A Twiniversity Family tries out Country Dance 2 for wii

By Mike Taylor and family

The Country Dance 2 game got our family to try something new – dance together to country music. We don’t regularly listen to country music so the game had a bit of an uphill climb. We started playing the game and not recognizing the songs, jumped right in with the ‘Surprise me’ option. The “Surprise Me” option picks a random song and the game just begins.

 

The negative: Not much instruction is included onscreen other than to treat the dancer on the screen as a mirror image of yourself and to hold the controller in your right hand (too bad I am a lefty – no option for that.) Then icons appear for upcoming moves that are really not too helpful and we dance away. When we ended playing, a score screen comes up, but the details of a few categories were covered up by the large 1st. 2nd, 3rd indicators. My 9 year old son was bothered that he couldn’t see the numbers underneath, he is a details kind of kid.  The game is rated for E10+ with the reason seeming to be the country music lyrics. I heard a drinking reference, one of the songs is ‘Hell on the Heart’, stuff that wouldn’t bother me much with my older kid, but would be an issue for some.

The positive: We had three of us dancing at once, and we had fun and got a bit of a workout. We also liked that the lyrics are printed on the screen, so I suppose it can help a learning reader. Just screen the song first and don’t expect to read along and dance at the same time. That seems almost impossible. Our highlight was when my wife discovered she could dance better than me just by shaking the remote while I was actually trying. It’ll probably be a while before she lets that go. Also, a few hours after we finished, my kid asked if he could go play again, which speaks quite a bit to the fun level for him.

Thumbs up or Thumbs Down?: “Down mostly, partly because of the music. Even with music I prefer I would probably not spend $40 on a game like this. Also, it did not seem to have a lot of re-playability.  There was no way to increase the difficulty, unlike a guitar hero type game. For $40 I would want it to last a while.”

Thanks Mike for trying this out for us!