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37 of 38 found the following review helpful:
It's no Dance Central!Feb 21, 2011
By W. I. Group
"prime fanatic"
I own Dance Central (and several other Kinect games) as well as purchasing this game from Amazon on its release date. My friends all love playing Dance Central, its only weaknesses being (in my opinion) the track list and lack of additional songs on Xbox Live.
Enter Dance Paradise, a game that's had three months to improve on the quality of games released at Kinect launch. Unfortunately this game fails to deliver due to the poor motion sensing capabilities and overall not-fun game play.
Pros: - Good music selection. - The music videos play on the screen which gives the audience a little more entertainment than what's available in Dance Central. - You can make a playlist of several songs which then play in order without going back to the menu after each song. This is good for parties.
Cons: - Terrible motion tracking. - Frequently, an image of a huge Kinect sensor with question marks floats on the middle of the screen while you are playing the game. I think this means it's having trouble detecting the user clearly. - When you miss a move (or the motion is incorrectly tracked) the game boos at you. - The songs do not play all the way thru, usually they stop after the bridge. - Load times between songs are very long. - Part of the gameplay has you moving physically from one side of the sensor area to the other, which is relatively pointless and only serves to illicit more boos from the virtual audience. Dance Central has this better.
Summary: If you are desperate for some more songs to Kinect dance to then this game may help. Otherwise steer clear of this game and wait for the next generation of Dance Central (or maybe some decent DLC??).
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
STEER CLEAR!!! Frustrating Game!! Get Dance Central if you don't have it!!!Feb 28, 2011
By Roy Woody Ouch! This game is horrbile! The only thing it has going for it is song selection. Even with that it won't play the full song and I think some are actually shorter than those on Dance Central. Also I noticed that there is a bug that won't let us play the song BulletProof. If we select that song it just returns us back to the song selection screen after sitting through it's unbearable load times (Installed on the console BTW).
Also missing is a way to see what Kinect sees. Dance Central implemented this so well. In Dance Central if you aren't in the game play area you can see on screen where you are located. Also it can show you if someone else has taken the controls from you. Dance Paradise just brings up a Kincet Sensor picture with questions marks surrounding a character and then that leaves you with a WTF look on your face while trying to move to where the Kinect can see you correctly. That kills the game IMO because it's the biggest annoyance with the game.
The dancing can work if you are able to be seen by Kinect correctly. It's a little weird going from Dance Central to this style of dancing though. It makes it look like they were planning to have this support 4 players but then changed their minds or something. Also the colors of each track are different, Red, Yellow, Blue and Green. 4 Players in mind? Probably. You will see 4 tracks with humanoid figures doing the moves you should mirror falling to the bottom of the screen. Player one has the first 2 tracks and it jumps tracks ever so often. When you think you have the hang though the song cuts off after like the first verse then hook. Sucks!
Don't buy this game! You will regret it!!
13 of 15 found the following review helpful:
Great soundtrack!Mar 26, 2011
By Patrick H. Nguyen Dance Paradise - The good: 1) The best soundtrack of all current dance games, 2) Simultaneous 2-player multiplayer, 3) Ability to create custom playlists, 4) Ability to watch full-length music videos
Dance Paradise - The not so good: 1) Lack of sufficient tutorial mode, 2) Dance consists of strings of dance moves rather than a single choreographed routine, 3) Music is so good that the shortened dance version begs to be longer, 4) Will occasionally lose track of player (but rare)
Dance Paradise is another dance game that is available for the Kinect Sensor. It plays like Guitar Hero or Rock Band but instead of hitting a note on 1 of 4 lanes, you do dance moves on the lane. It has a "dance power" that behaves like the "star power" of Guitar Hero.
The user interface controls quite well. It utilizes Kinect ID well. Menu navigation is quite easy and the control is very good. If you don't like navigating the user interface with your hand, you can use a standard 360 game controller. There is a slightly frustrating element to scrolling through the songs though. If you like to flip through the songs slowly so you can see what the song is, you can hold your hand over the arrow button. However, it'll advance slowly for only 2 songs. If you hold over the button for more than 2 songs, it'll start to scroll really fast which may cause you to skip pass the song you want. So if you know the song you want is a few songs away but not far away, what basically happens is that you have to hold over the button for 2 songs, then lift your hand off the button and then put it back on the button to scroll for 2 more songs and then lift off. This can become very annoying. Again, once you know where all the songs are located in the list, scrolling fast is advantageous. Luckily, you can control the user interface by the controller if you want more granularity in your navigation. I would say that its menu navigation is right up there with the best Kinect titles. It's below Dance Central's UI but above Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports (the snap-on motion of the cursor can be annoying sometimes).
