Plug'n'Play DDR

Disclaimer:  Reviews contain my personal opinion, and I don't claim to be the authority on these things.  I appreciate and respect that other people may have different opinions.  Friendly debate is welcome, but name-calling and other such immaturity will be ignored.  My reviews assume you've either played the game already or aren't planning to.  They're full of spoilers, but they won't necessarily describe the whole movie beginning to end... more likely I'll rant about some aspect or another in detail, but leave huge gaps about the plot.  And oh yeah, I'll be cursing.


Wanting to get more in the spirit of exercising, for Christmas I asked for one of those plug'n'play DDR mats.  Compared to the cost of an actual DDR game + a dance mat for whatever console, it seemed like a pretty good deal.  Being plug'n'play, I figured some things would be scrimped on (like maybe there'd be no graphics but the arrows), but I didn't know just how much content the thing would be missing.


I plug the thing in to my TV, and first thing I notice... this thing is pretty much 8-bit.  I don't care so much about the primitive graphics, but the MUSIC is 8-bit, and this is a music based game.  But whatever, I'm into retro games, and the 8-bit midi renditions of techno music are actually kind of charming once I get over my initial shock.  


I step on the dance pad to play, and quickly realize that this thing is NOT made for adults.  The arrows are really close together, and I'm constantly stepping on the wrong ones.  Luckily the game is forgiving about that, so it's still playable.  Three songs in I notice, this game is too EASY.  Coming from me, that's really saying something; I'm notoriously bad at DDR. I've played the actual version of this game on a friend's console, and I can't usually make it through more than a "two-footer" (level two) difficulty.  On this plug'n'play version, I made it through the level five difficulty with no problem at all.  I had to turn on "Trick Mode" to feel like I was exercising at all.  


All of this I don't even mind that much, though.  The biggest disappointment about the whole thing is that there are only about ten songs, total, in the whole game.  And that includes two re-mixes of other songs, so really it feels more like eight.  There's almost no replay value in it at all.  I'll probably use it anyway, because in Trick Mode it's an okay workout, but it probably won't be long before it's not a challenge anymore and I'll be trading it in at Game Stop.