Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix E3 2005 Feet-On Report

The Dance Dance Revolution series usually sticks pretty closely to a specific brand of dance music, but it's branched out in the past with a Disney edition of the game. Now, Mario is stepping onto the dance mat with his own game, which is full of dance remixes of existing Nintendo music.

The version of the game on display at E3 2005 has a smattering of songs from games like Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Wrecking Crew, Dr. Mario, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Wario World, and Mario Party 5. You'll also encounter some remixes of classical music. There's a track from Pomp and Circumstance in there, just for good measure.

The dancing works as you would expect a DDR game to work. Arrows float up to the top of the screen in time with the music, and you're judged by how well you can match the timing of those steps by pressing the corresponding arrow on the floor mat. The game has five different difficulty settings that should let any player excel at the game, though we did notice that the "very hard" setting really didn't seem to be as hard as the original DDR games get, though.

Graphically, the game puts colorful polygonal scenes from Mario's world behind the action. You can select from a handful of different dance characters, letting you have Mario face off against Luigi, for example, in a two-player game.

We're always down for some dance remixes of classic Nintendo tunes, so DDR: Mario Mix looks like it could be pretty cool. Hopefully the difficulty will be tweaked a bit to offer more of a challenge to the dance mat-inclined people of the world. Mario Mix is set to hit stores in October.