Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix

"Looks very nice compared to 3rd, but doesn't beat the arcade"

It is my honest opinion that this game should not have been released on the playstation. The arcade has so much more over this version: every song in the DDR universe (not including DDR 4th Plus), no loading times, cleaner graphics. If Konami wants my opinion this should have been released on the PS2 or Dreamcast, like i thought they would do when the arcade was just released. The song list is just a shadow of the arcade, it's nice they put the missing 3rd mix songs and some solo songs, but they needed better 4th mix songs. When backing up my game I noticed the cd, and only just over half of the cd is used, i'm not sure but could they have put more songs on? Ok here's the review:

First the songs. I've heard numerous complaints on some DDR boards on how the songs sucked. This greatly reduced the appeal, but it seemed that most of my really favorite songs were put (a bunch of naoki, erotic, and captain jack songs.) It was really sad there was no disc switching option, cause that would have allowed it to be as close to the arcade as possible.
Solo mode. Ok I have really wanted to play solo games on the psx after playing it at a bowling ally one day. I was wondering why they had never done it before, and now they have so I am very happy. If one is wondering, there were two spin off DDR titles, DDR Solo 2000 and DDR Solo Bass. These featured great songs, only one player panel, and two extra diagonal up left and up right buttons to push. Conveniently the O and X buttons are the diagonals, if your using controller it's the L R buttons. This is a really great experience for those who have never heard of DDR solo.
Graphics. The graphics are actually really well done. The little star swipe as you start and end songs looks really cool. The backgrounds look really nice and have an increased ability to give you seizures (joking about seizures.) The character graphics look as bad as ever but that's ok. Everything is in high-res and is noticable from the past DDR games. The scoring screen looks extremely well done from the past.

All in all this was a great installment to the series (4th mix)sadly, the psx version is not a fair representation of it. If you haven't been able to play the arcade, your missing a lot, but this is the closest you can get.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/22/01, Updated 03/22/01