Pump It Up: Exceed (game & dance mat) (PlayStation 2, 2005)

Since you've just clicked on a review of a dancing game it's a fair bet that you've played one in the past and probably already have a plastic pad taking up space in your home. Pump It Up: Exceed is another game in the genre, but it breaks out of the four-button pad setup that the Dance Dance Revolution series and In the Groove use. Thankfully, the new pad with its directional arrows on the corners and a new button in the middle easily justifies its existence for the new kinds of dance moves that can be pulled off and with over a 100 songs to play through there's a lot of dancing to do. This makes it a worthy alternative even if it still has some growing up to do.

It's possible to buy Pump It Up: Exceed as a standalone game, but the only way you're going to truly play it is to pick up the bundle for $20 more. The pad itself has a sticky bottom and stays firmly in place on a hard surface so there should be no worries in it moving around. That makes sure that all your attention can be focused on the dancing itself and you're going to need it. With a fifth center button there are now five icons to keep track of on the screen as well as four new buttons combos that can be used in the game. But since the center button is adjacent to the corner buttons, these new combinations can be hit with a single well-placed foot.

What the new button layout enables the game to do is to throw out many more movements into the songs. Players are required to move around the pad in more ways than in the other dancing games and the double-button jumps can have them facing left, right, and diagonally. The designers have used this new possibility well in the choreography so that the dance moves feel more like dancing than elsewhere. This can also make the moves a little trickier to pull off and for the hardcore there is much more to take care of here.

Another benefit of the five buttons and their configuration is that the arrows on the screen are in a more intuitive layout. The DDR games stick to the standard icons with the arrows pointing left, down, up, and left, the Pump It Up: Exceed layout has the buttons (from left to right) as back left, front left, center, front right, and back right. This makes the screen easier to read, especially for those new to the genre.

With the new moves in hand there are loads of songs to go and explore with over 100 tracks making an appearance here. There are a few licensed tracks here from The Crystal Method, Sugarhill Gang, and Elvis Presley, but the vast majority are original tracks. But even though they're unknown they still represent a surprisingly healthy amount of different music genres. Latin beats work into hip hop and on into some hard rock and on through to some J-Pop. The songs are professionally done and all of them have a pretty happy feel to them to add to the party atmosphere.