Hardcore Dance Dance Revolution gamers always seem to know what to do with their hands while playing DDR; with Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party for the Wii, you have no choice but to move your hands with the Nun-chuck and Wii Remote, does it work? It sure does!
Konami this time around has decided to add “shake your left hand” or “shake your right hand” for DDR Hottest Party on the Nintendo Wii; at first it seems goofy because you want to move your feet instead of your hands. The included wired dance mat from Konami is a good quality product with a nice non stick surface so that mat shouldn’t go flying into the air while you break out in a sweat, unfortunately you can not purchase extra official Konami mats alone so you’ll have to resort to the funky coloured Disney Gamecube mats or 3rd party mats.
There are also some new steps that you can leave on or turn off in the options: Such as destructor stars that fly onto one of the 4 arrows; when it reaches the arrow, you must NOT be pressing that arrow or you’ll lose points. There are also some stomp arrows that require two steps to get rid of than the usual one step arrows. All in all, they are a bit of a distraction, but thankfully they can be turned off easily in the options screen. An annoyance is you must turn these options off for each user every single time you start up the game.
Now we get down to the nitty gritty of the game, game modes:
Groove Circuit Mode is like the arcade mode where up to 4 players can dazzle the audience.
Free Play Mode: In this mode you will clear various venues and unlock new songs and dance stages in the game
Workout mode: Time to burn those calories away in this mode, just like other DDR games it will keep track of your calorie count with a preset set of songs or create your own play list and goals you wish to reach. Even though you have a set number of songs to do, for some odd reason the game likes to interrupt after each song with a score, making it hard to keep the heart rate up…you should be dancing straight through like the other DDR games.
The music in DDR Hottest party is much more pop/top 40 sounding compared to the Playstation 2 version of Dance Dance Super Nova 2, which should appeal to first time gamers who enjoy that type of music more. Hardcore DDR fans may miss some of the j-pop and other more unusual tunes that you don’t normally hear on your local “mix FM” station. Some songs that aren’t dance by nature were, changed into dance songs such as Lips of an Angel which has this heavy rock/dance beat going. Some other songs of note are Rythm is a Dancer, Too Little Too Late, The Sign and a crazy hyperactive Karma Chameleon. There are only 50 songs which makes this the lowest count of songs in all versions of DDR which are around 70+. 1, 2 step is “broken” or left on purpose to be stupidly easy in “beginner level” because all you have to do is shake the right Wii Remote for the ENTIRE song, pretty lame if they missed this in testing.
Sadly there is no online mode even though online play has started to appear on many Nintendo Wii games, there is also no downloadable content, so you can’t add any songs to DDR Hottest Party. There are various 4 player modes, but if you leave the hand motions on you’ll need 4 Nun-chucks and Wii Remotes.
There are no music videos in the Wii version, but the on screen dancers have some interesting moves including some really funny ones that can only be described as “River Dancing”.
Over all the game has a great “Top 40” sound track that is different from the usual “indie/J-pop” DDR sound tracks, this will definitely appeal to new gamers to the DDR franchise (not saying this game isn’t hard if you pump up the difficulty level).
With the Wii aimed at casual gamers and families, Dance Dance Revolution on the Nintendo Wii hits the mark with a very good mix of songs (just wish there were more) game modes and of course making you shake your hands as well as your feet.
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