Dance Central 2 - Xbox 360

I'm an old lady, but I love the Dance Central series. And DC2 is a worthy -- better than worthy -- successor to DC.Like in DC, you'll get to learn new dance moves and choreographies, sweat, and generally have a good time set to good music. But there are a few differences.1) Graphics. The graphics are a lot better this go-round, from the backgrounds to the way the characters move. Instead of being set in a gritty city setting, they've moved down to a Cali/Miami-styled place, with richer and brighter colors. DC2 looks amazing. The incidental music feels more sophisticated.2) Instead of dancing as a particular character, you dance with a "crew," whether that means the athletes of Riptide, the club kidz of Hi-Def, or one of the other styled crews. I haven't seen Dare or Oblio, two fan faves from DC, so far in a few hours of play. Boo. However, the crews mean there's a campaign mode. You select the level of difficulty for the dances at the outset (Easy, Medium or Hard), then cruise from one crew to the next dancing their routines with them. This means you get to go through the campaign three times, if you want, and the personalities of the crews come through.3) Fitness is tweaked. There are playlists, which load pretty rapidly, so you can either do a 20-minute low-impact workout or a 50-minute "long hall." The game estimates calories for you, though I'm curious to know how it does so since a medium-sized old lady like myself burns a vastly lower amount of calories than someone significantly larger and a lot more than a skinny kid. You can also create your own playlists. If there were a "shuffle mode" that would have been perfection.4) Break It Down mode is WAY better. You can actually get through it faster than in DC, and using voice commands can slow it down, video your movements and check against the dancer, and focus on one or two moves you may need to get through. The only reason I'll never have all the achievements on DC is because one is "get 100 percent on all songs in break it down." If this tech had existed for DC, I might have gotten it.5) Import all your DC songs. This is great, but 400 MSP? Come on. I'm glad I got the pre-order free points to do it. But the instructions were wrong -- don't redeem code from inside the game for this, go through your XboxLive account. Seriously, there are too many digits for the in-game code redemption, which works for the 240 MSP card you get inside the package.Speaking of songs, there are some really good ones on DC2. Lots of them are not family-friendly, even with words blipped out. And there are a lot of "meh" songs. I think my biggest disappointment in the DC series is that there is a lot of great dance music out there, but a lot of what DC licenses is ... "meh." What's up with that? Why don't they get a whack at better songs? They get a lot of great songs through "Rock Band," why is a dance game such a challenge?While I'm on about song choices, I think one of the things that hampers the series is its music choices are all in a limited genre -- hip hop, classic disco/funk and pop. Why not bust out an occasional jazz standard, rockabilly or country song, at least for DLC? Here's where having characters and crews kind of limits the range, one way that the Just Dance series overcomes these limitations. Of course, Just Dance 3 is way more family-friendly than DC. But my point is that if you're going to limit your range, you need to get the best of what's available from that range, and I don't know that Harmonix necessarily does that (I mean, three novelty songs -- the Numa Numa song, "What is Love?" and "Baby Got Back" are supplemented with the Humpty Dance. This is too much novelty. At least they're fun to dance, if not to have stuck in your head -- damn you, Haddaway.)6) Two people can dance at the same time. Yay! Party time! And there are mini-games in the multiplayer mode.7) You can shut off Freestyle mode and just do programmed moves for all the DC2 dances (not so much the older stuff you have).8) The way it reads your moves seems to have improved. Although going "down" in a scroll menu you can still have a rough time of it getting "stuck."At any rate, there were reasons that DC was the best, most-popular Kinect title on the market forever. And those same reasons -- fun, fitness, challenge, friendly multiplayer -- are still around, and even stronger, in DC2.

I won't go into the minutiae of the game. There are plenty of reviews for that. The bottom line is you like dancing at all and if you liked DDR, Dance Central 1, or the Just Dance series, you have to buy Dance Central 2! It improved on DC1 in so many ways (and Dance Central 1 is already an awesome game as it is). The only weakness now is that there is no online multiplayer but no other dance games provide that option except for Zumba Fitness so hopefully DC3 can address that.I will detail what my friends and I have found that we love and probably isn't covered by most reviews. Had a DC2 party last night and everyone loved it so much more than DC1 (though they loved DC1 way back in the day).The best new feature to them was the fact that you can sign into 4 profiles and you can rotate through profiles easily (had each of them go through KinectID so that there was facial recognition). Just step up and bam, the Kinect recognizes the person and provides scoring for that unique individual. In DC1, everyone pretty much played under 1 profile. You can also set up different difficulty levels for different people so the great dancer doesn't have to do easy steps or the average dancer doesn't have to feel under duress with difficult steps.The soundtrack is just awesome this time. They all mentioned how they liked this soundtrack more and I agree. Did the song import as well so people like all your Dance Central songs in one place, using 1 disc.The other great new feature they liked but caused us minor problems some time was the automatic drop-in/drop-out feature. If there are 2 people playing and one person sits down, he drops out and there's only single player dancing. If a second player stands in the frame, he joins in and the players are dancing side by side on the screen. But in the beginning (since this was a new game to us), when we had people switching, we weren't quick in switching people so it would drop to single player and then back to multiplayer. That was a little disorienting on the screen so this time we made sure people didn't drop out during a song or we made sure people switched fast (no indecisiveness!).And the tutorials section is better as well. Now you can practice just the moves you are having problems with, without having to go through the entire tutorial.For those interested in dancing as exercise, now you can set up playlists and have nonstop dancing. This was a weakness of DC1 because in DC1, you had to pick a song after each song was completed so there was a downtime of about a minute between songs (choosing the song, the difficulty, etc.).You can also now record videos and upload pics/videos to the Net. In DC1, it took pictures of your dancing but it stayed on your Xbox.There's just so much that makes DC2 truly superior to all dance games out there to cover. I get excited just thinking of the fun I've had in the brief time I've had the game. Now I can conquer the steps for all my DC songs and then can go back to DC1 to finish it and get all the achievements for that game (now that you can tailor your tutorials completely).And just one more tidbit to finish this off:The most crazy thing is one of my friends never plays video games. His aunt bought him a PS2 way back in the day when it was well over $200, and it sat under his bed until his friend found it. He then sold it to his friend for something like $100 (when it was still hot and going for over $200). He bought a Wii since everyone else got one but he never used it.And now, he's going to pick up a 360 with Kinect after playing around with DC2, DC1, KS2, KS1, and Lips. He's big into rapping so he'll probably get Def Jam Rapstar as well. This might be the first system that he actually plays and enjoys. The cool thing is I made zero sales pitch because I knew he didn't play video games, but he got excited anyway and plans to pick up a system, just because of Dance Central 2 (well, also because of Lips and Kinect Sports 1 and 2).