The motion recognition for the dancing appears good such that if you do the move correctly and in the correct lane, you will score well. The key is being in the correct lane in order to be recognized for doing the move properly.
The graphics are bright and colorful with a cartoony appearance. In the upper center of the screen, you see the music video for the song playing. The majority of the screen is dedicated to the 4 dancing lanes. The right side of the screen shows your Xbox Live avatar. When you perform the move correctly, your avatar will perform the move correctly. Sprinkled around the screen are random avatars who are also dancing to the music. The far left shows your "dance power" which behaves like "star power" in Guitar Hero. The dance moves which you are to mimic are conducted by Gumby-like characters. The graphics are not complex or have special effects like Dance Central or even Michael Jackson (Wii) but they do look better than Just Dance 2. But the music video and seeing your own avatar dancing just feels good. It feels like you're having an effect on the dancing whereas Dance Central and Just Dance 2 have a canned effect. You can just stand there and the on-screen character keeps going like you don't exist.
There are 2 difficulty modes that can be set under the options: easy and hard. This is a global setting that sets the default difficulty for the song. However, in the song selection screen, you can individually set the difficulty for the song. So for example, you can set Easy under Options so that all the songs are tagged for easy difficulty and then change a song such as "It's Raining Me" to Hard.
Under the single player mode options, you have Career and Free Play.
The first thing most gamers do when they get a game is jump into the career mode to finish the game since gamers tend to be goal-oriented. Games like Dance Central prevented this by making you do the breakdown mode to unlock the career mode of the song. But Dance Paradise lets you jump right into the career mode. In career mode, they'll give you a goal for a song such as having to perform a minimum of 5 combos. Since there's no tutorial for the dancing, the career mode can feel like a chore because you have to accomplish some career goal, but you didn't have a previous chance to learn the song so you're just trying to do the moves on the fly to do the career.
Dance Paradise has a free mode where you can freely select any single song and there's no specific goal. You just dance. This is the mode to learn the dance steps for the songs. It's more fun not having a goal to do when it comes to dancing. And once the moves are learned, the career mode becomes more fun because you're just dancing and if you dance correctly, you'll almost certainly accomplish the career goal for the song.
In the free play mode, you can choice over the specific song you want to play. However, it's not like Dance Central where you pick a song and then jump right into it. In Dance Paradise's free play mode, you are supposed to create a playlist of songs you want to play. If you only want to play a single song in Dance Paradise, you create a playlist of 1 song. Otherwise, you can create a longer playlist of all the songs you like. I think the limit is 8 songs at a time. The playlist feature is very nice and useful because it makes it so that you're just dancing once the playlist is done. Once you have started a playlist, you can move forward or backward on the list. So when you finish a song, you can choose to retry the dance, go to a previous song or go to the next song. Dance Central doesn't have a playlist function but you can jump into a song quicker because you don't have to generate a playlist.
The tutorial is very basic and it only serves to teach the basic game mechanics of Dance Paradise such as how to transition from one lane to the next and how to activate your Dance Power. It doesn't really serve to teach you how to dance. It does get you an easy achievement and that's all it's good for. But apparently people skipped the tutorial, judging from the comments on Amazon where people didn't realize you need to change lanes to dance.
The nice thing about Dance Paradise is that it has multiplayer modes where you can compete head to head simultaneously locally. It's only simultaneous 2 players, but it's functional. There's no online multiplayer. Zumba Fitness and Dance Masters/Dance Evolution also allow for simultaneous local multiplayer and online. Dance Central only offers alternating multiplayer.
Versus mode is where the best dancer wins (highest score).
Attack mode allows you to can use attacks to weaken the opponent. Attacks are activated by jumping. You build up your "dance power" and then unleash an attack. The issues with this is that 1) it's kind of hard to see when your "dance power" is charged enough to unleash (kind of like how some versions of Guitar Hero, it was hard to see the star power in the periphery) since they only change the color of the star and it's in the far peripheral view and 2) you have to jump to initiate the attack which can throw off the rhythm. But again, hitting "star power" in Guitar Hero often could threw off your rhythm too. As you do the moves correctly, the "dance power" gauge goes up. When the gauge is full, indicated by all 5 stars being lit, you can then jump to activate your "dance power". Note that "dance power" is also used in single player but in single player, it's to achieve career goals or to boost scores.
