Dance Factory

Dance Factory is a fun idea in a pre-Audiosurf world. DDR is great and all, but what about the rest of us who want to listen to our own music? Codemasters decided to solve this problem by creating a way for the PS2 to read your CDs and automatically make DDR charts out of them!

Sounds wonderful in concept, though as you might expect, this comes with tons of issues. The first is that by automatically generating patterns, they end up typically detecting the BPM incorrectly, and spewing out unnatural patterns on top of it. Sure you can play it, but you wouldn't consider anything this game spits out at you to be actually good. Then, since this has to constantly read the data off of a music cd, you should expect to run into problems, like skippy disks that can't be fully read. Technically you can make your own charts in this game, though it amounts to DDR's live editing mode, which also results in awful charts.

Also the up and down arrows are flipped relative to where they are on DDR's UI. EW. Your muscle memory will not take kindly to this.

Generating the charts takes a while, too. If you decide to play the little minigame while the CD is loading (this game not only dodges Konami's iron fist, but Namco's loading screen patent), then the CD reading speed will slow down to a stupidly slow speed. Which is unfortunate, because the little loading screen puzzle game is probably more fun than the charts themselves. And after all that waiting, a simple disk reading problem can erase everything.

This is all unfortunate, because the features and presentation of this game are very nice. The menus and style are simple, but look good. The menu music is great, and this game has a ton of visualizers! There's also a 'monster' generating mechanic where each CD will generate a different creature that will dance during the songs. A bit of a nod to Monster Rancher, you think? You can even put some silly little cosmetics on them. It's cute.

Were it not for the disc reading problem, I could genuinely recommend this as a cool music visualizer, but the problems nullify most of the enjoyment you could get with this game.