The next game on my review list was ABBA You Can Dance. For those who aren’t familiar with ABBA, they were a Swedish pop group from the 1970s who are one of the most successful pop music groups in history (to put things in perspective, Lady Gaga needs to sell about 170 million more albums to match them). The only thing I remember about ABBA from my childhood is looking at their name on billboards and magazines and getting confused because one “B” was backwards, something that thankfully Sesame Street set me straight on. Of course, growing up in the 1970s, songs like “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me” were ubiquitous, as were funky disco moves.

ABBA fell into relative obscurity until 2001, when the musical “Mamma Mia” became a smash hit on Broadway (forever altering the concept of those words, which to most Americans my age were usually followed by the words “that’s one a-spicy meatball”).

This review is going to sound like a re-run of other reviews I’ve done, from Michael Jackson: The Experience to the last post of The Black Eyed Peas Experience. To cut to the chase, the conclusion is going to be the same as for both of those games–this is going to be a must-buy for people who happen to be huge fans of ABBA (i.e., knows a song other than “Dancing Queen”), but for everyone else it’s probably not going to be work shelling out money for it until you can find it in the bargain bin for under $20.

As with Just Dance, the options are very simple when you start up the game. You can click “Play” to start dancing right away. There are two options: you can just dance (no pun intended) by selecting a song, or you can perform in a “mini-musical” of six ABBA songs, a feature obviously meant to cater to those who enjoy the musical Mamma Mia.

The song list contains pretty much all of ABBA’s hits, including:

• Angeleyes
• As Good As New
• Bang-A-Boomerang
• Dancing Queen (two versions available)
• Does Your Mother Know
• Fernando
• Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
• Head Over Heels
• Hole In Your Soul
• Honey, Honey
• I’m A Marionette
• I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
• If It Wasn’t For The Nights
• Knowing Me, Knowing You
• Lay All Your Love On Me
• Mamma Mia
• Money, Money, Money
• People Need Love
• SOS
• Summer Night City
• Super Trouper
• Take A Chance On Me
• The Winner Takes It All
• Voulez-vous
• Waterloo
• When I Kissed The Teacher

As with Just Dance 3, songs are choreographed for 1, 2, or 4 dancers and the multiplayer routines in particular can be a lot of fun as you and your friends or family can dance a routine where all the dancers dance to distinct steps, just like a real Broadway routine.

Strangely, I found the motion detection to be mostly accurate but very unforgiving. This is a departure from most other Ubisoft dancing games which tended to err on the lenient side. It took me about 10 tries to muster even a 4 stars out of 5 for Dancing Queen. And yes, I got a very good workout when I did so. On the one hand, the strictness of the scoring is great motivation to try over and over again to perfect the dances and get great exercise along the way, but that’s only if you don’t get too discouraged by false negatives. You do have the option of turning off scoring altogether and just dancing to the music.

An interesting feature of this game is the addition of a “karaoke” mode. Plug in a USB microphone (I used my Rock Band microphone and it worked great), and you can sing along to the lyrics, either looking at a traditional karaoke screen with the words scrolling on the bottom of the screen, or you can even attempt to sing while you’re dancing. Ultimately this was a fun addition, but it fell short of a real karaoke experience, as you could still hear the original vocal tracks as you sing (plus, you don’t get evaluated on your singing, which could be a good thing or a bad thing).

Just as with The Black Eyed Peas Experience, many of the songs have original music videos playing in the background as you’re dancing (music videos in the 1970s basically consisted of concert footage  and people dancing). They did a pretty good job of integrating the video in the background so it wasn’t too distracting.

One of the complaints I had about the Black Eyed Peas Experience was that it wasn’t really an “experience” as the Michael Jackson Experience was as far as taking us into the “world” of the musicians. ABBA: You Can Dance does a slightly better job of it, as under the Extras from the main menu you can view biographical information and photos of the group, as well as view all the lyrics to all the songs. Still not quite the immersive experience that made the Michael Jackson Experience so good, but a nice little extra for fans of the band.