Some attacks include Vitality theft (steal opponent's energy), Track jump (keeps changing the opponent's track/lane), Twinkling (makes the opponent's silhouette difficult to see by twinkling it), Stuck (prevents opponent from changing tracks), Hidden (makes opponent's silhouette transparent so it's hard to see), Free (freezes the opponent's avatar so they can't dance), and Score theft (steal 10% of opponents score and add it to your own).
Synchro mode is synchronized dancing where teamwork is key. It's more about being in sync than anything else. Otherwise, you're trying to figure out who's to blame for messing up the routine.
I have Just Dance 2, Michael Jackson (Wii version), Zumba (Kinect), Dance Central (Kinect), and Dance Paradise (Kinect). Now I feel Dance Paradise is the best soundtrack of them all. It's really, really good. The game has all the original music videos and original music tracks. There are no covers like in Just Dance 2. There are 40 tracks which is impressive since they're all original tracks whereas Just Dance 2 has 44 tracks but quite a number of cover versions. Dance Central only has 30 tracks but you can purchase additional tracks.
The dancing, like all Kinect games, measures your entire body too. They tried to follow the Guitar Hero/Rock Band system where the center of the screen is occupied by 4 lanes or tracks. The dance moves you are supposed to do are coming down the lanes so you have to change to the correct lane for the game to score your move. This throws a lot of people off and the comments you read on places like Amazon reflect this. Because sometimes when things get hectic, you're doing the correct dance move but you're in the wrong lane so it counts as a miss. The body recognition is fairly accurate, arguably as accurate as Dance Central.
Now onto the dancing... When you dance a song, the routine is essentially a string of dance moves. It's not a single choreographed routine designed for the song like in Dance Central or Just Dance 2. For example, in Dance Paradise, you may do a jitterbug move and then transition to the swim move, then transition to a cross over move. The moves are actual moves from the past including a number of disco moves, the hula, some moves from the 60s like the mashed potato, the twist, the swim, etc. You'll definitely recognize some Lady Gaga music video moves. There's even an abridged version of the Macarena. So basically all the craze moves that were cool at the time but are corny now. There doesn't appear to be a huge number of dance moves. It appears that they recorded some moves specifically for some songs and then reused those moves in other songs (but they do little things like slow down the move for the song or speed up the move depending on tempo). So some songs seem well choreographed but other songs seem haphazard. The well-choreographed songs feel awesome and feel Dance Central-esque. The other songs feel disjointed.
The game uses some Gumby-like dance characters which you are supposed to mimic. Because they are Gumby-shaped, it can make it hard to figure out how you're supposed to do the move. Sometimes it's hard to tell which way the character is bending because he's a simple Gumby model. In Dance Central, Just Dance 2, etc., you have more realistic looking models which makes it easier to mimic. On the right side of the screen, you see your own Xbox Live avatar and when you do the move correctly, your avatar will dance correctly. And your avatar's movements are quite easy to see. If they simply had your avatar traveling down the 4 lanes, performing the moves would be much easier (though it would be a little surreal to see 4 copies of yourself moving down the lane).
As for the length of dancing, both Dance Paradise and Dance Central have shortened, abridged versions of the original tracks. Dance Paradise just goes roughly halfway through a song and stops. I suppose they couldn't edit the audio track since there's a music video. Dance Central, on the other hand, adroitly edits the track so that while it's a shortened track, it feels like a complete song because it has a beginning and an end. Just Dance 2, Dance Masters, and Zumba Fitness have complete full length tracks. However, the Just Dance series uses a lot of cover songs. I suspect all these decisions were because of royalty costs. JD used covers whereas DP and DC used shortened songs.
Dance Paradise also has a feature called the Video box, and the video box allows you to set up a playlist of music videos to watch. A limit of up to 8 videos can be in your playlist. Once you have started the playlist, there are on-screen buttons to exit, to advance to the next video or to go back to the previous video. Once the playlist has started, it will play to completion and then repeat. To exit, you have to select the exit button. The videos are in the correct 16:9 aspect ratio, but the video doesn't fill up the entire screen. Instead of taking a full-screen 1280x720, the music video is 710x400. While the video is definitely standard definition, it looks pretty good. The framerate of the video appears odd as it seems to be skipping frames in order to keep the video and audio synchronized. This may be due to a PAL to NTSC conversion issue as this was originally a European title but has been brought to the States.
