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| Dance Praise 2 -the ReMix: Dance Pad Included! (Digital Praise) | 
 enlarge | List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $31.32
You Save: $18.63 (37%)
Buy New/Used from $31.32
Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 23 reviews)
Sales Rank: 16907
Category: Book
Author: Thomas Nelson
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Studio: Thomas Nelson
Brand: SOS
Label: Thomas Nelson
Format: Cd
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Media: CD-ROM
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 12.7 x 7.9 x 3
MPN: 4599-CTC-00001
ISBN: 140031335X
UPC: 181826000402
EAN: 9781400313358
ASIN: 140031335X
Publication Date: January 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Dance Praise 2 the ReMix combines the latest music from top Christian artists with an action packed dance game that offers hours of family fun. Simply connect the dance pad to the USB port of your Windows or Mac computer, follow the onscreen arrows and start steppin to the music. Includes new music from top Christian artists, including Mandisa, Barlow Girl, Superchick, Pillar, Casting Crowns, toby |
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Product Description
Dance Praise 2 -the ReMix combines the latest music from top Christian artists with an action packed dance game that offers hours of family fun. Simply connect the included dance pad to the USB port of your Windows or Mac computer, follow the onscreen arrows and start steppin' to the music. Includes new music from top Christian artists, including Mandisa, Barlow Girl, Superchick, Pillar, Casting Crowns, tobyMac, Jeremy Camp, Ayiesha Woods, Plumb, and more! With over 50 songs and 4 dances per song, there are over 200 dances to choose from. Many new features enhance game play and record keeping. Let the dance party begin! For ages 4 and up.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Still enjoying after 2 months January 7, 2009
The History:
In 2004, I purchased an XBOX and DDR for what I hoped would be an exercise experience I would enjoy. I had lost 50lbs in 2003 and had gained at least half it back when I bought it. It *was* fun and my oldest son would play it with me. We got to AA rating on most of the "light" songs we would play, but there were many songs I wouldn't let the kids play due to the suggestive lyrics and even images. Plus many of the instrumental songs were too techno for my taste and really were just driving and not terribly musical. Of the ~50 songs that came with it, I would only play ~20 of them. Also the step up in difficulty from 'Light' to 'Standard' seemed pretty severe, forget about 'Heavy'.
In Jul this year I got back on the weight-loss bandwagon. Push-mowing, biking and DDR were my exercise mechanisms-- ~45 mins of DDR or 1.5hrs mowing or 1hr bike ride a day. 45mins of DDR took 1hr because each song ended and a new one had to be selected and started, plus each song is only ~1.5minutes long. As winter approached, I could tell DDR as my only form of exercise was going to fail me. I could only take it 2 or 3 days a week by October (I was biking a lot). Dance praise was recommended to me by a friend and so I figured the variety if nothing else would be worthwhile.
All I can say is WOW. This was the best thing I did in October.
== The Review ==
My configuration:
I happened to have a reasonably recent Vista 3GHz Core2 Duo hooked up to an older CRT rear projection 65" HDTV, so this had more than enough horsepower to play the game, plus I don't have the attitude of "they should put this on a console", rather I have the attitude, "You should hook your PC up to your TV!"
Since I already had dance mats for my XBOX, I found I could buy some XBOX to USB converter wires for about $5 each including shipping off ebay. A driver (XBCD-- freeware) seemed to make them work well enough, so that was nice-- no new mats to purchase. Requires reconfiguring the buttons though via XBCD utility and requires a patch to Dance Praise to make it work.
My HTPC is connected to a 5.1 sound amplifier via SPDIF optical cable, but Dance Praise 2 only seems to output to the speaker output of my soundcard. Fortunatley earlier in the year I had wired the speaker outputs of the PC to the multi-channel input of my amp as an experiment, but had never used the mode and teh SPDIF was my default sound output and had worked fine with all my other software. After trying all the recommended troubleshooting for "no sound" in Dance Praise, I tried pressing the "Multi-channel" button on my amp and voilla sound (good quality too btw).
Because my PC would lose it's connection via DVI whenever I'd use a different source for the TV, I was in the habit of turning my PC on to use it and off when done. I had the same jerky/freeze problems mentioned by others on many occasions. It seemed worse on some days than others. I believe the source of this was the daily/weekly/monthly maintenance done by other processes on the Vista box (like defrag, checking for updates, etc). Since it may have been 2 days since it was last booted, those days the computer had the freeze problem worse during the first 15 minutes of play. If I left the box on for an hour and *then* played, it would be much better. I've since added an EDID signal so the PC never needs to be turned off and will always allow me to see the video on the DVI input even if I switch to another source in the mean time. Now I leave the computer on most of the time and haven't had any gameplay glitches in the past 3 weeks since adding that.
Game Setup:
The game allows profiles which is nice (we have 5 children). The profile seems to remember many of the options as well as the last song you had played and your background, etc. No matter what the kids do, when I start it up and set 'DAD' as the first player, it goes to my background and my last song and my last mode, etc.
