Quite a few of my friends have sent me listings or pictures of the Boardwalk Arcade DDR toy, and I don't blame them - if anything, it does fufill it's purpose of being a cute little desk toy. But still - I wish it was more than that.
Games-wise, the BA-DDR minicab boasts three songs (Keep On Movin', Make It Better, and Paranoia) and three difficulties (Basic, Another, and Maniac).
The difficulties are exactly the same as when DDR first came out with 1stMix, and the songs line up with this too - Paranoia and Make It Better introduced in 1stMix, and Keep On Movin' in 2ndMix.
The songs are fun enough at first, but after a few plays it starts to get tiresome, due to both the lacking tracklist, the quality of the button-pad, and the uninteresting design of the menus.
There's no menu music, and you don't even get a letter rating at the end of songs. This is totally a nitpick, but it all adds up after a while.
I'm not great with specifics when it comes to pads, but these buttons can be infuriating, dropping inputs even when your press is perfectly in the center of a button.
Aside from the buttons (and even then only during gameplay), there are no bright neon lights as I saw advertised in some listings, and the sound quality is also absolutely awful to the point that I hear little difference in the volume options, too.
I even ended up cracking the back open when I first got it to take a look inside, and there's only one speaker!
Moving onto how the unit itself looks, it's ... pathetic, to say the least.
The print quality is pretty good - which, obviously, immediately gives away the terrible pixelled jpegs plasted onto the template. A child could do better than this on PicsArt or something.
See here on the marquee - the Stay Cool! font is clean and crisp, and the background looks pretty nice too, but the low-res DDR logo ruins the whole look.
Also, on the sides and front, you can spot a DDR X logo?! What's this doing here?! DDR X has nothing to do with 1st and 2nd Mix at all, and it also looks low-res and pixelled to hell and back to boot.
As much as I'm disappointed in the gameplay, I'm even more disappointed in the look of this toy - it looks and feels cheap, and I wouldn't've picked it up myself. I'm just lucky I recieved it as a gift.
As much as I'd like to do a complete overhaul of the BA-DDR minicab, complete with a new circuit board and new decals, I just don't have the time for that kind of project right now.
But overall? I do not recommend this. Sorry! Bit of a downer for my first review.
Thanks for reading :) Hope this was a little informative !
