Boogie Superstar (Wii) Review

It's not a completely bad thing. Boogie Superstar is now very much a female-oriented game; the weird creatures and space stages are out of the window and in their place are hip young guys and (mainly) girls who take part in X-Factor style showdowns. You take one of six preset characters, toss them through a basic character editor (hairstyles, skintone adjustments, clothing, colours of clothing) to spruce them up a bit, rename them and chuck them into the fray. The result is a much more cohesive setting, though at the expense of the story elements from the first. The closest you get to a story now is the host of the show babbling in gibberish about who's going to sing next and some judges telling you how crap you are at dancing. Just like the X-Factor.

You're awarded scores out of ten for your performances, which determines how many points you come away with and whether you can best your three opponents. After all's said and done you get some coins to spend on new packs of songs and clothes, the amount varying depending on your final positioning. That's about all the progression there is. The single player mode and multiplayer mode are both accessed by going into a show, where you can choose to do up to three performances in a row - solo or duet karaoke, or solo or duet dancing.

Singing and dancing are completely different bits of the game that don't intersect with each other. The dancing feels much better this time around, perhaps because there has been time to get used to the limitations of the unmodified Wii remote since the original's development. You use the remote alone and go about imitating moves (which move is indicated by an icon) in time to a little dot bouncing back and forth in front of you. Do well and the dot stays green while your performance meter creeps up; get your timing all wrong and you start to go into the yellow and red and start to lose points in the latter's case. Can't remember what move the little icon represents? Don't worry, after a few misses a tiny little dancing mannequin will show up in the corner to demonstrate and help you along. If you continue to dance like you have the normal distribution of right and left feet then you'll swiftly fill your meter, and then you can, with a quick lasso movement, move yourself up a level. The more you rise, the more you'll appeal to the judges, the more points you'll get at the end and the less reason they'll have for needlessly sniping at you. Every so often you'll also be asked to waggle furiously to build up a separate combo bar, after which you perform a few moves in quick succession. There are odd moments where your movements aren't registered correctly (jumping never seemed to work for us), but on the whole it tends to catch most of what you're doing quite accurately - in performance, anyhow. There's a studio where you can create your own little dance routines by acting out some of the preset dance moves along to a track, but sadly we didn't find it to be very good at understanding what we were actually doing and decided to put its own moves in instead, some of which were completely different.

Singing is similar to most other karaoke-style games. The words scroll along with bubbles above them to let you know when to sing, you open your mouth and vaguely musical noises tumble out into the microphone. We're not sure whether to criticise the pitch detection or whether it's just our worthless vocal cords, but we'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that, generally, it works. However, we refuse to give the track list the same treatment. The first Boogie had a brilliant selection of cheesy songs that everybody knows, from The Commodores to Jackson Five and right back round to the Grease theme. What does Superstar have? Rubbish covers of Leona Lewis, Katy Perry and a bundle of R 'n' B pop horrors. There are some decent things in there - Kanye West's Stronger and Chromeo's Fancy Footwork being two examples - but much of the appeal is lost in all the tracks being covered, and not particularly good ones at that. Toxic by Britney Spears is especially nasty. It doesn't matter so much in the dancing parts - we can dance to this tripe just as well as we can dance to anything else if you stick a remote in our hands - but for singing the songs are dreadful. While we can understand why EA took a step away from the style of the first game, we cannot fathom why they would trade in the recognisable songs for this lot. You can't even access the majority of the 40-odd song tracklist until you've earned enough coins to buy them, either.