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For those of you who have the Kinect, Dance Central was THE game to get for it. With songs like "Poison" and "Brick House", it was the first game that actually made me want to get off my butt and dance. Though to be fair, Kinect Sports and Kinect Adventures are great games in their own right, there's nothing quite like the feeling you get when your dance moves sends your friend crying off to mommy. Haha but in all seriousness, Dance Central made dancing fun. With Break it Down mode, you could learn moves at your own pace, and the actual song never stopped just because you weren't doing so well that one time.
If you didn't think it could get any better, trust me -it does. The main feature to come to Dance Central 2 is the ability of two people to play at the same time. The function works well enough, though it does get awkward depending on which songs you do. It's actually not a fault of the Kinect, just that one person's body movements sometimes gets in front of yours, and it confuses the game. A nice addition to the game is that when you pick a song, before you play it, the game actually does a little preview of the dance moves involved with the songs a nice quick way to see how difficult the moves actually are (or aren't).
You also can import your songs from the original Dance Central, unfortunately you have to pay for the privilege. I really shouldn't have to spend Microsoft Points to redownload the songs just allow me to store the songs from Dance Central on the HDD or USB stick, and play them from there in Dance Central 2. Also, one of the commentors had mentioned that the dancers don't do their little quirky sayings and moves in the beginning of songs anymore. He's correct, but I'm sure I like it or not. Having them making random sayings or moves gave them personality almost making me choose one over the others. Maybe it's just me though....
One more thing that can be hit or miss: the game now allows you to go through menus and change options by the regular hand swipes, or with your voice. The voice recognition does work, but I've noticed that it sometimes has a hard time picking up your voice when you're in a song. I really don't like having to turn my TV down when I'm singing "Break Your Heart" by Taio Cruz, ok Harmonix??
Those are really the only three things I can say that are somewhat a negative to this fantastic sequel. They also changed up the songs somewhat picking some more 90s and today's hits, like "What is Love?" by Haddaway and "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot. I have to say it flawless performance on this, Harmonix. Another thing I enjoyed: Dance Battles just got a whole lot more interesting. Instead of having Freestyle like in Perform It mode, they took it out, and put in Freestyle Moves, where the game shows you 4 different moves, and each person can choose whichever they want to perform, but if you and the other player start performing the SAME move, you basically go head-to-head to see who can finish the move correctly FIRST. I can't tell you how much more fun and competitive that made Dance Battles. Also something to note Dance Central 2 introduced Gold Moves, which are worth 4x the points. And yes Gold Moves are in Freestyle Moves (can't tell you how much of a competition that creates).
Between the awesome selection of music to the once-again awesome and nice twist of humor in the move names (Sir Mix-It-Up, Funky Charleston just a few of the ones I noticed), Dance Central 2 proves that if you just put the time and effort into it, sequels really can be better than the originals....
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I'm an old lady, but I love the Dance Central series. And DC2 is a worthy -better than worthy -successor to DC.Like in DC, you'll get to learn new dance moves and choreographies, sweat, and generally have a good time set to good music. But there are a few differences.
1) Graphics. The graphics are a lot better this go-round, from the backgrounds to the way the characters move. Instead of being set in a gritty city setting, they've moved down to a Cali/Miami-styled place, with richer and brighter colors. DC2 looks amazing. The incidental music feels more sophisticated.
2) Instead of dancing as a particular character, you dance with a "crew," whether that means the athletes of Riptide, the club kidz of Hi-Def, or one of the other styled crews. I haven't seen Dare or Oblio, two fan faves from DC, so far in a few hours of play. Boo. However, the crews mean there's a campaign mode. You select the level of difficulty for the dances at the outset (Easy, Medium or Hard), then cruise from one crew to the next dancing their routines with them. This means you get to go through the campaign three times, if you want, and the personalities of the crews come through.
3) Fitness is tweaked. There are playlists, which load pretty rapidly, so you can either do a 20-minute low-impact workout or a 50-minute "long hall." The game estimates calories for you, though I'm curious to know how it does so since a medium-sized old lady like myself burns a vastly lower amount of calories than someone significantly larger and a lot more than a skinny kid. You can also create your own playlists. If there were a "shuffle mode" that would have been perfection.
