[Music] [Laughter] many rhythm games throughout the years have revolved around simulating the act of dancing which you'd probably expect for a long time the best we had in that regard was pretty much ddr or pump it up giving players a stage to dance and step to the beat that would all change in the era of motion controls however game companies surely saw the potential of dancing rhythm games paired with motion controls and this was also before companies had completely soured to rhythm games as this was right around slash before the plastic instrument games crash so a lot of game companies were chomping at the bit to get their motion control games out enter dance evolution dance evolution also known as dan evo is a dancing rhythm game from konami that uses the microsoft kinect yeah i haven't heard that name in a while have you dance evolution requires the player to mimic a dance choreography presented to the player by a dancing character on screen think just dance except the indicators tried to match up more directly with the model as they happen rather than seeing a list of dance moves the player has to prepare to mimic just dance came before this game by the way there are a few different note types the standard note is a green pose that is presented alongside the main dancing character at certain points in the song when the two indicators come together you need to be doing that pose in this way you're not technically required to dance along to the choreography all the time but obviously it's encouraged there are also blue circles that will appear over top of the character throughout these indicate hand or foot position and your hands or feet need to be in the correct spots when the character does their move that matches them there's also a whole note version of this type of note on some of the higher difficulties there's a note type that appears on the ground near the character indicating where and when you should step honestly i wonder how well the kinect did at tracking this one at home lastly there are what i would describe as orange swipe notes these orange notes require a continuous hand motion in a certain direction the arrows will appear and work as sort of sliders for you to move your hand across all of these combine together to create an active dance choreography for you to play on the lower difficulties it relies a lot on the player to follow the dancing and play along but on the higher difficulties the game is a flurry of actions giving the player a full dancing experience we've got a few versions of dan evo to take a look at so let's start with the original on xbox 360. the first version of dan evo to release was known as dance evolution or dance masters in the us this is the one and only bomani series to ever start as a console release it was released on november 4th 2010 in north america and it requires the kinect a lot of dancing games of this style came out around this time and it was definitely a trend with a lot of other games in this style like dance central and just dance it shipped with 30 songs 10 of which were unlockable the game was met with middling reviews some citing the game's niche soundtrack as you'd expect the game is populated with ddr music since that's a lot of the in-house dance music konami has to pull from a lot of gnocchi and a spattering of other ddr tracks this surely gave the game a competitive disadvantage in the american market as a large majority of the popularity of music games especially in the west is dependent on the song list why would you buy dan evo and dance to some random japanese music you've never heard of when you could buy just dance and play along to lady gaga or dance central featuring music from daft punk and the black eyed peas konami was at a major disadvantage when it came to song list and arguably didn't have the gameplay to back it up with some reviews citing the judgment in the game as oddly touchy the game would be later ported to an arcade version but not before another weird stop along the way up next is rhythm party which technically exists in the same series though it does work a bit differently but then again when the hell am i ever gonna talk about rhythm party elsewhere so it here we go this game is extremely strange it's the second cs game in the dan evo series and as of now is the most recent home release of a bomani game which was 9 years ago you can probably mostly thank konami for that since they were shifting their focus heavily away from the console gaming market but yes this was our glorious cs send off the gameplay of rhythm party is significantly more straightforward being more of a rhythm game where you use your body to hit significantly more standard rhythm game notes like taps swipes and holds i honestly wonder why the gameplay is so different in this version they licensed exactly three songs for this game which is almost certainly too little too late but hey at least they got ymca and born this way now other than that the game had seven other songs at base you want more than 10 songs better shell out for the dlc buddy if you had all the dlc for this game you got 25 songs wow amazing honestly the song choice in the dlc is pretty decent if you're a bomani fan it seems like they made the same mistake twice with basically no notable songs that a western audience would take notice of but hey at least it has bag the game was removed from xbox marketplace on february 1st 2015 though hilariously the dlc is apparently still out there if you have a copy of this sitting in your xbox 360 and you need to top up your rhythm party song collection it's just a really strange release overall with that we move on to the final most notable release dance evolution arcade was the final version of dan evo and funnily was an arcade port of the console version all the songs except one from the base game came over to the arcade version and then they added new ones throughout its life as well there was also a level system added to the game to allow for progression and unlocking of higher difficulties the game ended up having 96 songs in total and retained the same gameplay of the original dan evo console version god knows what happened to the gameplay of rhythm party the game stayed on this version for the remainder of its life and around four years after its release was taken offline on august 31st 2016. with the offline patch came the force unlocking of all the hidden and challenged songs as well as the removal of 20 songs this is something that can happen when a game is given an offline patch they may not have the license for some of the songs to keep them in the game past the offline patch so when the game is taken offline they remove them and allow the game to keep operating it's definitely unfortunate but it helps the game to get an offline patch rather than nothing at all with that the dance evolution series went dormant days of luton was an interesting series that really tried to capitalize on the motion rhythm game's craze and i would say that for a certain fan base they did a good job the gameplay can be flashy and fun at times and even if the song list isn't to your taste i do think it fits the game well there's a good chance that the reason dan evo disappeared is just due to the kinect becoming aging and unsupported hardware the trackers on those cameras were serviceable for the time but never really that great and around the time of microsoft releasing the xbox one they started phasing out the kinect and not supporting it anymore plus those motion rhythm games had kind of lost their luster and rhythm games as a whole in the west had massively decreased in popularity the game does live on in some ways however the game has grown popular at conventions and can still easily be run today due to the offline patch it's really great that they at least gave it that and didn't have to resort to completely killing the game honestly i really wish that konami was willing to give all their series an offline patch it would help the hardcore fans be able to continue to enjoy the game easier as that makes it a lot more feasible for convention game rooms to support them when they don't have to work around an unusable network check honestly if konami has to kill more games in the future i just really hope they keep doing this dance evolution may live on in homes and conventions but it still joins the list of dead rhythm games thanks for watching check out my twitter and my twitch links are in the description below you can also check out my patreon if you want to support my content if you like this video don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you guys next time [Music] you