Boogie

 

    So fun fact: this is the first game for this blog I've had to emulate in order to play. I did try to play this game on my actual Wii, and in that regard, things started okay at first. It got through the opening cutscene just fine, and the title screen had no issues either. The moment it asked me to select a character, however, said character turned into a veritable vertex explosion, and my Wii Remote started to make a noise akin to a Gatling gun. My copy is probably just scratched or something, but either way, I didn't wanna risk breaking my actual console playing it further. In emulation, it ended up working fine, but it turns out, I really wasn't missing much.
    My best summation of Boogie is if you took something like Space Channel 5 and blasted away all of its personality and challenge with a pressurized hose. It's a dancing game where you have to shake the Wii Remote to the beat to earn points, and occasionally shake the Wii Remote in specific directions to do dance moves that earn you more points. There's an attempt at a combo system where you can't do the same move over and over or else your points will decrease, but all you have to do is change the direction of your Wii Remote swaying every other beat or so and it'll say that you're doing great. There's also sections where you sing a part of the song, but I've never, ever seen this game bundled with the microphone it supposedly included, so the game just has you tap a button to make your character sing.
    As you could probably guess, the game is extremely easy. I mostly played the story mode, which has you playing as characters that include a stereotype, a generic woman, another stereotype, a generic man, and bootleg Patrick Star on their uninteresting adventures. It's in this mode where I breezed through every single song in no time flat, as the point requirements for playing a stage are far lower than what I ended up getting. On some songs, I had point counts that crossed one million when the game's requirement was only around a hundred thousand. I understand that developers for the Wii wanted to ease off on difficulty for the sake of casual appeal, but this rewards you for doing almost nothing, and it's downright silly.
    There are a bit over thirty songs to dance to in this game, and fair's fair, they are all licensed songs people would probably know. They are all covers, which isn't immediately bad in and of itself; it was pretty common practice for rhythm games of this time to use cover versions, like with Elite Beat Agents or the early Guitar Hero entries. The problem is, the covers made for this game are incredibly weak in quality, often nowhere close to the original song in terms of instrumental palette. There's even a couple songs in here, notably the cover of Daft Punk's “One More Time”, that have notably off-key singing, which is doubly confusing considering it uses autotune.
    If it sounds like I'm having trouble writing about this game, it's because Boogie is one of the most nothing games I've ever played. Barring that mishap playing it on an actual console, which I doubt is the game itself's fault, it is at least more competently put together than the average shovelware title, but it can't really save a dull experience. It doesn't really work as a dancing game since there's no moves to dance along to, and it doesn't work as a traditional rhythm game either due to the utter lack of challenge. After I post this, I'll go back to my life of mostly forgetting this game's existence, and if we're being honest, you will forget this game as well.