And so I’ll give ABBA: You Can Dance 4 out of 5 stars. It’s a well-made game, although as I mentioned with the other “Experiences”, I would have been just as happy to see one or two of the songs as DLC for Just Dance 3 rather than forking over $40 for a lot of songs I’ll never play. Still, for a die-hard fan of ABBA or Mamma Mia, as well as anyone looking for some good clean fun for their families (especially when compared to The Peas), you won’t go wrong with this one.

But as usually happens when a franchise gets big, a company and its competitors will milk and milk that cash cow until way past the point where the public is saturated with it. We’ve seen dance games for summer parties and country music and Broadway. We’ve seen dance games for kids, including one with Dora and one with the Smurfs. We’ve seen specialized dance games for specific artists like Michael Jackson and ABBA and specific shows like Grease. At some point you just want to shake these game publishers and tell them to THINK OF SOMETHING ORIGINAL FOR A CHANGE. But I digress. I suppose as long as we keep buying them, they’ll keep making them.

The Black Eyed Peas Experience is the latest entry into the morass of dance games, based on the eponymous pop music group. Even if you’re not an avid follower of this group, you’re no doubt familiar with some of their most popular songs such as “Let’s Get It Started”, “I Gotta Feeling” and “Boom Boom Pow”, which have all become popular in the mainstream.

I’ll start off by saying that if you’re a die-hard fan of the group, you’re going to want to get this game and you’re going to love it, no matter what this or any review site will say about it.

For the rest of us, here’s my take on this game.

The Black Eyed Peas Experience is not a horrible game in itself. The menu navigation is among the smoothest I’ve seen in a Wii game. The motion detection is mostly spot-on; I’d say it’s a bit less forgiving than Just Dance 3, but if you practice the moves it’s not hard to get a high score. Not surprisingly, it borrows a lot of great elements from Just Dance, from the use of pictograms to show you upcoming moves, to allowing up to four players to dance at the same time. In fact, one improvement over Just Dance is that all you need to do is to pick up your controller and the game will automatically recognize you as a player.

There are, of course, a lot of “Black Eyed Peas”-specific details within the game. The four silhouettes you follow on the screen are the Peas themselves, so at any point of each song you’ll be dancing as Will.I.Am, Fergie, or…the other two. The background images are all nicely detailed in the ‘hip pop’ style of the Black Eyed Peas and in some cases you’ll see excerpts of the actual music video playing in the background. The choreography is definitely inspired by the style of the Black Eyed Peas on stage–meaning that anything with an intensity level of 2 to 3 sweat drops is going to be a great workout.

One gripe I have is that even though the game supports up to four dancers all songs are choreographed for one or at most two different dancers, so in most cases all four players will be dancing to the same steps. This is somewhat ironic given that the premise of the game is to experience a band that consists of four people. In fact, the scoring is set up to encourage four people to dance together as a team. Even more aggravating–each of the Black Eyed Peas characters will jump in and out of some songs when the came could very well have supported all four of them dancing independently.

Another gripe of the game is that while they did inject a few Black Eyed Peas elements in the game play, it really still feels a lot like Just Dance and not an “experience” of its own. Contrast this with Michael Jackson: The Experience, which I really liked because Michael Jackson’s style of dancing was so unique and so revolutionary that the dance moves in the game really did transcend the typical kinds of moves you’d see in Just Dance. Another plus in that game was seeing videos and tutorials from Jackson’s own dance coaches which really made you feel like you had an “insider’s view”.

In the case of The Black Eyed Peas Experience, there’s hardly anything in this game that couldn’t have been accomplished by just having it as downloadable content of The Black Eyed Peas to Just Dance 3. Heck, if they could get Mario as DLC they could certainly get the Peas in there. At the very least I would have liked to have seen special features such as behind-the-scenes videos from the Black Eyed Peas themselves, insights into how they design their dance routines, or even a break-down of some of the more complex dances by the Peas themselves. This game had none of that, leading me to believe that the Black Eyed Peas weren’t really involved with this game other than allowing their songs to be licensed.

