| kitler53 said: Just Dance is a waggle game with dancing, not a dancing game. |
There's a lot of truth to that statement. And yet Just Dance is a perfect example of why a successful dance game does not even need a Kinect camera.
Just like the Harmonix guy said: The Wii simply does not have the sensors required to track how you're actually dancing. It only gives the player that impression, while in face It only senses what your right hand is doing. Game reviewers were badmouthing the game because of this.
But the Wii game that got the lowest review score on IGN ever got extremely successful and even became the fastest-selling third-party Wii title. Which clearly shows that perfect body tracking is far less important for a dancing game than one would expect.
In most Kinect games, an on-screen avatar mimics the body movements of the player. But in dance games like Dance Central and Just Dance, it's just the other way around: The player mimics what an on-screen avatar is doing. Apart from a score counter, how you are actually dancing has almost no impact on what you see on the screen. People like Just Dance because it's a great multiplayer experience: People have fun together, dancing to songs they like, all while they are even learning some new dance moves. Accurate body tracking is not important for the fun. I was at a birthday celebration of a friend of mine two weeks ago. His four nieces were there and with their parents doing other stuff, they played Dance central on his Wii. They had not even heard of "Just Dance" before but wanted to play it. They were only having one Wii Remote so only one of the girls could actually play, but all four of them were standing in his living room trying to mimic the movements. They seemed to be having lots of fun and didn't even seem to care about the score counter and didn't even ask the girl that had the Wii Remote to pass the controller over.
So while Kinect is indeed the best input device for a game like Dance Central because it most accurately senses your body movements, it will be pretty much the same fun when used with other input devices. The fun in dance games comes from good songs, interesting choreography and simply dancing with friends.
And thinking that Move is technically incapable of judging how someone dances is like thinking that you cannot judge how a person is dancing by only seeing a (2D) video of a dance, believing you need a 3D video instead.
