Boogie: Superstar

At the beginning of the year, I received a copy of EA's Boogie from a friend who had, herself, received it for free. She had a nasty case of the flu at the time, and in retrospect I should have been leery of her attempts to foist any games on me, at least not without searching Metacritic for the phrase "so bad, it might give you the flu."

Boogie wasn't a good game. Its dancing mechanics, at least what I saw of them in the tutorial, were "huh?"-inspiring - just complex and silly-looking enough that I couldn't persuade myself to bother learning them. If I'm going to expend effort to make myself look like a fool, I will do it on my own terms, thank you.

That may sound mentally lazy, but in doing game design myself I've learned to put myself in the shoes of the average player, who fears change and balks at steep learning curves. You can teach this gentle creature to do amazing things, and show them new and fantastic worlds, but only if you don't spook them right out of the gate.

Boogie's tutorial - God, I barely remember, but... there were these creatures I was supposed to keep an eye on, and I had to move around the stage, and... it made me say, "no, I'm not doing that."

And just like that, I was done playing Boogie. I just wanted a game that asked me to keep a rhythm, and Boogie wasn't that game.

Plus, its characters were... A starfish, right? Who acted like Elvis? That was one of them. I'm not opposed to wackiness, but that character concept has just enough staying power to be a one-off Conan O'Brien joke.

"Here at the Late Show, we promise to do only highbrow, socially relevant humor. Isn't that right, Starfish Elvis Impersonator?"

As a relateable player avatar, it just doesn't work. So I had to try Boogie Superstar, which, from the previews I saw, was about humans and seemed to have a reality-show aesthetic, which struck me as instantly more engaging than whatever Boogie Classic purported to be about. And I don't watch reality shows, singing-based or otherwise.

Boogie: Superstar's a pretty solid game. And if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the TRIFORCE OF HAIR:



Basically, the game has you doing simple, arm-based dance moves in rhythm - pointing, doing an arm roll, miming a lasso or a drumbeat - and switches it up enough to keep things interesting. The got the note of simplicity right - dancing is supposed to be about the way music makes your body move, and cluttering that up with anything else is just diluting the fun. And damned if Boogie's dance moves didn't get my hips moving. Imagine that!

That's not to say that Boogie: Superstar is-

Hold on. Are you still imagining me moving my hips? Because I didn't say you could stop.

That's not to say that Boogie: Superstar is perfect; it suffers from the same interface woes that all Wii games do. For example, I'm occasionally instructed to "jump," and I do, and the game doesn't think I did it right.

I've been jumping my whole life, Boogie: Superstar. How long have you been around? Couple months, tops? Yeah, I thought so. I know what jumping is.

But Boogie:Superstar's not bad. I didn't look too deeply into its multiplayer, or its full songlist, but its core gameplay works: Keeping rhythm with a song is mindless fun, but mindless fun is still fun, which puts it ahead of a lot of other games. It didn't keep my interest for all that long, and I don't see it catching fire outside of the teen girl demographic, but I could see myself playing it again if I ever found myself in front of it. Imagine that!

And keep imagining it until further notice. Cheers!