Not that the game is a bad deal as far as the songs go; if you buy the game for its list price of $49.99, that comes out to about $1.66 per song (which goes down to 83 cents a song if you can find the game at the street price of $24.99). But by making this a separate game, they take away any chance of enjoying the unique features of Just Dance 3 such as its workout mode and its support of four-person independent choreography.

In terms of the songs, you can choose from 30 Black Eyed Peas songs from four of their albums:

The Beginning
Don’t Stop the Party (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 3)
Whenever (Solo, difficulty 1, intensity 1)
Someday (Solo, difficulty 1, intensity 1)
Fashion Beats (Duo, difficulty 1, intensity 1)
Everything Wonderful (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 3)
Take It Off (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 1)
The Best One Yet – The Boy (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)
Light Up The Night (Solo, difficulty 3, intensity 3)
The Time – Dirty Bit (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)
Just Can’t Get Enough (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)

Monkey Business
My Humps (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 1)
Disco Club (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 1)
My Style (Solo, difficulty 1, intensity 1)
Don’t Lie (Duo, difficulty 1, intensity 1)
Dum Diddly (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 3)
They Don’t Want Music (solo, difficulty 2, intensity 3)
Don’t Phunk With My Heart (Duo, difficulty 1, intensity 1)
Pump It (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)

The E.N.D.
I Gotta Feeling (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)
Imma Be (Solo, difficulty 3, intensity 2)
Meet Me Halfway (Duo, difficulty 2, intensity 1)
Boom Boom Pow (Solo, difficulty 3, intensity 2)
Rock That Body (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)

Elephunk
Hey Mama (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 2)
Let’s Get It Started – Spike Mix (Solo, difficulty 2, intensity 3)
Shut Up (Duo, difficulty 2, intensity 1)

With all respect to The Peas, I think there are only probably 5-6 songs which most people who buy this game will dance to; the rest will probably be appreciated only by their biggest fans.

One other point I should make. While this didn’t play a part in my rating, one thing that parents should be aware of is that the songs are uncensored, and are not even the “clean” radio edits. So the language can get quite explicit. Some examples (I bleeped out the cuss words here, but they’re unexpurgated in the game):

• Boom Boom Pow: “I’m on that next s*** now”, “next level video s***”
• Pump It: “Your girl admits that we do da s*** and When we play you shake your a**”
• Lady Lumps: “What you gonna do with all that a**, all that a** inside yo’ jeans? What you gonna do with all that breasts, all that breasts inside yo’ shirt?”
• Don’t Stop the Party: “Get up off my genitals”
• Hey Mama: “Hey Mama, this that s*** that make your groove”
• Take It Off: “a** up side-to-side, come on girl, take it off”

With Just Dance 3, even though some of the songs were suggestive, the publisher took time to at least bleep out the profanity. But with this game they didn’t. And even beyond the profanity, as anyone who follows the Black Eyed Peas knows, just about every song is suggestive and full of sexual double-entendre.

Again, I’m not making any judgments here and this is not factoring into my rating of the game–I’m sure for everyone who decries the profanity in the game, there are just as many people who are happy that the game has remained true to the artists’ original songs.

But this is just something that parents and educators may want to be aware of who may not know The Black Eyed Peas beyond the sanitized versions played on TV shows and at sporting events. I’m actually surprised that this title got a “T for Teen” rating, as I would guess many parents would probably hold off on getting this for their 13 and 14 year olds if they knew the content. I actually thought the ESRB had made a mistake in this case, but sure enough on their site they reiterate their Teen rating with the following summary:

Rating summary: This is a rhythm-and-dance simulation game in which players follow along to dance routines from the Black Eyed Peas. Players score points by accurately moving their bodies in time with the music and scrolling indicators. During the course of the game, a few background videos depict suggestive behavior (e.g., gyrating female dancers); some women are depicted in form-fitting outfits that reveal moderate amounts of cleavage. Some songs contain the words “sh*t” and “a*s”; others reference sexual material (e.g., “(Hotness) sex with clothes on . . . And I got a Trojan/Just in case we get it,” “Just wanna squeeze t*ts,” “You know my style is naughty, right/So don’t c*ck block me,” and “Maybe if you’re lucky/You’ll get a peep show”).

