Review: Dance Dance Revolution S

I love downloading free apps and demos onto my iPod Touch, so when I heard about the free demo of Dance Dance Revolution S Konami had put out, I tried it out. There was only one song, and one dancer, but it was so much fun that as soon as I saw that the full version had been released, I was all over it. And thankfully, I was not disappointed.

The basic premise of the game is classic DDR. Select a dancer, select a song, and go to town. The big change is that instead of using your feet on a dance pad, you use your thumbs on the touch screen. It actually ends up working better than it probably should, given that your thumbs are obscuring the upcoming arrows. There's a Standard Mode where you play through three songs to get a high score, Course Mode where you can try to stay alive as long as you can (difficult to do when the Challenge Mode here only lets you make four mistakes in all four songs!), and an unlockable Endless Mode.

There is also something called Shake Mode, where you hold your iPod Touch or iPhone and tilt it in the directions of the arrows. Strangely enough, actually stepping side to side on an imaginary dance pad seems to work better than just tilting the device. Unfortunately, despite the game being called Dance Dance Revolution Shake, Shake Mode is kind of weak, with just one lame song that basically just demos the mode. If you can unlock the ability to play other songs in this mode, I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

While you only start with a couple male and female characters and ten songs, just playing the game unlocks lots more of each. So far I've only unlocked 57% of the content, but that's six new characters and six new songs, plus Endless Mode. So there's still more to do. There's reportedly over 20 songs total in the game. The music sounds great with headphones, but it's also totally playable with the speaker. Graphics are impressive, with full 3D characters getting down amidst the animated backgrounds.

DDR S is great fun, and definitely worth the $6.99, at least for me. The gameplay totally translates from feet to thumbs, and the songs are terrific. No licensed songs from popular US artists, but then, I suppose true DDR fans wouldn't want those anyway. My only complaint so far is that it breaks the cardinal rule of portable gaming in that there is no pause or interrupt feature. Turning off your iPod or iPhone will stop the game, but when you restart, you'll be back at the title screen. Oh well, I guess that's what updates are for!