4) Break It Down mode is WAY better. You can actually get through it faster than in DC, and using voice commands can slow it down, video your movements and check against the dancer, and focus on one or two moves you may need to get through. The only reason I'll never have all the achievements on DC is because one is "get 100 percent on all songs in break it down." If this tech had existed for DC, I might have gotten it.
5) Import all your DC songs. This is great, but 400 MSP? Come on. I'm glad I got the pre-order free points to do it. But the instructions were wrong -don't redeem code from inside the game for this, go through your XboxLive account. Seriously, there are too many digits for the in-game code redemption, which works for the 240 MSP card you get inside the package.
Speaking of songs, there are some really good ones on DC2. Lots of them are not family-friendly, even with words blipped out. And there are a lot of "meh" songs. I think my biggest disappointment in the DC series is that there is a lot of great dance music out there, but a lot of what DC licenses is ... "meh." What's up with that? Why don't they get a whack at better songs? They get a lot of great songs through "Rock Band," why is a dance game such a challenge?
While I'm on about song choices, I think one of the things that hampers the series is its music choices are all in a limited genre -hip hop, classic disco/funk and pop. Why not bust out an occasional jazz standard, rockabilly or country song, at least for DLC? Here's where having characters and crews kind of limits the range, one way that the Just Dance series overcomes these limitations. Of course, Just Dance 3 is way more family-friendly than DC. But my point is that if you're going to limit your range, you need to get the best of what's available from that range, and I don't know that Harmonix necessarily does that (I mean, three novelty songs -the Numa Numa song, "What is Love?" and "Baby Got Back" are supplemented with the Humpty Dance. This is too much novelty. At least they're fun to dance, if not to have stuck in your head -damn you, Haddaway.)
6) Two people can dance at the same time. Yay! Party time! And there are mini-games in the multiplayer mode.
7) You can shut off Freestyle mode and just do programmed moves for all the DC2 dances (not so much the older stuff you have).
8) The way it reads your moves seems to have improved. Although going "down" in a scroll menu you can still have a rough time of it getting "stuck."
At any rate, there were reasons that DC was the best, most-popular Kinect title on the market forever. And those same reasons -fun, fitness, challenge, friendly multiplayer -are still around, and even stronger, in DC2.
Best Deals for Dance Central 2 - Xbox 360
When you think about the Kinect, there are a handful of games that come to mind. Without doubt, Dance Central has earned its spot in the Kinect Hall of Fame. There are dance games and then there is Dance Central. Millions of fans have benefited from the fun approach of dance instruction and often club floors are living testimony of Dance Centralfs impact. Now, the DC crew is back and better than ever in Dance Central 2 for Kinect.FEATURES
There are many positive things to talk about with Dance Central 2. Immediately you will notice the clean interface and ease of menu navigation. The original version of DC was already clean, but Harmonix took their time to make navigation even more of a breeze. This aided tremendously by the addition of voice commands. Within seconds of popping in the game, you can be dancing. For me, all it took was literally saying, gXbox, dance, song, Like a G6, XBox danceh. And off I went.
For those that have already played the first Dance Central and even purchased songs, everything is ready to transfer directly into Dance Central 2. Purchased songs will automatically show up in Dance Central 2s playlist. To carry over all the songs from the original Dance Central, you will need the code that came with the first game and 400 MS Points (5 USD). The transition is smooth, but you will need a harddrive or USB drive, as well as a connection to the internet. Once the songs carry over, everything is integrated into the game. Your play list becomes HUGE. All of Dance Central 2s new features are supported except the option to skip the freestyle part of the song.
The new game play modes are subtle, but add a lot of play value to Dance Central 2. My personal favorite new additions include the ability to make my own playlists and the Dance Crew challenges. There are already a decent amount of pre-made playlists, but you are able to pick your own songs for some killer back-to-back dancing sessions. As for the Dance Crew challenges, this is as close as you are going to get in a story mode for the game. Essentially, you meet a Dance Crew, dance the selected songs, and unlock the next crew. This makes it more of an immersive game versus dancing for the heck of it.
One huge bonus of Dance Central 2 is the ability to have two players, either playing cooperatively or battling it out. The second player can hop in and out of the game with ease and at any time. Like the song? Jump in and play. That easy.
