Dance Dance Revolution SuperNOVA 2 (game & dance pad) (PlayStation 2)

The sixth DDR released in North America for the PlayStation 2, "Supernova 2" isn't the best choice for the PS2 owner (that would be the previous "Supernova"), nor the second best (that would be "DDR MAX 2"), but it's a solid third place. What it does right, it largely inherits from its prececessor. What it does wrong can be squarely laid on the shoulders of its music producers and licensers.

By this point, pretty much everyone in gaming knows DDR, so a summary of basic gameplay can be skipped. The key is how the game is presented and what varieties are available. In addition to the basic arcade-style game, Supernova offered solid "advanced" games such as a versus mode, the best exercise mode the series has ever known, and then sabotaged it with the aggravating "Stellar Master Mode", a confusing mission mode that had to be completed to unlock over a third of the game's soundtrack and all the extra modes. Supernova 2 simplifies this with a "Hyper Master Mode" which at least allows players to progress more quickly through unlocking new stuff. However, it shares the same dubious design decision as Stellar Master Mode: most of the challenges change the nature of the game, sometimes radically (arrows are rearranged, superimposed, invisible, move at confusing speeds, etc.).

Given how much effort has to be invested in these Master modes to unlock much of the soundtrack and gameplay, you wonder: what's the real game, arcade mode, or Master mode? It's as if "Madden NFL 2008" only offered the NFC teams at the start, and made you play silly quarterback challenges and punt/pass/kick contests to unlock the AFC, team-by-team.

Fortunately, Hyper Master Mode is a lot easier to beat, since you can buy "support modules" to help you clear difficult challenges. For example, if a challenge requires you to hit a certain number of combos, a module that turns "good"s into "great"s will keep your combos going. So you're less likely to hit a brick wall in Hyper Master Mode than in the previous game's Stellar Master Mode. But it's still annoying to have to invest so much time in this mode at all.

I exercise with DDR every day, and I appreciate how good Supernova's exercise mode was, and am grateful it is copied lock, stock, and barrel for Supernova 2. You can maintain multiple profiles and histories for exercise players, protect them with passwords, and design your own custom exercise courses (also possible in MAX 2, but not in the "Extreme"s).

The catch is that you need to start unlocking songs quickly to build a tolerable workout. Supernova 2's default song list contains a lot of low-speed R&B and slow pop from popular performers like Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, etc. Some of the licensed songs, like Chris Brown's "Say Goodbye" and especially Gwen Stefani's "Wind It Up" are particularly ill-suited to DDR-style dancing. There are licensed songs that work in this format, like Fatboy Slim's "The Rockafeller Skank", but sadly, they're the exception. Doing a workout of 17 all-random songs, on "basic" for the first and last and "difficult" otherwise, I found I was only burning 350 calories, compared to 450 for similar workout schedules on Supernova. Only after unlocking the usual DDR J-pop suspects like Be For U, Riyu Kosaka, Naoki Maeda, Anettai Maji-Ska Bakudan, etc., could I get the speed to a point where it was interesting and valid exercise.

So, full points for taking the best of Supernova, addressing the worst problems of Stellar Master Mode (though