I’m no prude, but this seems like it should be closer to an M for Mature (aged 17 and up) than a T for Teen (aged 13 and up).

All that aside, I’d give this game 3.5 stars. It’s not a bad dance game, but for the reasons I mentioned above, it does feel like it falls short of an “experience” that’s worth paying $49.99 for. As I said, if you’re a big fan of The Peas, you’ll probably want it at any price. If you’re just a causal fan, I’d say this would only be worth it when it goes under $20. And if you’re a parent or educator, you might want to take a good look at the lyrics of the songs before bringing it home or to your school.

It’s for this latter group of people that I’m writing this review. If you’re in the former group, take a break and hold on until my next review (which will involve the decidedly-more grown-up Black Eye Peas).

If your TV is turned on to Nickelodeon more than a few hours a week, chances are your kids are going to love this game (and by extension, so will you). As with its predecessor Nickelodon Fit, it features some of your favorite characters from Nickelodeon, including Dora, Diego, and the  Backyardigans. Ni-Hao Kai Lan and her buds were left out of this one for some reason, but in her place is the Fresh Beat Band.

While Nickelodeon Fit had a great variety of different kinds of activties, there’s only one activity in Nickelodeon Dance: dancing. The dance moves aren’t nearly as complex as what you’ll see on games like Just Dance or Dance Central, but many are simplified versions of familiar dance moves like the cha-cha or the twist.

The game starts out with an introduction by Dora. Throughout the opening menus, Dora will out reminders incessantly (I mean every two seconds) such as “don’t forget to press the A button to choose what you want!!!!!!” and “you can scroll through the list of things you can choose by pressing up or down on the plus control panel!!!!!!!!!” It gets annoying very quickly (even to small kids, who are really more intelligent than some of these games give them credit for).

The opening menu is pretty simple:

• Quick Play
• Dance
• Workout
• Achievements
• Options

When you start out, you’ll be automatically sent to a tutorial. If you are familiar with Just Dance, it should all be very familiar to you:

• Three of your favorite Nickelodeon characters will dance on the screen, and your goal is to match the moves of the character in the middle, as if you’re looking in a mirror.
• There are icons on the bottom of the page that tell you what move you should be doing and what move is coming up. I didn’t find the icons particularly intuitive, but that didn’t matter too much because the moves themselves are very simple. Also, the character will shout out the dance move, which even small kids will quickly catch on to.
• As you hit moves correctly, stars will fly out of the character into a “score meter”. The score meter only consists of three stars, and there isn’t a numerical score count at all. The game supports either one or two players dancing together; one player will have a blue score meter, the other’s will be purple.

There doesn’t seem to be any difference between “Quick Play”, “Dance” and “Workout”, except that with “Quick Play” you’ll see a list of all four song categories, while with “Dance” you’ll see songs from only three categories (“Starting Steps”, “Smooth Moves”, “Fancy Footwork), while with “Workout” you’ll see songs from the fourth category (“Workout Songs”).

You start by selecting a song. If a second player wants to play, they have a few seconds to press the “A” button on their controller to join in.

Each song has one of three icons to distinguish how much physical activity the song involves. There’s 1) a “walking” icon, 2) a “jogging” icon, and 3) a “running” icon. If you’re a parent that wants to wear out your kids, go for the “running”.

Here’s a complete list of the categories and songs:

Workout Songs
Down by the Bay – Dora the Explorer (3)
Great Day – The Fresh Beat band (3)
Limbo Rock – Go, Diego, Go (2)
Rhythm is Gonna Get You – Dora the Explorer (3)
The Lion Sleeps Tonight – Dora the Explorer (3)
We Did It! – Dora the Explorer (3)

Starting Steps Songs
A Friend Like You – The Fresh Beat Band (1)
Al Rescate – Go, Diego, Go (3)
The Backyardigans Theme Song (1)
The Fresh Beat Band Theme Song (3)
Get On Your Feet – Dora the Explorer (2)
Dora the Explorer Theme Song – Dora the Explorer (2)
Oye Como Va – Dora the Explorer (2-locked)
Santa Claus is Coming Aqui – Dora the Explorer (1-locked)

