Dance Factory

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Feet-on with the last dance game you'll ever need

Have you burned through Dance Dance Revolution's entire song catalog? Or have you always wanted to try a dancing game, but thought the music wasn't really your thing? Enter Dance Factory. Due out in August, it's the first game that'll actually let you stomp to tunes from your own CDs.

At first blush, Dance Factory looks like your typical DDR clone, as a series of cascading arrows tell you which part of a dance mat to step on in time with music. The key difference is that Factory generates "dances" based on the beats in the tracks you feed it. Just pop in a CD, select a song and in about 30 seconds, you'll be able to hop around like a moonbat to anything from Tchaikovsky to Slayer. (There are also five built-in tracks from Kool and the Gang, Pussycat Dolls, Rihanna, Tim McGraw and Bodyrockers, if you don't want to hunt for a CD right off the bat.)

We've spent some time testing out Dance Factory for ourselves, and although the game is still months from release, it's surprisingly fun. Granted, the dances it generates only loosely follow the beat of the music you feed in (and when they follow closely, the steps tend to come just after the beats), but in general the steps seemed to fit the overall speed of the piece. And being able to dance to your own music makes a huge difference with a game like this.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.