A PS2 dance game + mat for under $5

If you’ve read much of this blog, you know I love a good deal, and right now a lot of those deals are on Playstation 2 console games.  The decade-old console may be going out to pasture (even though they’re still making new games for it) but it still has the best DDR games, in my opinion, and several dance game knockoffs were released for it right before the Wii stole much of the home exergaming spotlight.

One knockoff is High School Musical 3:  Senior Year Dance, a dance-mat game loosely fashioned after DDR and featuring songs from the popular Disney Channel series.  (Don’t confuse it with the Wii HSM game, which does not use a mat.)  I picked this up from Amazon at the incredible price of $4.08, and at this writing, the bundle’s price is only $3.63.  Yes, bundle – the game comes with a four-arrow dance mat that can be also be used with DDR or In The Groove.  The mat is a little thinner than the standard Konami mat, but for under $5, how can you complain?

And the game itself is actually not bad at all.  It’s based on the Disney Channel franchise of tween-aimed movies and music about a high school where kids sing and dance everywhere, like in Fame.  As in DDR, you step on a mat to cues set to the beat of a song, but here you watch for bubbles gliding out of the center of a ring of four bars, arranged like the arrows on the mat.  There are also jump and “freeze” steps, and while there’s no training mode aside from a very easy tutorial, the beginning mode is easy enough for anyone to get used to the gameplay whether you’re a DDR player or not.  Two players can play, in either versus or cooperative modes.

Many of the songs are catchy and danceable, if you can stand tween pop, and since this is Disney, no worries about inappropriate lyrics.  And there are a couple of neat features:  one is the Super Star mode, which is similar to the Star Power in Guitar Hero.  Once a meter fills up with consecutive steps, a star in the corner starts blinking, and if you jump on the X and O spots simultaneously, you get double points for a few seconds.  The other cool thing is the ability to create your own avatar, either male or female, give it any name and watch it dance in the background.

There’s no workout mode or edit mode or doubles mode (just a few “fan” extras like personality quizzes and a “yearbook”) but geez, a dance mat plus game for the price of a frappachino!  If you’re even slightly interested, jump on it with both feet.