Dance Central 2 Dance Party

So a couple of weeks ago, I bought just about the most fun, addictive game ever: Dance Central 2. It was on sale at the Best Buy, and I was already there to replace my crapshack controller (pro tip: the $20 controller is not your friend.) Turns out the Kinect is good for more than just shouting “Liara, singularity!” This game is crazy fun, and since Dance Central 3 was just announced at E3, I thought I’d have a dance party with my friends and take pictures of them because that’s vaguely related.

I had the idea for a dance party on Wednesday and by Saturday, the date of the party, I manged to wrangle two whole friends! Which is actually a good thing, because I don’t think anymore people would have fit in my tiny living room. My amazing boyfriend is absent because he wasn’t feeling well and actually slept through the entire party, much to our surprise.

Anyway, meet Jono and Big Ben, two of my best friends. They are totally awesome people and all-around great (single) guys (ladies.) I dare you to find a more giving (ladies,) selfless (ladies,) helpful (you know what I’m saying) pair of gentlemen. Seriously, I didn’t even have food in my fridge. I invited them over to dance for this article and then I made them pay for their own dinner. Maybe there’s a reason only two people came to my dance party. (I only just realized that I should probably have had food and drinks. There’s a reason I play videogames so much: No social interaction.)

We all took turns alternately dancing and taking pictures. As you will no doubt realize, none of us are photographers.

To the right of Jono and Ben, you can see that I had to move the couch into the kitchen in order to have enough space for two 6 foot plus dudes to dance in my house. We also had to move the ottoman into the hallway, although I didn’t get a picture of that.

Before any dancing could be done, we ran into some difficulty with the Kinect. It recognized me, it recognized Ben, but it wouldn’t pick up Jono for anything. It caused a lot of consternation.

We finally decided that it must not have liked Jono’s black jeans, even though that made no sense because it had no problem with Ben’s black jeans. I ended up lending Jono my red basketball shorts and it picked him up just fine after that.

The one thing I really find difficult with Dance Central is the menu selection. It doesn’t pick up arm movements very well, and when it does get that you’re waving your arm to select a menu item, actually getting the Kinect to track you long enough in order to let you select that item is a pain. This is specially true with two players, because if the other player even shifts their weight, the screen will suddenly switch from pink to blue, and start responding to the other player instead of you. Ultimately we just had the cameraman/extra person select everything with the controller.

You should also make sure you’re not dancing in front of a window, like I was here because the window completely washes you out and you end up getting thirty-nine thousand points on “Whip My Hair” by Willow Smith when you know you killed that song. Granted, Jono was really good at this game. Like, crazy good. Bitch please good.

Ben and I, on the other hand.

Let’s just say that we had fun.

One thing that you should watch out for when you have tall friends and are playing this game, is that they have a much smaller range of movement available than the rest of us. Big Ben is about 6′ 5″, and as you can see here, the Kinect viewfinder cut off his head whenever he got too close to the entertainment center.

In the two weeks since I bought this game, I’ve played it more than any other game in my collection. Running through fitness mode is now my favorite work-out, not least of all because I don’t have to leave the house in order to do it. The calorie calculator basically just assigns 25 calories burned to every song, which I think is inaccurate, but I don’t really care. I just enjoy jumping around in my living room to pop songs and being able to call that exercise.

My friends and I had a crazy fun time playing this game. I got all red from jumping around so much, and we had to cool down with a couple rounds of Trials Evolution once we pulled the couch out of the kitchen. Best three person Just Dance 2 dance party ever.