Sonic with a gun and Mario dancing? They must have spiked my water.

The image is burned into my brain: Mario cabbage-patching on a boat to the rhythms of a techno-version of the Mario Bros' theme song. Make it stop, make it stop!

DDR Mario Mix blends Konami's ability to turn chart-topping music into fast, fun dance games with Nintendo's stable of unforgettable characters and music. The results are a wonderful first real drop into the dance game crazy for Nintendo, and it looks like it's worthy of the company's name.

The first thing I noticed about the game was the dance pad, the large blue pad used for the game has a big Mario painted right in the center. Very sweet.

The game has both straight-up dance modes and a story mode that features the sort of bizarre, non-sensical plot that is pure Nintendo. Whichever mode you choose the end result is that you will be doing lots of dancing in different setting with Mario and other Nintendo characters as your dancing avatar and reworked Nintendo classic music as your dance tunes. (There are six character to choose from and 25 songs to dance to.)

The only other noticeable difference was that the game was a real stickler for scoring. I tried my hand at the game, apparently I was first to dance in the van, and paused a second to take a picture. The one pause made me miss a handful of moves and lead to my getting an F. Harsh.

Not only do you get to cap some major ass in Shadow the Hedgehog, you have Sonic running along side you when you do it, providing decidedly inappropriate commentary.

For this twist on their top franchise, Sega didn't just slap some paint on Sonic and heel him, they plopped Sonic's evil twin down in a world just as dark as he is and then let him run amok.

While Shadow's ability to gun down his foes is quite a departure from past Sonic titles, the best things about this game is that it still maintains the frenetic pacing, jumps and coins that were hallmarks of past incarnation of the game. Most importantly, past concerns about control issues seemed to have been resolved in the sections of the game I played.

Still, it really was disturbing to run around gunning down bad guys with Sonic at your elbow offering up "atta boys" in his elfish voice. From what I saw, this looks like it could be Sega's next big thing.