My brother and I used to play sock puppets when we were younger. I’m told that this isn’t a normal past-time so I’ll explain: we would put on sock puppet shows for our friends. That’s it. Most of them involved a husband and wife who would fight about paying the bills and would always end with one each being pummeled in alternating fashion with a twig or something. As we got older, we had more sophisticated fun aping Shakespeare, and eventually exchanged beating with sticks for verbal abuse. At some point there wasn’t even an audience anymore and the whole thing became a weird memory from my childhood.
Not that this has anything to do with Just Dance 2014. I just felt like sharing a little about myself.
I’m not sure I understand the appeal here. Even from a perspective of dancing in front of a TV in the living room, there’s not a lot to be impressed with when it comes to the sloppy choreography that Just Dance seems to hinge on. At least that’s what I’m lead to believe, considering how uninspired the tracklist is. Has this series always been like this? Was it ever anything more than just goofing off in front of the Wii back in the day?
Maybe having the year in the title isn’t helping, but everything about Just Dance 2014 feels like a game rushed to market to meet a console launch and simultaneous multiplatform release. Sure, it has some variety with a fitness thing, but don’t we expect that? Maybe we’re just supposed to expect that titular Lady Gaga song to be in this game again so that nobody could ever be disappointed over it being left out for reason of fatigue or timeliness. You could lead me to believe that as long as that one song was included, and a group of people were goofing off in some live-action captured footage, that there’s not really anything else needed to release a game in this series.
The Just Dance TV feature is interesting if only to serve as a window for the kind of people who were tricked into playing this game, and the other online feature is hardly realized. I think it’s the online multiplayer, which they call the World Dance Floor. If the game was more transparent, or at least used a more direct interface, then it might be clear what modes serve what purpose. The World Dance Floor is disappointingly no more than a realtime leaderboard, lacking a visual representation of other players, and with absolutely no sense of interaction outside of being instantly ranked against each other at the end of a section. Try to imagine a racing game where the only online mode was a time trial, and featured no player ghosts, and seemed to jump aimlessly between tracks like some messy best-of mix. Maybe you’re into that, though.
Tune in for Just Dance 2015 and I’ll tell you about the time my dad and I had to drive a state away for a carburetor.
Finally Jack Black in controller form…what, no? It’s not him? Oh man…
A fight stick without a stick…what a wild time we live in.
A quarter of a century after the original game's launch, Atari is re-releasing one of…
To celebrate the 3rd game's 5th anniversary and the original's 25th (!), YSNET has transferred…
One of 2022's best games is slinking onto the Switch in this week's update.
This website uses cookies.