Smooth Moves Songs
Alouette – Dora the Explorer (1)
Go, Diego, Go Theme Song – Go, Diego, Go (2)
Joy to the World – Go, Diego, Go (1)
Locomotion – Dora the Explorer (1)
We Got the Beat – Dora the Explorer (2)
Yeti Stomp – The Backyardians (2)
Iko Iko – Dora the Explorer (1-locked)
P.U. (Stinky Swamp Song) – The Backyardigans (1-locked)

Fancy Footwork Songs
Dancing in the Street – Dora the Explorer (2)
Music (Keeps Me Movin’) – The Fresh Beat Band (3)
Here We Go – The Fresh Beat Band (3)
Rockin’ Robin – Go, Diego, Go (2)
Tuba Polka – The Backyardigans (3)
We’re Unstoppable – The Fresh Beat Band (3)
Animal Jam – Go, Diego, Go (2-locked)
Sleigh Ride – Dora the Explorer (1-locked)

The songs are all cover versions of popular songs. The singing is done by Dora, Diego, or the Fresh Beat Band, and is characteristically high pitched and energetic, just like their TV shows. From my observations, I’ve found that adults generally fall into two categories: those who hear such cover versions as fingers on a chalkboard, and those who love them (primarily because their kids’ eyes perk up and their feet involuntarily start moving whenever such a song starts playing). Play through the demonstration videos I’ve posted here and decide which camp you fall under before buying the game.

For parents who are worried that the lyrics of games like Just Dance 3 are too suggestive, there’s obviously nothing at all to worry about here. Even very, very mildly suggestive lyrics (such as the phrase “every guy, grab a girl” in Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets”) are rewritten to something very innocuous (in this case, “ever-y boy, and ever-y girl”). And as is often done in Dora songs, some of the lyrics are rewritten to teach kids about different hispanic and latino concepts (in the same song, places like “Philadephia, PA” and “Baltimore” are replaced with places like “Puerto Rico” and “Columbia”).

One think I always check for in dancing games is how accurate the controllers are. In this game, the controller response is very noticeably lenient. First, I tested it out by playing normally, and easily scored three stars. Second, I tested it out by just waving my arm up and down to the beat, and scored three stars again. Finally, I decided to just lay the controller on the table–and I still got one-and-a-half stars.

Of course, this would be a detriment in most dancing games, but because the audience for this game is pre-schoolers, it’s actually an advantage. If a child in your family has felt left out while everyone is playing and having fun with Just Dance, they’ll love the game that’s “made just for them”.

On the other hand, I imagine some children may realize very quickly that no matter what you do (or don’t do), you’ll get a high score. So I think the best way to approach this game is not so much to focus on the score, but just on having fun dancing with their favorite characters. Since they’re probably dancing to songs that play on the TV anyway, this game adds an additional layer of interaction with their on-screen friends that they’ll get excited about. There are also “Achievements” that you earn as you progress through the game by completing songs and earning stars.

Overall, this is a very basic dancing game that’s accessible to preschoolers. I would have liked to see more options, such as the ability for different dancers to dance at different levels (this way a parent or older sibling could dance with a child and be somewhat challenged). I also wish the game could accommodate more than two players, as sometimes the whole family would like to get involved (my guess is that they limited it to two players because they wanted to keep it consistent with the version on the Kinect, which by definition can only accommodate two players). Finally, it would have been nice to have had a little more personalization in the game, as this is something that would have brought the interactivity far beyond what kids already see on the TV–for example, making use of the child’s Wii character or allowing the child to be greeted by name (or even to store their name and their progress).

All in all, I’m giving it 4 stars out of 5 and my recommendation, but really only for a very specific group: parents of preschoolers who are fans of shows like Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go. Parents of older kids may opt for Just Dance Kids, and families of teens and older will probably want to stick with Just Dance 3 or its many variants.