OK, you tell us what it's doing.
By Steve Boxer reporting from EA's "We don't Heart E3" previews
Here’s another Wii-specific game which is reminiscent of Rock Band’s (very much) younger brother. It did impress me much more than Playground, though. The idea is that it lets you pursue a virtual pop career, so there’s a SingStar karaoke element, and a dance element in which you encourage your character to strut his or her stuff by moving the Wii remote in time with the beat. Bravely, EA has kept that aspect of the game pretty free-form, so you can vary the gestures you make but, as long as they’re on-beat, your character will dance in interesting ways. It’s pretty much like conducting an orchestra.
There’s also a Duck Hunt-like mechanism which lets you hit targets and consequently strike poses and, with tracks like Kung Fu Fighting on the soundtrack, the game refreshingly abstains from taking itself too seriously. Although, if you do want to take it seriously, there’s a surprisingly powerful editing program that lets you create music videos - handy when you’re trying to progress through the single-player mode, and which is rather like being a virtual contestant on some scarily teen-oriented version of Pop Idol.
This may sound like the scariest thing since Simon Cowell last hitched his trousers up to just below his eyebrows. But Boogie might actually have the potential to become something of a cult hit. One thing is for sure – it contains the best feature I’ve come across in any videogame in the past five years, which happens to be something of which Sony might like to take note. If, like me, you can just about hold a tune but have a voice that you really don’t like to hear, you can set Boogie’s karaoke side so that the closer you are to the prescribed note, the more you hear of the original singer of the track rather than your own voice: a feature that should be made compulsory on every karaoke videogame. And you can open up the chance to watch the game with 3D glasses, too.
Boogie is exactly the sort of game that you never thought EA would make – from a distance, it looks more annoying than impressive, but when you get close-up and start playing it yourself (rather than leaving it in the hands of the tweenies for whom it was clearly designed), you realise it actually has some hilarious stuff in it. You can visualise a whole generation of dads embarrassing their kids by insisting on playing it – but you could also imagine it becoming a cult ironic gimmick in the clubs of Hoxton. That’s what EA’s new direction is all about.
Here’s another Wii-specific game which is reminiscent of Rock Band’s (very much) younger brother. It did impress me much more than Playground, though. The idea is that it lets you pursue a virtual pop career, so there’s a SingStar karaoke element, and a dance element in which you encourage your character to strut his or her stuff by moving the Wii remote in time with the beat. Bravely, EA has kept that aspect of the game pretty free-form, so you can vary the gestures you make but, as long as they’re on-beat, your character will dance in interesting ways. It’s pretty much like conducting an orchestra.
There’s also a Duck Hunt-like mechanism which lets you hit targets and consequently strike poses and, with tracks like Kung Fu Fighting on the soundtrack, the game refreshingly abstains from taking itself too seriously. Although, if you do want to take it seriously, there’s a surprisingly powerful editing program that lets you create music videos - handy when you’re trying to progress through the single-player mode, and which is rather like being a virtual contestant on some scarily teen-oriented version of Pop Idol.
This may sound like the scariest thing since Simon Cowell last hitched his trousers up to just below his eyebrows. But Boogie might actually have the potential to become something of a cult hit. One thing is for sure – it contains the best feature I’ve come across in any videogame in the past five years, which happens to be something of which Sony might like to take note. If, like me, you can just about hold a tune but have a voice that you really don’t like to hear, you can set Boogie’s karaoke side so that the closer you are to the prescribed note, the more you hear of the original singer of the track rather than your own voice: a feature that should be made compulsory on every karaoke videogame. And you can open up the chance to watch the game with 3D glasses, too.
Boogie is exactly the sort of game that you never thought EA would make – from a distance, it looks more annoying than impressive, but when you get close-up and start playing it yourself (rather than leaving it in the hands of the tweenies for whom it was clearly designed), you realise it actually has some hilarious stuff in it. You can visualise a whole generation of dads embarrassing their kids by insisting on playing it – but you could also imagine it becoming a cult ironic gimmick in the clubs of Hoxton. That’s what EA’s new direction is all about.
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