Kotaku
I spent some hands-on time with EA Montreal's Boogie recently to get a feel for how the original singing and dancing game will play. What was shown was frequently given the caveat of "pre-alpha" software. There wasn't a great deal of content ready for public display, but the core gameplay concepts were there, finally giving us an indication how Boogie's mechanics will set themselves apart.
The game has two distinct modes of play, dancing and singing. The latter couldn't be more straightforward. It's karaoke. The interface (which appeared pre-pre-alpha) looked very familiar to anyone who has played SingStar or Karaoke Revolution and should perform capably in the tunes department.
Only one song was ready for play, The Commodores "Brick House", but other tracks populated the song list including "You're The One That I Want" from the movie Grease, KC & The Sunshine Band's "That's The Way I Like It" and The Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha." Yep, that's pretty much every song you'll never want to hear again.
One nice feature described to us by the Boogie dev team was the game's "vocal assist" which, optionally, will mix your own voice with the pre-recorded vocal track, making the tone-deaf a little more aurally palatable. EA staffers told us that while the game will ship with a packed-in microphone, the final design hasn't yet been decided.
Dancing mode looks like somewhat familiar territory for EA Montreal, taking the SSX Blur control scheme and mutating it for performing dance tricks. It's less Dance Dance Revolution than it is a trick-based rhythm title. Think DDX, with less focus on strict beats and more focus on personalized performances.
The controls are set up in a fashion that seems to be popular among EA designers, the nunchuk controller will see your left hand controlling specific body motions, including, oddly enough, modifying facial expressions with the analog stick. Rotating the nunchuk twists your head and spine with the Z button opening and closing your mouth. How that will affect your performance was unclear, but it appears that having your character "sing" in time to the vocal track will net you a better score.
The Wii remote performs your avatar's dance moves, which EA has turned into a series of tricks and stances. Motions with the remote will perform logical dance moves; moving the remote in an upward motion will make you jump; downward motions will perform squats and splits. Side-to-side motions will elicit side-to-side spins and shuffles. Twist the remote, do a hip twist. It makes sense, but that doesn't mean it's immediately intuitive or overly easy to coordinate. You can switch up these moves with the A button, for style changes, and the B button, which acts as a modifier. The cross pad is used to move your character across, up and down a 3-by-3 grid better known as the dance floor. In other words, no parking on that thing.
Frankly, I was put-off by the current control scheme. It seemed unusually complex for a game clearly targeted at the Wii's more casual audience. Like SSX Blur, I went into Boogie thinking the game would feature a simpler, more intuitive, possibly remote-only method, only to find myself stumbling through my dance routine. EA Montreal may intend for players to more slowly ramp up, to become more accustomed to the coupled waving, twisting and stick control, but jumping into the game with limited play time made me wish for Brick House to end early every time. Granted, the game is still very early and there's more than enough time for fine-tuning, but there's one more aspect to the controls left to consider.
You'll need to shuffle your Boog all over the danceable area to pick up tokens (used to buy new clothes, hairstyles, accessories), multipliers, as well as power-ups for your Idol Meter. The Idol Meter will fill up as you successfully pull off dance moves, on-beat, allowing you to pull of uber-tricks (in a dancing sense) with a series of Wii remote motions while holding down A+B. These were still not finalized for our playtest and will surely see some changes in their implementation.
One interesting feature of Boogie that will surely fit well with the Wii partying crowd is the game's video recording tool. Your dancing and singing performances can be saved to the Wii's internal storage for posterity and humiliation purposes. EA promises an editing "toy" that will let you change camera angles and add effects.
There's still a good deal of Boogie that is currently still unrevealed and unfinished. While the game's multiplayer capabilities elicited many "I can't talk about that yet" responses, it looks like two-player support will allow one dancer and one singer, or two dancers.
Boogie has promise, but I relayed my control concerns to the team who told me they're still early in development. The game has style and substance, and fans of SSX Blur will probably understand best the design philosophy behind Boogie, but how well it will ultimately play is still an uknown.
You can check out the game's visuals in five new shots in our gallery, or hold tight for video.
