Lisa: Twinkletoes

Ever since Dance Dance Revolution came out for the Playstation and XBox, I have been bugging Blake every time we pass a game store to go in and ask if they're coming out with a dance pad for the GameCube. Of course, the game store employees always responded with a flat "No." Obviously they are hardcore gamers who do not consider DDR worth their valuable time.

Imagine my surprise when we were walking through the GameCube area at Best Buy last year, and there was a dance pad and a dance game just sitting right there on the shelf! It wasn't true DDR (it was a near-clone called MC Groovz Dance Craze), but it had to be mine. Honestly, the game was a bit disappointing, but I played it anyway, and I am excited to have the pad to use for the awesome Karaoke Revolution Party and as a second pad for the upcoming Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix.

I soon became fascinated with the fact that the Mad Catz dance pad has almost all the buttons of a standard 'Cube controller, and functions like a controller during gameplay. I wondered if the dance pad could be used to play other, non-dancing games. Recently, Sarah and I took the only course of action we could imagine: we challenged the GameCube master, Blake, to a dance-off. Of course, Blake absolutely refuses to play MC Groovz on the dance pad, so we had to be careful in how we posed the scenario.

Here was the setup:

Challenge #1: In the two-player dance mode on MC Groovz, Sarah and I (on the dance pad) faced off against Blake (playing on a regular controller).

Result: Sarah and I were strongly in the lead before Blake figured out how to perform some of the steps on the controller. For example, green arrows on the screen mean that you stomp on both of the indicated areas of the dance pad simultaneously. Since you can't move a joystick in two directions at once, Blake figured out (after some trial and error) that you have to move both the joystick and the c-stick, one for each foot. Once he figured these things out, he started closing in on our lead and we quickly moved on to Challenge #2.

Challenge #2: In the two-player mode on Soul Calibur, Blake (on the dance pad) was pitted against Lisa and Sarah (alternately, using controllers). We thought we would have this one in the bag, because although Blake has mad Soul Calibur skillz, playing on the dance pad would surely be a tough handicap to overcome.

Result: After an adjustment period of about three fights, Blake was using all kinds of combination moves and totally kicking our trash. He was hopping around on that dance pad like crazy, much how Pamie described Stee:

We are all horrible at the dance mat. And by that I mean "stee is awesome in ways we can't understand because his feet are bigger than the squares he's supposed to hit, and we don't understand why he can dance on this thing like a small boy trained in acrobatics, but the rest of us lumber through the 'easy' mode, hoping we don't look like total tools, knowing full well that we do."

Conclusion: You can take the controller away from the GameCube champion, but you can't...um...but he will totally slaughter you anyway. Also, I see now how Blake earned his high school nickname.