For a long time, “DDR” was synonymous with “rhythm games”. Konami reinvented the floor-mat-as-controller genre, thought to be dead after the Power Pad experiment, and garnered an impressive following with its Bemani series of games. However, a lackluster console release of Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, coupled with the company’s apparent lack of interest in making new arcade titles, left a void for loyal. RedOctane, maker of excellent third-party dance mats, saw an opportunity to step in, and partnered with Roxor Games to bring their competing title, In The Groove, to the PlayStation 2. Although they made the kinds of mistakes you’d expect from a first-time developer, they still produced a high-quality product that has Konami scrambling to re-establish their place in the market.
This title’s gameplay is relatively simple. Instead of a controller, there is a mat on the floor with buttons in the four cardinal directions. There is a line of stationary arrows (the stage) at the top of the screen. Music plays, and more arrows scroll up from the bottom of the screen. Your goal is to step on the corresponding button when one or more moving arrows reach the stationary line. There is a life bar on the screen, which increases or decreases based on your performance. If you reach the end of the song with anything left in the meter, you clear the song.
In The Groove brings two new complications to the console rhythm game market. The first, borrowed from the Pump It Up series, is that more than two arrows can be required at once. Unless you are a quadruped, this means slapping the dance mat with your hands. Original to this title are mines, which scroll up the screen with the arrows. If you are on an arrow when a mine passes through the stage, your life meter decreases. Although not world-shattering features, they do help keep fresh a genre that had begun to stagnate in the last couple of years.
This game contains most of the standard game modes, although the developers have chosen to rename most of them. Dance and marathon modes are the basic play modes. In dance mode, you choose songs one at a time and each is judged separately. For marathon mode, you select a course consisting of four to five songs, which are played without stopping or resetting the life bar. Fitness mode allows you to burn calories until you reach a specified goal, with no danger of failure. Battle mode pits two players against each other, and performing well results in changes to the opponent’s step charts. There is no mode for editing step charts, however, so you’re stuck with the step charts the game comes with. There is also a tutorial for new players. If you are going solo, you can also choose to play on a single pad or two at once, using all the directional buttons from both controller ports in the latter case.
In The Groove’s fitness mode is possibly the best ever made for a rhythm game. You enter your weight and choose a goal for the workout (either an amount of time or number of calories burned), and play until you reach your goal. Since you cannot fail except by giving up, there is no penalty for choosing songs you can’t pass in order to get a better workout. You can choose songs or marathon courses individually if you want to personalize your workout. The game also lets you choose a difficulty level and play random songs of that rating for the entire workout. The latter method gives you the most efficient workout, and I can’t understand why a similar has not been seen since Dance Dance Revolution Konamix.
There is one major flaw to the fitness mode, however – the calorie counter severely overestimates how much energy you use. The first time I tried this mode, I played 15 minutes of random difficulty 6’s, and the game claimed that I burned almost 1,000 kcal. If this were true, everyone who ever wanted to lose weight would play this game. You can get reasonable numbers by putting an extremely low weight (35 pounds for me), but it is best to simply ignore the calorie count and use the timed mode.
Roxor did something for In The Groove that should have been done in a console rhythm game a long time ago: they included every song from the arcade version in this release. One of the major criticisms about various Bemani games was “[My favorite song] isn’t on this mix!” With nothing left out of the console release, there’s nothing to complain about on this front. In addition, four songs that would be on the arcade version of In The Groove 2 were included among the unlockable content.
The song selection in this title is dominated by hard rock, metal and trance, which makes it very easy to get into the game. Digital Explosion, Inspector K and Reflection Theory highlight the mix, with three songs (plus remixes) each, all of which are great fun to step to. Anet’s “Normal”, a rock ballad for the maladjusted, and Vanilla Ninja’s inspirational anthem “Tough Enough” are also easy on the ears and hard on the feet. Machinae Supremacy’s “Bouff” and “Hybrid” and Dax’s “Not Worth the Paper” have excellent beats for hardcore players. E-rotic makes an appearance, with two titles that are less erotic but just as catchy as anything they contributed to the Dance Dance Revolution series.
