Now that Nintendo’s Wii has proven itself to be a sales juggernaut, game publishers are falling all over themselves to get anything out there on the new system. The majority of these efforts have been half-baked ports of existing games, just with poorly tacked on motion controls. Original properties are somewhat hard to come by on the Wii, which is what makes Electronic Arts’ Boogie so intriguing. Unfortunately, original doesn’t always mean fun.
As the title implies, Boogie is all about singing and dancing and generally paving the road to Funkytown with groovalicious dance moves and funktastic vocals. Actually it’s about shaking your Wiimote to simulate dancing, and singing into a USB microphone to cover tunes, but you get the idea. Players are greeted with a charming opening animation of two of the game’s five characters dancing and singing the classic Grease duet “You’re the One That I Want”, and then led to a very slick character customization screen. Despite the dearth of playable characters, there are plenty of customization options, but not so many as to scare off any funk loving Grandmas who don’t know a Wiimote from a breadstick. Once your character is complete, players play through a tutorial on how to get their groove on with both singing and dancing and finally, creating and editing video clips.
The presentation is done very well with lots of bright, vibrant colors and an overall upbeat design. The problem is that once you get past the nice menus and quirky characters, there’s not a lot to keep you entertained.
Dancing is done by moving the Wiimote to match the sound of the metronome emanating from the Wiimote’s speaker. Hitting dance moves in time with the beat not only nets you points, but also builds up your boost meter. Get a full enough boost meter and you can enable Boogie Boost mode by hitting the B button. When in Boogie Boost mode a succession of arrows appears below your dancer. Moving the Wiimote to match the arrows and keep in time with the metronome causes your dancer to explode in a frenzy of dancing that would make Denny Terio proud.
If it sounds simple, it’s because it is, and too simple at that. The movement of the Wiimote doesn’t feel at all connected to the moves that your dancer is pulling off, and simply waving it back and forth with no real effort is enough to net several hundred thousand points at a time. While your dancer cuts the rug, you can attempt to maneuver him or her towards a random red imp that offers score tokens, however this works only about half the time and usually ends up just causing frustration.
Karaoke is a mixed bag as well. Boogie’s 38 songs are all covers and range from faithful reproductions of the original songs to downright awful butcherings. The song selections include some Karaoke staples, and some disco favorites such as “Brick House” and “That’s the Way (I Like It)”, but with the exception of a few Black Eyed Peas and Britney Spears songs, the tracks don’t quite match Boogie’s apparent youthful target demographic. On a side note, while many of Boogie’s tracks have been cleaned up to match the game’s E 10+ rating, parents of younger children may be uncomfortable with their 11 year old daughter singing Pussycat Dolls songs.
The Karaoke game only looks for matches in pitch, not the actual words, which makes it possible to simply hum your way through a song, keeping your eye on the pitch indicator to know when to raise or lower it, and obtain over a million points. While this seems like cheating, it’s really the only way to obtain the various score goals on songs you don’t know the words to, as it’s impossible to read the words and be mindful of the pitch meter at the same time. True, part of the joy of Karaoke is watching your friends make fools of themselves while they try to sing, but having the game constantly tell you how badly you’re screwing up takes a lot of the fun out of it.
