Girls, girls, girls. No, it's not a Vegas review, it's the target audience for EA's Wii title Boogie SuperStar, which was announced yesterday. I swung by EA's New York press event yesterday, too, where the game was on display, and I took a look at it.
I'm presuming that very few of you reading this are young females between the ages of six and 12 who love to karaoke to Leona Lewis' Bleeding Love, or dance to the best of Fergie and Good Charlotte. The songlist is intimidatingly marquee, though, and one of the major takeaways from having the game demoed for me was just how far games have forged in getting the music biz to recognize their power in helping label artists stay relevant to a new audience.
And while Boogie SuperStar might not be a game specifically for you or for me, I think that's pretty important - equally cool was the motion recognition tech.
It'll come bundled with a microphone for pretty standard-looking pitch and note duration-based karaoke, but for the dancing portion, you hold the Wii remote and Nunchuk and do whatever moves you're prompted to do. Simple stuff, like twirling or arm-rolling, but the guy who was demonstrating for me (yeah, a guy) seemed to be able to move really naturally and have the game still clearly understand which moves he was doing.
The fun part was that the on-screen avatar (characters are fully customizable, by the way) did whatever moves the guy was doing even when they were wrong - in other words, rather than lead the player, the on-screen character follows him, always attuned to the player's movements. That was pretty neat.
It looked like the kind of thing my eight year-old girl cousin would love to have at her next birthday party. There are cartoony narrative cutscenes following your chosen glamor girl's rise to stardom, suitably imbued with 'tween girl signposts of coolness and drama, so the game knows its audience well, even when that audience isn't me.
Girl games have a tendency to make us cringe a bit, but I suppose I'd rather have my cousin rocking out with this game than something with Bratz in it. Shudder.