Pump It Up: Exceed (game & dance mat) (Sony 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.

it brings memory of me like 8 years ago.
it's got pretty much all the songs from previous pump it up.
but first 2 generations of pump it up was sorta easy, but this version is a lot harder!!! which i love!!!!

pad is better than normal DDR pad, but still not stable.
if you have a drill, get a stable wooden board and put screws and washers on the edge. it feels like a real thing!!

such a good and fun workout :)

My daughter and I compete with each other using Pump It Up: Exceed, so we needed a second dance pad. While a hard pad would have been better, we're not too hard core, so the soft pad works fine for us. It tends to slide around on the carpet, and there's no tactile feedback to let you know where your feet are. Otherwise, it seems to be holding up well to our stomping, and we're happy with the way it has been working. If your expectations are set correctly and you're not expecting a commercial product, you should be happy with this pad.

Tha game itself is fun. We had been just using the Home Mode, but now that we're using Arcade Mode, we have more songs to use. I haven't tried DDR, so I don't know how the two compare - it seems that there are more accessoried available for DDR, but PIU was not a major investment, so we are satisfied with our purchase.

If you like Dance Dance Revolution and Korean songs then try this game out. For those of you that are DDR players this game might challenge you since the direction arrows on the dance pad are complete opposite of the DDR dance pad.

I thought I was getting a Dance, Dance Revolution with american songs but this game is basically like a Pokemon dance game, with cartoon graphics that remind me of Pokemon and japanese songs. The box says there are alot of songs that we can't seem to find on the game. I am disappointed and would not recommend.