One of the main niceties of playlists is for working out. Our Kinect to Fitness and Health group has already seen great success in people losing up to and over 100 pounds from playing the original Dance Central. On top of the improvements already mentioned, the workout mode now has its own screen in Dance Central 2. Calories are tracked from every activity, including Break It Down mode. When doing the playlists, the songs flow from one to another without interruption. What I absolutely LOVE is how quickly you now move into the song. No more waiting for your dancer to bounce around and talk buckets of smack. They might do a quick move and a few words, but nothing like the original Dance Central. And finally, when the dancing is done, the calories are added all up. The calorie tracker may not be totally correct (no weight or gender asked), but you definitely have an idea of how close you are to burning off that Halloween candy.
Break It Down mode has returned and has been made more inviting for us impatient folks. The same mode from the original has returned, but with added voice control. There is a sweet satisfaction in yelling, gskiph after being told to perform ehitch a ridef for the millionth time. Better yet, for the returning veterans, you will be able to pick out certain steps to learn, versus learning the routine. And for the curious mind that wants to know exactly what they are doing, you can shout, grecord videoh and a video of you dancing a particular move will show up behind the dance leader for comparison.
The final added feature that really brightened my day was the cleaned up store-front. The first Dance Central had the ability to buy extra songs, but was made cumbersome by having to pull up an extra menu and scroll through a few songs at a time. The new store is built into the game and is just as easy to navigate as the playerfs song list is. With a quick flick of the wrist, you can be jamming to James Brown in no time.
GRAPHICS AND SONGS
Despite all the nifty new features, the dividing point between Dance Central 2 and Just Dance 3 seems to be the songs and the graphics. Ifll have a more detailed comparison of these two games up later. As for Dance Central 2, the graphics are very similar, but have definitely had an overall. Character models are similar, but backgrounds and special effects have been smoothed out and upgraded. The game is a lot more pleasing to the eye. Between the scenic locales and neon hand paths, everything feels more alive than the original.
Everything in a dance game comes down to one thing: songs. The fact is, if you enjoy the music, you will enjoy dancing to it. Dance Central 2 has everything from Gaga to Willow in it. There isnft a song on the list that you probably wonft hear at the club. The song variety is a little more eclectic than the first Dance Central, but you still wonft find anything your granny might be anxious to jump into. The songs are all fun, even the Bieber one, but thankfully there are those playlists to pick your favoritescjust in case youfve had your fill of ethe Biebh.
THE FIVE Ffs
When reviewing games, I like to look for the five ffs: family, fitness, fun, functionality, and firsts. Dance Central 2 is rated for the teen crowd and above. Mostly for lyrics, but there are a few mildly suggestive dances. I mean, do you really think you can dance Baby Got Back or The Humpty Dance without smacking some booty? For the fitness folks, there isnft a better game I can think of that will get your cardio flowing. Playlists and trimmed song intros will make sure you are getting a full heart-pounding workout. Without doubt Dance Central 2 is one of the most fun games around. Now with two player tracking and voice commands, the same trusted functionality of the original has been upped. There isnft a lot ground-breaking features that Dance Central 2 brings to the table, but you can expect a lot of additional features compared to the original. Calorie tracking, playlists, uploading to Facebook, and more have all been done by other games, but now you can have the complete package.
PROS
Streamlined play
Two players
Playlist creation
Calorie tracker
Many more!!
CONS
None!
FINAL THOUGHTS
If you have ever been interested in a dancing game, then this is the one to get. With the streamlined play, ability to bring in your previously owned songs, and added player tracking, youfll be partying for quite a while. The song selection has spread out, but still maintains its roots. Essentially, the bottom line is, if you own a Kinect then you will need to eventually own Dance Central 2.
Honest reviews on Dance Central 2 - Xbox 360
I must say the song selection, character design, co-op play, and newly renovated moves are refreshing, but sadly this game has one design flaw unlike Dance Central 1, which worked well with my large frame and helped me to lose 100lbs (Yay me!), I have found within the first hour of play, that it will not register me below the waist at all (Even though I am wearing skin-tight pants, and have checked to make sure I appear fully in the camera frame), and it will barely register my arms, although this may be due to a baggy sleeves issue. However, this was never an issue before in DC1, wearing the exact same clothing. I feel like I have wasted my money in a game that keeps telling me I am doing the moves wrong when I know, as a veteran 5-Star DC1 player, that I am doing them right. I can't imagine what the issue here is... a change in programming perhaps? However, I really regret pre-ordering it now, as it cannot be returned (as it is opened). It's really too bad. I feel like I am stuck with a game I cannot play. I hope other larger people like myself will be helped by my review, and at least rent the game before buying to see if it will register you correctly. I gave this a five star rating for fun, because even though it would not register me, I got a great workout and had fun playing this game with my husband and friends. It gets only a 3 star rating overall because of the issue I have described. I should mention, to make sure this is not a camera or hardware issue, that all my thinner friends registered for the camera and were able to play just fine.UPDATE 1/13/2013: Dusted off the game after basically ignoring it for awhile to find a series up updates available which seem to have fixed my problems. It reads me fairly well now, and while not perfect, makes the game fun.
