It's About Time Somebody Did This
I love DDR as much as anyone, but even the most hardcore player has to admit that it eventually gets repetitive when you're stuck with a very finite number of songs. Dance Factory is a long overdue idea that lives up to its promise. You really can pop in any CD and dance to it.
Granted, there are a few caveats. It takes some time for the game to analyze each track and come up with dance steps, about 30 seconds for a 3-4 minute song. If you're doing a whole CD be prepared to wait up to 10 minutes. There's a mini puzzle game included that you can play while it's creating your dance steps, but I found that this actually made the create phase run much slower. Once you're done you'll need to save the steps to a memory card to avoid waiting the next time around. It's not very space-intensive, however the game doesn't recognize Slot 2 or the PS2 HDD.
I should also mention that the game itself is on a blue-base CD-ROM, not a DVD-ROM. (When was the last time you saw a new PS2 release on one of those?) I've always had a bit of trouble getting my console -- it's the older bulky model -- to read some of these, and it took a couple of resets with the disc already in the drive before it would take it. Occasionally during play the song would cut out before it got to the end, and the game would tell me it had a problem reading it. This happened on different CDs so I'm assuming it's my PS2.
Once Dance Factory loads, you eject the game disc, insert your music CD and create your steps. I experimented with a variety of music types and got mixed results. It seems to work best when there's an easy beat for the game to pick up on. With some old-skool hip-hop and a dance collection that was very similar to what you'd get with DDR, I got pretty good steps. Sometimes they were spot-on, other times the game seemed to get the main beat confused with the half-steps, and I was never certain whether this was intentional. I got similarly decent results from an 80s/90s light rock CD, but highly complex or soft, beatless music (such as jazz and new age) is better left undanced to. Continuous mix CDs don't work so well either, since even in endurance mode the game stops after each song to give you your score, unexpectedly cutting off the segue into the next track. It works much better if there's a fade-out between songs.
My biggest gripe comes from the game's arrow layout. For some reason (possibly legal?) the designers chose to transpose the positions of the up and down arrows on the screen. DDR has pretty much wired my mind to expect: left, down, up, right. So I tend to look at where the arrow is rather than what direction it's pointing. This led to a lot of confusion when I first started. Also I felt the arrow columns are spaced a little too far apart in the one-player mode. Finally a couple of the background themes make it hard to see the arrows coming.
The difficulty also felt unbalanced at times. Even on the pro difficulty a few songs (mostly slower ballads) had steps that were too easy, but for most faster tracks the sheer number of steps was insane. It felt like there was a difficulty level missing between normal and pro. And the step generation algorithm never came up with anything nearly as creative as the human-created moves in a DDR game.
All this said, I'm still glad I got Dance Factory. Dancing to your favorite music is a blast compared to the endless Paranoia remixes. The game itself is far from perfect, but the sheer music variety it gives you makes it a worthwhile purchase for people who love dance games.
This game has its place
Our family has DDR. My two teenage boys are very good at it, and thrive on challenging dance moves. My two grade schoolers just have fun dancing. My wife and I join in occasionally. This game is not for intense DDR fanatics. My teenage boys give the same complaints that other reviewers here do, that the up/down arrows are in reverse order compared to DDR, so for those who almost play DDR with their eyes closed, this will be frustrating. However, for my younger kids (and their parents), we don't care. Our brains don't have DDR burned into them yet. Even my older boys acknowledge that being able to dance to their own music is fun and refreshing, even if it's not as challenging. I agree that some songs don't get read well by the dance making software, so you simply don't play those songs. But I was impressed how well many songs were translated into dance steps. Once you've uploaded songs from a CD, you never have to do it again (as long as you have your memory card inserted). As for CD-R discs, I've had no problem with them. I used quality brand discs, not the super cheapies. I haven't tried CD-RW discs, and wouldn't either. A big plus for parents is that this game has no annoying DJ's voice like our DDR game, and so instead of hearing the same techno songs over and over again with annoying comments like "You're not an ordinary fella!" and "Absolutely wonderful!", when my kids play this game I just hear normal music playing (and feet stomping, of course). As long as you know what to expect from this game, you won't be disappointed, as long as you aren't a super freak intense DDR fanatic. I'm glad we got it.
Good idea, needs work!
I bought this for my fiance who had become obsessed with various DDR games in the hope that I could replace the repetitive techno music with songs of my own and maybe join the fun... well I had no problem figuring out the setup and LOVE that I can in fact dance to any music I want... the only problem is.... well.. even after I have the game create a dance to go with my songs it leaves me wanting more. First of all the steps NEVER go with the music... and some of the songs shouldn't be hard to find a beat for at all. Second, I'm not very fond of the levels of the game. The easy is frustratingly simple, the normal level is not much better, but the expert is crazy!!! There is no middle ground!!! Plus I do miss the option to have the two players competing dancing on different levels... After all, I'm just not as good as he is! In this game both dancers have to choose the same difficulty. I know its frustrating for him to have to "slow it down" for me, and I get upset trying to keep up with him on the harder levels... Oh well I guess over all its alright.... at least I can listen to my music instead of "Cartoon heros"
grete
wow nice skin looks greate on and esay to remeve to looks like it belongs rite on system
