with a couple of Mario Party style mini-games.

I only had a couple of complaints about this game. The songs were overall pretty well done, especially the remixes of the Mario series songs, but there just weren’t enough of them. There are less than two dozen songs in the game and half of those are techno remixes of public domain songs. And, yes, a techno-remix of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is just as good as it sounds.

I also found it odd that while two people can play the game, it requires two pads to do so appropriately. Not too big of a deal until you find out that they only sell extra pads through Nintendo’s online store, which just seemed weird to me.

The game also was pretty short. I managed to play through the entire game and unlock all of the songs in two playthroughs, which took about two hours. A little disappointing for a $50 game.

But other than those relatively minor things, it’s a solid game, and certainly worth playing at least once.

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