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With the success of SingStar, and the Wii’s targeting crosshair locked firmly onto the casual gamer, Boogie is almost the most obvious Wii product you could imagine. Suddenly realising nobody else had beat them to it, EA must be rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of developing and publishing the first game that allows you to combine karaoke and dancing together.
“It is a full entertainment package that is designed for all the family to have fun together,” explains Alain Tascan, head of EA’s Montreal studio, though after playing Boogie it’s clear that it is equally pitched at the intoxicated post-pub gamer, who has already learned every syllable of every SingStar.
The game is presented much like an EyeToy game, with all the brash design and lurid palettes we have grown used to in ‘lifestyle’ console titles, but it certainly looks perfect for the job in hand and is simple and instinctive to navigate. The game types boil down into the karaoke, the dancing, and a single-player story mode, that presents you with five different challenges depending on the avatar you choose. With five playable characters available at present, that means 25 stages to play through to unlock the rest of the game’s modes and content.
Of course, these kind of games are about playing together, so it is the substance of the singing and dancing modes that will decide whether Boogie becomes a reason for the casual gamer to invest in the Wii, or just another wannabe SingStar casualty.
The karaoke itself seems to be well developed and workable. Between 30 and 40 songs are promised, though so far only two have been announced; Don’t cha, by The Pussy Cat Dolls, and Brick House, by The Commodores. Players can expect to see a number of hits spanning the popular genres from the 1950s to the present day, but unlike SingStar, the videos are not included, and there is some chance they may all be covers.
What Boogie does do though, is offer a number of options that affect how you sound and how easy the game is, allowing more sheepish performers to hold their own against the most confident living room superstars. The first mode works like SingStar, simultaneously playing the original vocal track alongside you own. For the brave another setting completely removes the vocals of the artist, giving you an authentic suburban pub version of karaoke. The third and final mode is the most impressive and likely to prove very popular. Using a little technical wizardry, Boogie takes your voice in through the microphone, and then spits it out the speakers as the professional’s voice sounded on the record itself.
What that means is that when you sing, as long as you get the note and tone right, your voice will sound like it is from the vocal box of the original artist. Mess up, however, and the vocal track cuts out, leaving the instrumental elements playing alone.
The dancing mode of course uses the Wii-mote and more often than not the Nunchuck, and takes a flexible approach that sees you simply keeping in time rather than following precisely dictated routines, as had been the case with so many dance mat games previously. What this means is that you can go as fast or as slow as you want, and be as understated or showy as you desire, as long as you stick to the rhythm, with points being awarded based on the skill level of your performance.
Sadly, from the sections played, all too often the dancing involves little more on the player’s behalf than basic hand movements, which translate onscreen into far more exaggerated manoeuvres. Swinging the hand left and right, up and down, or arcing to either side makes the on screen avatar leap and flip in time, and though a tap of a button changes the movements your character performs, giving you points for variation, it makes little difference to the sensation of playing, leaving you feeling more like a human metronome than a disco inferno.
Of course, this simplistic model may actually be a boon to the game, offering less confident players, or those unfamiliar with games, a chance to join in, as Tascan explains: “When we did SSX Blur we realised it needs to be something that can be used by both the casual player and people who want a challenge.” SSX Blur’s notoriously fiddly controls were a chance for EA and the rest of the industry to learn just what players are capable of with the Wii, and their complexity became a moot point in a game fan base equally filled with casual and hardcore gamers, who either loved or loathed the obtuse interface.
A ‘Boogie Meter’, which could be straight from the SSX games, is also included, and fills as you dance in time, eventually allowing you to trigger prompts that turn directed jolts of the Wii-mote into huge somersaulting moves. Again, these feel rather disconnected to your own ‘dancing’, which can feel much more like amateurish conducting.
Occasional moments in the dancing mode also throw PaRappa the Rapper-style sections at you, where you must tap your Wii-mote in time to syllables of dialogue, so that your character sings along, but the most popular element is bound to be the setting that lets you sing with your own voice while dancing. As is easily imaginable, this proves fairly tricky, and in some way justifies the simplified dancing controls. Hopping about the virtual dance floor to race for bonuses and barge your opponents also adds some more depth to the game, but still doesn’t go far enough to please the hardcore audience EA insist this product will appeal to.
Of course, the now standard character customisation options are available, as is a video mode that lets you film and edit your onscreen performances with an apparently generous degree of creative freedom. For now this function is being kept closely guarded by EA, but they are keen to suggest it will be fantastic. Whether that is true or not will only become apparent when some hands on-time when the editing facility is made available, but the enthusiasm game producers put on such features usually outweighs player interest somewhat.
Regardless of complaints about control and worth, this kind of game is clearly far better too simple than too complex. It is targeted at the family and post-pub audience, and both those groups will likely lap this up. If it can make either of those groups giggle anywhere near as hysterically as SingStar has managed, then it is assured success, in a genre that has increasingly become a console seller for an audience previously turned-off by games.
