If you love DDR, you'll hate this game.

User Rating: 4 | Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party WII
I'm a DDR fan with moderate tenure, having picked up the craze with DDR Max 2 for PS2. It was love at first sight. So when I got a Wii, DDR Hottest Party was one of the first games I picked up.

I regretted it within ten minutes.

You can choose from quite a few avatars for when you dance, but don't expect them to be cute or interesting. They all look like participants of one of those performance contest TV shows like American Idol or whatever. They also won't dance according to the arrows, but will perform preset dances that don't seem to have anything to do with the song.

The dance stages are probably the most varied and interesting thing in the game. Since they're just backgrounds, there's not much to say about them. There are some cute, flowery ones, some cool sci-fi ones, and some that are just interesting.

Unfortunately, I can't really review the Gimmicks because I don't use them. Basically, they float through as or with arrows to change how the game works. Sometimes if you don't stop the special arrow, a giant ball will block your screen. Other times, if your foot is on the wrong arrow at the wrong time, you'll get damaged by a mine. They're interesting, but I'm more interested in just dancing.

I'm not going to complain about the Gimmicks and Hand Markers, because they're fine, though I don't use them. They add something more to worry about when dancing which can add a challenge for people who are looking for that. I don't really feel like waving your arms about makes dancing more fun, but some people might. I can understand it.

I AM going to complain about the total lack of music that follows in the DDR spirit. What I got was a lot of mainstream pop-rock when what I wanted was techno and club music. Other DDR games had a variety of music from artists who weren't always super-famous, but playing Hottest Party is like listening to cheap remixes of popular rock radio by a high-schooler. This game had an especially significant lack of Captain Jack, and I like Captain Jack.

I'm also going to complain about the technical failings of this game. Normally when a person chooses to change settings, it's useful when the settings are saved. For instance, every time I play, I turn off Hand Markers and Gimmicks. Every. Time. I. Play. That's at least twice a day. I've gotten so good at it that I don't even have to look at the screen while I do it. That's not good!

I can maybe see the settings reverting to default for Free Mode or the Groove Circuit. Other people will probably want to play, and maybe not with my settings. But what really made me mad was when I created a personal user in Workout Mode that only I will use (that I can even password-protect) that does not save my settings. The calorie-burning goal is set to something like 30 by default. 30 calories? You burn that many calories by taking a big crap.

Which is, essentially, what this game is.