Britney's Dance Beat

"The game so bad, it doesn't even have lip synching."

Quick history lesson: Around the turn of the century, the latest craze in pop music was a bunch of non-threatening, attractive "singers" under the age of 28 choreographed dancing to synthesized beats all written by the same five people. These people were admired by 12-year-old girls everywhere as they desperately called TRL to vote for their favorite "singer". They were also hated by everyone else, who were just annoyed by either their music, dancing or goodie two-shoes image. Or maybe all three. I was of the latter group, and after playing this game for ONE DAY, I remembered why.

I know, one day is not enough to give a full review, but I say it is. OK, I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start from the beginning.

Britney's Dance Beat is a rhythm based music game similar to the vein of Bust-a-Groove for the PS1. Except this time, it features the likeness of one of the biggest pop stars of the pop star era: Britney Spears.

Unfortunately, you don't get to play as Britney (at least not right away). See, initially you play as one of 6 dancers auditioning to dance with Britney on tour. I can't remember the names of these dancers since they are so boring with their "street" looks and catch phrases. Aside from said phrase, they don't talk much, or emote at all. Matter of fact, if you play through practice mode Britney herself will judge your dancing without moving her lips.

Anyway, game play is what you'd expect from a music game. There's this blue circle on the bottom of the screen with a rectangular radius rotating in time to the tempo of the song being played. Buttons will pop up on the circle, which just so happen to be the same buttons on your PS2 controller. All you need to do is press the corresponding buttons on your controller as the radius passes over them. Your opponent, human or computer, will try to do the same. Whoever does the best job, represented by a seesaw-like graph (the more you hit your steps, the more the graph fills on your side) by the end of song will win.

In Audition mode (the main mode of the game), you go through ten of these songs. If you've read any other review of this game, you'd know that there are only 5 songs total. That right there should turn off most people, if they weren't already turned off by playing a Britney Spears game. In a brilliant move by the developers, they make you play through each song twice: a shortened version, and a full version. That's just a really lame excuse to play this game longer than you have to.

The game is easy at first. In fact, it's ridiculously easy. You only have to press one button repeatedly through the whole song. Then it gets progressively harder. When you hit 10 steps in a row, you send a "modifier" designed to mess up your opponent. This may mean changing the buttons you have to press or adding additional buttons at the last second. Of course, your opponent can do this to you as well. Which brings me to my main problem. When you get to the last song, the difficulty spikes. Your opponent is a lot better than you for some reason, and game is overall stricter when it comes to the timing. Add on the modifiers the computer throws at you constantly thanks to it being so good, and I have never passed the last song thanks to these factors, which is oh so frustrating.

You can, if you have one, play this on a DDR pad. I strongly recommend against it if you are a veteran DDR player. Tracking that damn circle instead of following the arrows up to the top takes getting used to. Plus, the transition from step to step is not very fluid or natural at all, unlike DDR. Modifiers also make this harder than necessary, since your feet are not that quick to step on an arrow you saw half a second ago.

Visually, it's not bad. The backgrounds have nice vibrant colors and are really crisp, which unfortunately means a lot of jaggies. The dancers move pretty nicely, thanks to good motion-capturing. Except at times when it looks like they're moonwalking since they don't deviate from their spot in the background. Too bad you'll be concentrating on this stupid blue circle, which at times can be hard to see as it passes over certain backgrounds. Plus, the better you do, the more sparks appear in the circle, which is very distracting.

There's not really much to the audio. It comprises of the same 5 songs, and their various remixes as you browse through menus. The sound effects are again pretty distracting and curiously, you can't turn them off even though appears you can.

As you play, you earn points which you accumulate to earn "backstage passes". All they do are let you access a small number of videos (11 in all). 6 of them show Britney doing photo shoots, being with her fans, and various backstage shenanigans during one of her tours. The other 5 are "immersive videos." This is footage of her concert performances (performing the same five songs, no less), which you can pan the camera around 360 degrees. This is pretty good, but you don't get a good view of Britney in either video. I guess it's supposed to simulate being at one of her concerts, seen through somewhat grainy contacts.

Do not buy this game, no matter how cheap it gets. The lack of songs and the spiked difficulty curve make this hard to enjoy. If you are a fan of Britney, you'd probably be better off buying one of her albums or DVDs. They last longer and don't require any effort on your part. If your curious about Britney Spears and want to be one of her fans, this is not the way to do it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/11/05