Another strange phenomenon is if you are standing in front of the TV or are out of view of the Kinect, the buttons will disappear so that you have a clean view of the video which is nice. But if you are sitting on the couch in the Kinect's view, the buttons stay on the screen underneath the music video, and subtle movements of your body can move the on-screen cursor which is distracting because if the cursor moves over a button, it causes the "select button" sound effect when all you want to hear is the music video.
Also if you plan to watch a bunch of videos without intervening, make sure you either turn off the 360 system screen saver or move every once in awhile or else the screen saver will kick in and dim the screen. To turn off the dimming, just move a little and the screen wakes up.
Regardless, the videos are watchable and a really nice feature. The music videos are the original full length videos. I never saw some of these videos so it was fun to watch. This makes it more sad that the whole song isn't played during the dance especially when you really like the song and want to dance for more than 3 minutes. When you see how hot some of the girls are in the videos, you'll appreciate the inclusion of the music videos. The music videos are so fun that it makes you reminisce of the days when MTV actually played music videos.
If you're an achievement fan, Dance Paradise is the game for you. I completed 7 achievements just by doing 1 song. In fact, after playing a few times, I had more achievement points in Dance Paradise than I had in Dance Central, and I've had Dance Central since before Christmas.
Conclusion: Dance Paradise is a fun game and would make a fine addition to your Kinect library if you like dancing. If you're really not into dancing or only want 1 dance title, that should be Dance Central. But if you want to complement Dance Central, try out Dance Paradise.
I like this game a lot because of the music. It also has simultaneous multiplayer (2 players). The negatives are that when you dance a song, the routine is a string of dance moves. For some songs, it works really well. For other songs, the moves don't flow together. The other negative is you only get to dance half the song. It just reaches a point and then fades out to a results screen. It feels bad because you really get into a good song and it ends just when you're into a groove. What makes it feel bad too is that they included the full-length music videos which you can play in their video jukebox.
9 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Frustrating, but might be fun on parties n with friends!Feb 17, 2011
By Faryal Mallick I got this game last night. I played for 30min, and I leave for NY today so I am just giving a preliminary preview. I will update once I'm back and play it more! I played about 5 different songs! The movement detection is not good at all. It kept telling me that I'm missing moves when I was actually doing them, my avatar would stand still.. and sometimes I didn't yet shift from one move to the other when my avatar already had started doing the next move for me! So body movement detection is not good at all for this game! However, I love the song collection, and the dance moves are easy and fun, and I love how its multi-player. I can't wait to have my friends over and have a dance competition.. I will update once I'm back and play more of it! Update: SO I have learnt that basically if you do the move exactly like the avatar n start exactly at the time he does only then your dance move is tracked.. which makes this game not fun and rather frustrating!
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Guitar Hero, but with Dancing!May 20, 2011
By Aaron Merkel HOW TO PLAY: Dancing "gumbies" constantly flow down 4 differently colored parts of the screen. Walk left or right to position yourself, perform the dance move, then move on to the next position and perform another move.
You will not be performing a cohesive dance routine; instead, you'll be performing mostly random moves to each song. Sometimes you'll get a move specific to a song, but it's rare.
The game is fun with a group and it provides a great workout. The song selection needs help. There are the typical "hits" from the radio and a bunch of foreign "hits" thrown on here. I say "hits" because most of the soundtrack is below average. I guess the better a song is, the more it costs, and they were too cheap.
Load times are atrocious. Longest load times ever. Even when you create a song list, the game will still load each song after completing the one before.
The graphics are mediocre colored polygons, reminiscent of Playstation 1 or 2.
When scrolling through the song list to find a song to play, the game loads the song's video. Sometimes you'll stand there for up to 30 seconds or more since some music videos have an intro with no music. Why can't it just load a clip of the song so you can hear it?
During game play, songs will just fade out halfway through. They are not polished and broken down into the best parts like the songs in Dance Dance Revolution.
Overall, a fun party game, for awhile. For 49.99 it shows a severe lack of effort in graphic design, song selection, load times, and dance moves.
Pros: Fun Party Game Provides exercise Learn some funky new moves
Cons: Graphics are generations behind Song selection is just average Load times are extremely, extremely long Repetitive music plays throughout each menu
based on 21 reviews
( 21 customer reviews )
