Slave 4 Her

Larger than life: CyBrit is terrifyingly realistic.

Britney's Dance Beat is an oddly addictive exercise in tedium.

by Debra Auspitz

A lot of people think that girls don’t like video games. Or at least that they’re not very good at them. Now that some brave, sports-bra-baring female soccer players have blown apart the whole girls-suck-at-sports assumption, video games remain one of the final arenas in which the ladies are overlooked.

Well I’m here to say, loudly and proudly, that there are women out there who’ll kick all kinds of butt at any game there is. I’m just not one of those women.

The female characters in the majority of games don’t exactly inspire me to become a serious gamer. There are two kinds of women in the game universe these days: the obnoxiously busty, ass-kicking-while-her-clothes-are-falling-off Lara Croft type, and the relatively normal, haunted-looking woman -- who inevitably is brutally murdered in the game’s introduction, thus prompting the male protagonist of the game to go on a killing spree.

Since there are no realistic women in video games, I had to settle for someone who’s not yet a woman. Yes, Britney Spears has her own video game, Britney’s Dance Beat (THQ, PlayStation 2, $39.99; Windows PC, $29.99, E-rated). It’s flashy, mildly entertaining and will drive you to levels of rage that rival the most violent shoot-’em-up game.

My gaming partner, Emily, and I first tried out the PC version of Britney’s Dance Beat. It has extras the PlayStation 2 game doesn’t have, like a quiz about Britney’s life and a chance to create and save your own dance routines. Alas, after the powerhouse opening montage of Britney dancing to music that sounds suspiciously like the Vincent-Price-voiceover music in “Thriller,” the game kept crashing. Determined to dance like pop stars (at least with our thumbs), Emily and I caused a small commotion by barging into the Blockbuster at 10th and Snyder 10 minutes before closing and demanding loudly, “Do you have the Britney Spears game?”

Even Emily’s intended-to-be-overheard question, “So when do you have to write an article on this?” didn’t stop the snickers of the teenage boys waiting to rent real games behind us.

Oddly enough, Britney’s Dance Beat is not a joke of a game, laughable premise aside. After the aforementioned montage opener, a computerized version of Britney (let’s call her CyBrit) awkwardly moves around the practice room, a gritty, graffiti-covered old dance studio that I guess we’re supposed to believe Britney Spears actually works in. CyBrit tells us that she’s about to kick off her European tour, and she needs us to be her backup dancers. To become members of her touring “family,” as she calls it, we must go through 10 auditions of increasing levels of difficulty, facing off against the computer’s dancer each time. If you win the dance-off, you move on to the next audition. If you lose, you try again.

There are no American Idol-esque judges to critique your performance, just Britney yelling out encouraging comments or gentle critiques (“looks like we need to work on this”). Like everything the real Britney Spears does, some of CyBrit’s comments come off a bit naughtier than I’m guessing they were intended (“don’t stop” and “that was hot” being two of them).

The actual “dancing” involves hitting the controller buttons repeatedly. A circle in front of your dancer fills with a combination of arrow directions or controller icons (square, circle, X and triangle), depending on what mode you choose. As a sweeping, transparent green band makes its way around the circle, you have to hit the correct controller button or arrow direction exactly as it becomes highlighted by the band. While this is going on, you and your computer competition are dancing in some sort of exotic locale, depending on the song, and Britney’s actual video is playing on a big screen in the background. The game tells you whether you’ve hit the move perfectly, just OK or if you’ve missed entirely. But you don’t see any of this, because you are intently staring at the stupid circle, trying to hit the right buttons in time to the music (though sometimes your “steps” are off the beat, so you can’t just rely on your sense of rhythm to get you through). Even after three hours of play, I had no clue what any of the dances actually looked like, because if you look up from the circle for a second, you’re screwed. If you actually want to know how to dance like Britney, go to Preview mode and choose one of the dancers to jerkingly show you the moves.

Before you audition, you have to choose a dancer, from six characters. The characters are a Benetton-ad of conformist diversity, from whitebread Dan (he says “dude, that rocked” when he wins an audition) to Latin lover Enrique (he does a weird little mariachi dance when he wins). The ladies include African-American Carla and perky Asian girl Elisa.

Hit the button one more time: Two dancers audition while Britney looms in the background.

Once you have a dancer, you choose the song you want to audition with. Eventually you’ll have to dance to all five songs, twice. The choices are the schoolgirl classic “Baby One More Time,” “Oops!…I Did It Again,” the raunchy “Slave 4 U,” and two newer hits, “Stronger” and “Overprotected.” After an hour of play, Emily and I found ourselves in a serious strategy discussion on song choice. “‘Stronger’ has the hardest rhythm so we should do that one first,” she argued. We agreed to save the knock-you-over-the-head beat of “Slave 4 U” for a higher-difficulty audition level.

For the first few levels you find yourself bouncing along to the beat, hoping to endow your thumbs with some natural rhythm. By the later rounds you are squinting at the circle on the screen, hunched over the controller and screaming curses at Britney every time she breaks your concentration by chirping “now you’ve got it!”

And somewhere in there lies the real point of the game -- to promote Spears’ latest album and to drill the songs into your head as you try over and over again to win an audition.

There is some seemingly arbitrary point system assigned to each round that you win, and with every 500 or 1000 points you get a “backstage pass” that allows you to watch a video of Britney getting ready to go on tour. It’s nothing you couldn’t see every day on MTV.

If you make it through all 10 auditions (which Emily and I, pathetically, did not), you get to dance in concert against another backup dancer. If you beat that dancer, you can face off against CyBrit. But first, go to the practice hall and work on your moves. CyBrit will either clap in a wooden, Al Gore kind of way and tell you what a great job you did, or she’ll shake her head and tell you to try again. And the amazing thing is, CyBrit manages to look even more alien and disproportionately busty than the real Spears. That’s modern technology.




	search citypaper.net