Dance Masters loses the flying arrows and doesn’t require a dance pad to play it. Konami developed this dancing game for Kinect. I stepped up to the camera to play it.
Dance Masters uses the usual Kinect menus, which have players move a hand up or down to pick a song and swipe to select. The demo’s songlist was short and mostly Bemani music. I picked “Into Your Heart”, one of the Naoki tracks, on standard.
The screen switched from menus to a female dancer. I was supposed to follow her moves. Kinect’s camera captures player one (with some odd pixilation) and puts them in the left hand side of the screen. Player two is on the right. If you follow the dancer you’ll see it on screen, but surprisingly you don’t have to dance to play Dance Masters.
Dance Masters doesn’t track fancy footwork. Only some of the dancer’s moves count towards your score. Those steps are shown with green silhouettes that close in on the model from the left and right. You need to be in the same position as the dancer when both shadows touch her to hit the note. It’s like hitting an arrow in Dance Dance Revolution, but instead of stepping on an up button Dance Masters have players pose. Most of the poses were extending an arm or leg in a direction. There was the point, the shoulder shrug with both arms out, and the monster (where you hold one arm up and the other out like you’re making a monster’s maw). As long as your pose is relatively close to hers you pass. Its possible, perhaps easier, to wait for the silhouettes before moving.
In fact, that’s what I did for my second song.
A Konami representative explained Dance Masters can be much harder, especially if I turned off the silhouettes. That’s one way to play Dance Masters. Another is to ignore the model’s dance and freestyle until the poses come up. There are some wild Dance Dance Revolution routines and it seems like Dance Masters gives players even more freedom to come up with something impressive.
