Since I had a chance at playing a full-version at Digital Life...I might as well share my impressions.
Overall, the game looked great. The only two things that soiled my experience were the lowered volume and the usage of soft-pads instead of something more heavy-duty.
Like DDR Universe, the development team has done a lot to make the game's look distanced from its PS2 brethren. The user interface includes a songwheel format similar to the older DDR arcade mixes along with the groove radar in the center. The selection menu looked nice with the bright colors. The revised banners and BGs were odd. I had no idea why there would be a Buddhist/Hindi figure in the new PSM background, or why there was a new Calico Cat banner with ugly tacky colors. But at least there wasn't anything hideous in quality. UM4 also uses "Oni" as the name for their Challenge difficulty, which is a nice nostalgia bonus for the vets. However, I wasn't pleased with how the Oni difficulty was hidden from the normal selections. You could see the 3 standard difficulties, but the only sign of an Oni chart were the extra ratings on the groove meter. This was somewhat annoying to me, as I'd liked to have know the foot-ratings for those Oni charts. However, the effort put into this game was obvious. Unlike Supernova, all the songs included a BGM. Maybe some of the BGMs were generic, but they were far from being an eyesore.
As for the songlist, DDR UM4 includes new content mixed with a few Supernova crossovers and a few repeats. As a person who primarily plays the PS2 console games, I was surprised at how nice the content in the Xbox version was. Along with the four contest-winner songs (GO!, Grandolin, There's a Reason, and Race Against Time), there was Insaner. Even though the sound wasn't very hearable (probably due to some idiot's decision to set up the Xbox to have a fairly low volume), I liked the hard-techno sound it generated. The steps were comparable to the Max series, at least up to TLOM.
If you're an Xbox owner and a DDR player, I recommend this game (provided nothing changes from the version show in Digital Life to the version released...hehehe...)
Overall, the game looked great. The only two things that soiled my experience were the lowered volume and the usage of soft-pads instead of something more heavy-duty.
Like DDR Universe, the development team has done a lot to make the game's look distanced from its PS2 brethren. The user interface includes a songwheel format similar to the older DDR arcade mixes along with the groove radar in the center. The selection menu looked nice with the bright colors. The revised banners and BGs were odd. I had no idea why there would be a Buddhist/Hindi figure in the new PSM background, or why there was a new Calico Cat banner with ugly tacky colors. But at least there wasn't anything hideous in quality. UM4 also uses "Oni" as the name for their Challenge difficulty, which is a nice nostalgia bonus for the vets. However, I wasn't pleased with how the Oni difficulty was hidden from the normal selections. You could see the 3 standard difficulties, but the only sign of an Oni chart were the extra ratings on the groove meter. This was somewhat annoying to me, as I'd liked to have know the foot-ratings for those Oni charts. However, the effort put into this game was obvious. Unlike Supernova, all the songs included a BGM. Maybe some of the BGMs were generic, but they were far from being an eyesore.
As for the songlist, DDR UM4 includes new content mixed with a few Supernova crossovers and a few repeats. As a person who primarily plays the PS2 console games, I was surprised at how nice the content in the Xbox version was. Along with the four contest-winner songs (GO!, Grandolin, There's a Reason, and Race Against Time), there was Insaner. Even though the sound wasn't very hearable (probably due to some idiot's decision to set up the Xbox to have a fairly low volume), I liked the hard-techno sound it generated. The steps were comparable to the Max series, at least up to TLOM.
If you're an Xbox owner and a DDR player, I recommend this game (provided nothing changes from the version show in Digital Life to the version released...hehehe...)
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