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Dance Central 2 - Xbox 360
Dance Central was a huge step forward in dance video games when it was released as a launch title for the Xbox Kinect. It wasn't the first video game to let you use "real dance steps" (Just Dance had pioneered the concept a year earlier on the Wii). But by making use of the Kinect, it offered unprecedented accuracy in evaluating your precise moves. The question is, does Dance Central 2 move the platform forward? The answer is a resounding "yes".As soon as I started up the game, one thing I noticed right away was that my whole body was getting picked up by the Kinect sensor, even though my TV is only about 6 feet from me. I can't tell you how many Kinect games can only detect my torso and above.
Something else I noticed right off the bat was that the user interface that Harmonix developed was the best I've seen of any Kinect game. You can scroll through long song lists easily, and menu selections require simple and foolproof "swipes" of the hand. Microsoft should require every game developer to use this instead of the current situation where each invents their own.
Okay, on to the game play itself.
There are five menu options when you start Dance Central. They are:
Dance
Crew Challenge
Fitness
Options
Buy New Dances
As with the previous version of Dance Central, you can just jump right into dancing by selecting "Dance". You'll be shown a list of songs to choose from. I noticed that as of today the Amazon product page doesn't have the list of songs, so I'll provide it here (the complexity of the song is in parentheses):
Atlantic Connection and Armanni Reign Reach (1)
B.o.B ft. Bruno Mars Nothin' on You (3)
Bananarama Venus (2)
Bobby Brown My Prerogative (4)
Britney Spears Toxic (7)
Bruno Mars Grenade (4)
Chingy Right Thurr (3)
Ciara ft. Petey Pablo Goodies (4)
Daddy Yankee ft. Fergie Impacto Remix (2)
Daft Punk Technologic (6)
Darude Sandstorm (1)
David Guetta ft. Akon Sexy Chick (7)
Diddy ft. Keyshia Cole Last Night (2)
Digital Underground The Humpty Dance (2)
Donna Summer Hot Stuff (3)
Electric Valentine Body to Body (3)
Enrique Iglesias ft. Pitbull I Like It (3)
EXILE I Wish for You (4)
Far East Movement ft. Cataracs and Dev Like a G6 (5)
Flo Rida ft. David Guetta Club Can't Handle Me (3)
Gnarls Barkley Run I'm a Natural Disaster (6)
Haddaway What Is Love (5)
Justin Bieber Somebody to Love (6)
Kevin Lyttle Turn Me On (2)
Kurtis Blow The Breaks (2)
La Roux Bulletproof (2)
Lady Gaga Bad Romance (5)
Lady Gaga Born This Way (5)
Lena Satellite (7)
Little Boots Meddle (4)
Mary J. Blige Real Love (1)
Missy Elliot Get Ur Freak On (7)
Montell Jordan This Is How We Do It (2)
New Boyz You're a Jerk (3)
Nicki Minaj ft. Sean Garrett Massive Attack (4)
O-Zone Mai Ai Hee Dragostea Din Tei (1)
Remy Ma Conceited There's Something About Remy (5)
Rihanna Rude Boy (3)
Sean Kingston Fire Burning (3)
Sir Mix-a-Lot Baby Got Back Mix Mix (6)
Tweet ft. Missy Elliot Oops Oh My (3)
Usher ft. Lil' Jon & Ludacris Yeah! (5)
Usher ft. Pitbull DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love (5)
Willow Smith Whip My Hair (5)
For each song, each player can select a difficulty of Easy, Medium, or Hard. The "complexity of the song" plus "difficulty level" together dictate how complex and intricate the choreography is.