The digressions from this theme are, for the most part, excellent. An artist who goes by the smiley-face symbol you get when you type “:)” into Microsoft Word and let it auto-correct contributed the delightfully bizarre “Delirium” and three other excellent tunes. MC Frontalot adds two old-school rap offerings with a geeky bent to the lyrics, and Spacekats and Crispy each deliver two more upbeat offerings. Nina’s electronic love song “ROM-eo & Juli8”, and the folksy “Da Roots” by Mind Reflection give more variety to this title. The mix would not suffer from less of Sammi Morelli, who supplies the obligatory set of songs too slow to dance properly to, but the collection of music is otherwise superb.
There are only two instances of licenses music in this collection – Merril Bainbridge’s “Mouth” (covered by Rochelle) and Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” (recorded by Natalie Browne). Both stay very true to the original; only the cover artist’s name and the shortened duration give away the fact that these are not the versions that received radio play in the late ’90’s. “Tell”, one of the first songs to be unlocked, could also be included in this category. Credited to Symphonius feat. Rossini, this song is a remix of “The William Tell Overture” which proves that you don’t need to do much to a classic to make it fun to dance to in the 21st century.
Songs in this game are rated based on their difficulty, and the precise values are similar to other rhythm games on the market. In The Groove’s ratings tend to underestimate the challenge slightly compared to other series, so a song with a certain rating in this title will tend to be a bit harder than one with a similar difficulty in a Bemani game. The song ratings go all the way up to 13 (for a single song – ZiGZaG’s “Pandemonium” on expert level, which has 849 steps), making. Every song has a level 1 step chart, so a beginner can jump in and play any song, and all songs have easy, medium and hard steps as well; more than three-fourths have expert as well. Additionally, the song selection screen tells you exactly how many jumps, freezes, mines and handplants are in the song, so you know exactly what you’re getting into.
The grading in this title is much more detailed than other rhythm games. During the play of the game, in addition to the dance meter, the game shows exactly what percentage of the possible points you have earned so far. At the end of the song, that percentage is translated into one of 18 grades. The lower grades are the same ones you got in high school, but beyond A+ (which tops out at 89%) are S-, S, S+ and one to four stars.
The arrows in this game are color-coded based on where they lie in relation to the beat (red for on the beat, blue for halfway between, and so on), including those at the beginning of freeze arrows. This is extremely helpful, as it leaves no question as to when you should be stepping on an arrow. The rest of the graphics are solid, but uninspiring. The backgrounds are not obtrusive and are pretty to watch for a few minutes while it’s someone else’s turn, but amount to little more than the usual repetitive patterns interspersed with stills. There are no dancers to distract you, and the danger warning is a simple but effective flashing red tint to the background on that player’s half of the screen. Everything is crisp and colorful, and the text is easy to read. The game is easy on the eyes, but no visual feast.
The fact that the arrows are polygons allows In The Groove to provide a large number of modifiers that would not be possible with sprites. Arrows can scroll towards or away from the screen (making the game resemble the opening of a Star Wars movie), and can spin, sway and vibrate on their way to the stage. This provides an interesting visual effect that can add challenge to songs that a player would otherwise have no problem with. Of course, the standard array of mods is available. In addition to being able to multiply the scroll rate by an amount from 1.5 to 8, you can also choose a constant speed for all songs. Most players don’t bother with mods other than possibly changing the speed to make arrows more easily visible in fast songs, but the developers of this game outdid themselves providing options for those who with to use this feature.
In The Groove has one major that must be mentioned. If you choose “Top Grade” as your default sorting method, there is a chance that the save file will be deleted when you load the game. This is a simple enough problem to avoid, but it is a serious glitch and something that a more polished developer would likely have prevented.
There are a couple other minor drawbacks about this game. The load time before a song is somewhat long; as many as 5 seconds may elapse between picking a song and the start of the music. Fortunately, if you are playing a mode where there is no break between songs, you only have to sit through it once. Also, if you care about the purity of the lyrics, you won’t like the home version of this title. More than a dozen songs have been edited for content. While this doesn’t really affect gameplay, it is a bit odd to hear “I’m cold and I am shamed, mumble mumble on the floor” in the middle of an otherwise excellent cover of “Torn” because someone thought the ESRB might have a problem with the word “naked”.
In The Groove is the best dance game on the market today, despite its imperfections. This is a must-buy for hardcore players and those who wish to lose weight by playing rhythm games, and would be as good a purchase as anything on the market now for a new or casual player.
