Review: EA's Boogie. Available now in stores.

It could be the quiet before the storm, as Metriod Prime: Corruption is few days from being released. Only one new game made it to the local games stores shelves this week, its EA's dancing game Boogie.

With 35 new and older songs (Don't Cha - Pussycat Dolls, I'm A Slave For U - Britney Spears, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper, etc.) to dance to, the songs list are impressive. All you have to do is to move your hands in basic up, down, left and right in rhythm to the indicators on the screen, similar to Konami's DDR except you wave your Wiimote in your hands instead of tapping arrows with your feet. Doing this right will fill up a boost bar and execute special dance moves which are cool to watch. You can also change three dancing styles by pressing the A button.

Boogie even ships with an USB microphone for you to sing Karaoke to. As with other Karaoke games, you simply have to keep the right tone to be scoring well. You can even sing the wrong words in the right tune to pass with flying colors, so I gave that a skip and concentrated on swinging my arms. Strangely, you are scored for performance for one part only, either dancing or singing. You cant score double even if you dance AND sing very well.

Graphically, Boogie is very pretty with pretty graphics with progressive scan and 16:9 support.

There are some quirks that bugs me in the game, like the Wiimote movements don't match the beats of the songs. I know Girls Wanna Have Fun's beat pretty well but the movements don't match the beats, so you dont get a solid sense of dancing to the song but simply dancing to the visual clues. This is made slightly worse as the vibrating beats on the Wiimote too don't match the song beats.

Boogie is a very simple dancing game, perhaps too simple compared to the feet tapping of DDR (or perhaps I am better at swing my hands than tapping my feet to the visual clues on screen). Its a mediocre but well commended effort by EA for the music rhythm genre on Wii. Nice to see third party developers coming out with better and original games for the Wii. Lets now see how better can Konami do it with their Wii DDR game.

Now I am anxious to getting my hands on Metriod Prime 3, how long do I have to wait after the Aug 27th launch date?