As others have noted, new to Dance Central 2 is the ability for two dancers to dance at once head-to-head. Once you select a song, the screen basically splits into two sides, where both dancers select the difficulty level they want to dance to (this allows for a "golf-like handicap" where strong dancers and weaker dancers can compete head-to-head). Here's where you really do need at least 8-10 feet of space and to stand separately, or you'll be bumping into each other and confusing the system if your motions cross.
I was a little perplexed as to why the system automatically assumed that two players; I would have rather seen the split screen come up only when another person stepped into the camera. Still, if you're playing solo, you can just ignore the left side of the screen and select "Play Solo".
The first time you play, you start out by reviewing the basics. For those who don't know, the concept is simple: you try to mirror the movements of an on-screen dancer as if you're looking through a mirror. A series of unique flashcards, with real dance move names like "cabbage patch", "snake", and "shoulder pop", will tell you which moves you should be performing as well as which ones are coming up. You have a couple cues to tell you how well you're dancing--a "spotlight" under your feet will display encouraging words when you hit the moves, the onscreen dancers will glow red if you're out of place, a boombox will display 1-5 stars depending on your progress through the song. Gold flashcards are worth 4x the points, and if you nail multiple moves at once, you'll "pump up the room".
Most of the reviewers have already talked about how spot-on the motion detection is, and all I can say is I agree. Every motion of your arms, legs, and body seem to be tracked almost perfectly. There are certain types of actions that the Kinect isn't necessarily great for (gunfire, precision sword fighting, and auto racing come to mind), but it's games like this where the Kinect's capabilities really shine.
After the song is done, you can view Photos of your performance. A nice new touch is that there is also a "Break Down" section, where the system will identify which areas of the song you didn't perform very well in, and review which areas you need to practice.
"Crew Challenge" is another new feature of the game. This is a 2-player "story" mode where both players perform as a "Dance Crew" battling to get to the top. Scoring works the same as in Dance mode with a few differences. For example, during dance battles, each member of the crew will be able to "go solo" where good performances will result in double the points. During a "Free 4 All", the dancers have to perform any of the moves of the song to score points. And so on. I was a little disappointed that the mode required two players, as this leaves out a large percentage of people. Having said that, if you've got a dancing buddy, you're going to love it.
To play "Fitness" mode you need to sign into a gamer profile. There's no option on the main menu to do this, you need to go to the Kinect menu and do it. Once you're signed in, you're brought to a menu where you can "Enable Fitness Mode". Once you've done this, the game will begin to track the calories you burn and the length of time you've played the game, both per session and lifetime. There are also a couple suggested workouts song mixes you can choose from, with names ranging from "Easy Start" (a 20-minute workout consisting of lighter songs such as Last Night and Hot Stuff) to "Sprint" (a 10-minute workout consisting of intense songs such as "Run (I'm a Natural Disaster" and "Toxic") and "The Long Haul" (a 49 minute marathon consisting of just about everything). I would have liked some more features within Fitness mode, such as the ability to set goals, set a schedule, see graphs of your progress, and so on. But regardless of all that, Dance Central 2 does have the potential of being a great way to work out that surpasses any step aerobics class at the gym.
In the "Options" menu, you can turn on and off Photos, Freestyling, Autosave, and Voice Control. There's also an intruguing option called "Enter Cheats".
"Buy New Dances" leads you to the downloadable content store. As of this writing there are 32 additional songs, each costing 240 Microsoft Points (about $3 a song). You can also purchase Dance Packs for 480-960 Microsoft Points each, and Marathon Packs for 1400 Microsoft Points. There's a pretty good variety of artists to choose from, from Ne-Yo to Rihanna to James Brown to The Black Eyed Peas to Sean Paul.
Bottom line, Dance Central 2 is a great sequel to an already great game. Of course, there is going to be a debate over whether Dance Central 2 or Just Dance 3 is the "better game", and I'm sure opposing sides will defend their choice with religious ferocity. But from my point of view, they're very different games. Just Dance seems to put more of an emphasis on being party game that's just "fun" (with more frivolous and lighthearted choreography and multi-platform play, but perhaps at the expense of precise motion tracking), while Dance Central definitely puts a higher emphasis on technical accuracy and perfecting the dance steps. But at the end of the day, both are extremely enjoyable to play, and both can provide a great workout.
But when all is said and done, from a motion detection perspective and a game which can teach you real dance moves that you can take onto any dance floor, Dance Central 2 right now represents the pinnacle of "real dance move-based" dance games on any platform.