More Body Rocking With Dance Central

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that, of all the games we've seen for ourselves for Microsoft's upcoming Kinect hardware for ourselves, Harmonix's Dance Central is the closest thing that the Xbox 360 motion controller has for a killer app. For me personally, it was the game from E3 2010 that I walked away from the show wanting to play more of right then and there, so I was more than happy to break out my patented white-boy moves when the DC posse rolled through town recently with a fresh build of the game.

I'll admit, after rocking Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" on easy at E3, I walked into this demo with a little too much confidence. This inspired me to skip a few difficulty levels and dive straight into Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It," and for my hubris I was very brutally rebuffed by a choreographed dance assault that I simply could not keep up with. Conveniently, this served as a great opportunity for me to test out Dance Central's Break It Down mode, a sort of built-in tutorial system that will allow you to practice the individual moves in a given routine one at a time before having them all strung together. 

I found that part of the learning curve in Dance Central, particularly on the higher-tempo tracks, is simply figuring out how to reproduce the moves being shown at full-speed. This makes the ability to slow things down within the Break It Down mode incredibly useful. I wouldn't say that I necessarily had "Push It" on lockdown after going through the song piece-by-piece, but it wasn't nearly the dance-tastrophe it would've been otherwise.

Now that we were loose, limber, and, admittedly, drenched in sweat, we shifted our focus to Dance Central's two-player Dance Battle mode. In this mode, two players will alternate dancing to the same sections of a given song, with the score tally at the end determining the winner. While the lack of two-player simultaneous play means that there will, sadly, be no opportunity to recreate the dance-fight from Michael Jackson's "Beat It," I had fun with the Dance Battle mode. Jeff gave me the business on Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head," but I managed to redeem myself by serving Harmonix's John Drake on Fannypack's "Hey Mami," though to be fair, I was playing on easy while Drake played on hard... and was suffering from food poisoning. Still, a win's a win, and I'll take it! 

My only nitpick with the Dance Battle mode is that player one always goes first, which seems to have the potential to give the second player a slight advantage, since they can see what moves they'll have to bust before its their turn to perform. I'm no game designer, but it seems like alternating the play order from one set to the next might help prevent either player from getting an edge.

 Did I mention the sweat? Because Dance Central can definitely be a pretty intense full-body workout, so I can't say that the news that the game would feature a fitness mode came as a particular surprise. Don't expect a Wii Fit or EA Sports Active level of fitness tracking from Dance Central, as that's not really the focus of the game, but it will give you a ballpark figure for how many calories you've burned during a given routine.

Harmonix has also revealed 11 additional tracks that you'll be dancing your ass off to in the game. This still isn't the full track list for Dance Central, but I think it gives a pretty good idea of the styles of dance music that the game is aiming for.

Basement Jaxx - "Rendez-Vu"
Benny Banassi - "Satisfaction"
Cascada - "Evacuate the Dancefloor"
Fannypack - "Hey Mami"
Kool & The Gang - "Jungle Boogie"
Kylie Minogue - "Can't Get Your Out of My Head"
Nelly Furtado - "Maneater"
Nina Sky - "Move Ya Body"
Pitbull - "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)"
Rihanna - "Pon de Replay"
Technotronic - "Pump Up the Jam"

And, if you haven't been keeping track, here are the songs that have already been revealed for Dance Central.

Beastie Boys - "Body MOvin' (Fatboy Slim Remix)"
Bell Biv DeVoe - "Poison"
Lady Gaga - "Poker Face"
Lipps Inc - "Funkytown"
M.I.A. - "Galang '05"
No Doubt - "Hella Good"
Salt-N-Pepa - "Push It"
Snoop Dogg/Pharrell - "Drop It Like It's Hot"
Young MC - "Bust A Move"