Dance! Just Dance… no, wait

For a game that the ESRB just ousted as “a dance simulation in which players follow on-screen cues to perform hip-hop, rock, and reggae dance routines” that’s coming soon to the Xbox 360, you’d expect it to be a launch game for Natal. But, coming from Germany’s DTP Entertainment — purveyors of Divinity 2, So Blonde and My Little Baby — it’s clear that the succinctly titled Dance! will feature no complex motion tracking whatsoever.

So, how is this game going to work? Obviously there’s a lot of motivation for publishers to glom onto the unexpected success of Ubisoft’s Just Dance. That makes me picture a similar setup where a silhouetted dancer performs a real dance on-screen that you then mimic with your drunk friends. But how do you win? Just Dance either uses the Wii’s motion tracking to expert effect or it’s plain broken but it ultimately doesn’t matter because you can’t lose and you can barely tell when the game thinks you screwed up. You just flail around foolishly, work up a sweat, have fun and repeat.

Could Dance! be brazen enough to suggest you do that same kind of follow-the-leader dancing without a single bit of motion tracking tech? I guess it could use the Vision camera, akin to PlayStation 2’s EyeToy: Groove, but why push that after Microsoft themselves abandoned the device years ago? Ultimately, it’ll probably end up a beat matching rhythm game without even a plastic instrument to wrap your pride around, I just couldn’t find any screenshots or info and had to post. If I find anything else before the game vanishes alongside its shouldn’t-this-be-a-Wii-game contemporaries like Squeeballs and that last really bad Scene It? game, I’ll be sure to post.

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