You can set up your own playlist-- I created one of about 30 songs from the original 50 and played that until Christmas when I got 3 expansion packs as gifts.
Each player chan choose one or 4 levels-- easy, medium, hard, or expert. This is probably one of the most marked differences with DDR-- the game is just flat out easier. But I've decided it is easier in a good way. Hard in the game is probably pretty close to 'light' in DDR, but if you set the song to quit out when you miss too many steps like DDR does, you'll find that you have to miss *A LOT* to fail out of a game. I found that I could play expert level right from the start and I think I only failed 1 song the first week. The net effect though is that I was able to get better quicker and enjoy the game more by playing expert from the get-go. I missed a bunch of steps, but still got the exercise and got a lot better at 'reading' a lot of arrows. 'Easy' level was great to engage my younger children (6 & 8) and my 10 year old worked her way up to Hard pretty quickly. My oldest son who had played the most DDR also went right to expert.
In any list of songs, the number of steps in each song is used to give each song a 1 to 5 rating (higher number, more steps) as a gague for how difficult the song is. Note, these are always relative ratings-- I selected nothing but 4 and 5 songs for a playlist and when viewed alongside each other many of those songs became 1s because they were relatively easier than the remaining 5s, but compared to all the other 1,2, & 3 songs I had already omitted from the play list they would have been much harder. It's a bit confusing.
You can also choose an option to have the computer generate steps for you instead of using one of the 4 choreographed Easy/Medium/Hard/Expert sequences. I accidently selected that option and it seemed that the computer generated steps on the the expert level were *much harder* than the choreographed steps-- I turned it off as I was trying to beat my son's high score-- not trying to play with that mode. Looks like it may be something to look forward to though.
Another option is that the words to the song can be displyed-- my younger kids had heard many of the songs due to a local radio station my wife often listens to so they enjoyed being able to sing along as others played.
You can either play one song at a time and select the next song each time lik DDR, or you can choose one of 3 special modes that has the game pick your next song. Sequence simply selectes the next song in the list and random will randomly pick a song from the current play list. The last and most sophistocated mode is "Tune Into You" which will give you harder or easier songs, based on how well you did on the previous one. Unfortunately though, once you become reasonably good at the game, this last mode will peg you at the hardest song after 3 or 4 and keep giving you the same one over an over, so I just made a playlist of my favorite songs and did either sequence or random for the most part.
Game Play:
Arrows go from the top of the screen down and they freeze when you step on them allowing you to see how early or late you were. Max combo of Perfect/Great hits is tracked just like DDR. I was suprised how little the top down paradigm affected me-- it was very easy to adapt. DDR allows this as an option so when I go back to DDR (I've only played it twice in the last 2 months) I configure it that way out of convenience.
Freeze arrows are the most different from DDR-- in DDR, you must just press them and hold them until the end (or longer) but in Dance Praise, you must release them on beat or you will incur an miss. This actually makes some of the freeze steps more dance-like and also more difficult. This aspect is what I found most disconcerting the two times I returned to DDR because I kept instinctively trying to release the freezes in DDR as is required in Dance Praise which makes the DDR steps much more difficult.
Dance praise has an arcade mode where certain steps must be avoided or they'll make the target disappear or blow up your arrows or somesuch. The kids like to play it, but I don't care for it. The game also comes with a version of tetris that you drive with the step pad-- it's tetris-- not much more to say about it. Any game that exercises your body is better than twiddling your fingers imo.
Exercise mode can be played for a calorie goal or a time goal. Either mode is better than DDR imo because no song selection is required.
Expansion Packs:
I was given 3 expansion packs for Christmas and this was a great boost for the longevity of the game. Each pack had 35 new songs and two of them added new games alongside tetris though I haven't played with them yet. The more recent packs (#6 and #7) seemed to have harder songs than the #1 expansion. With all the songs together, I created a new playlist of only 4 and 5 arrow songs and have a much harder playlist now with more than 2 hours of music. Before the expansion packs, I had only 1.5hours of music, half of which were pretty easy and aren't even on the new list.
I've probably logged better than 80 hours on the game since I got it the last week of october. I'm pretty sure I'd have never gotten that much exercise out of DDR-- I enjoy so much more of the music on this game and have actually gotten much better at the game than I had ever gotten with DDR-- mostly because the expert level on this game seems to be a really good bridge between the 'Light' and 'Standard' modes on DDR. I'm to the point where I can get 'AA' scores on many of the 4 and 5 arrow songs just by reading them as I go (i.e. full combo), but there are a number that are well beyond that. Plus Computer generated steps seem to be an option in the future.
End Result:
I'd lost 70lbs since Jul when I got this game and I've kept it off through Thanksgiving and Christmas in a very enjoyable way with this game. If you're thinking about getting this, you'll very likely not be disappointed. It's been my only form of exercise since it started snowing the first week of November and hasn't worn itself out yet.
 Great for the whole family January 7, 2009
Let me get the negative up front so I can go on and share the good stuff. The Dance Prasie is used with a computer. We use my husbands work computer to play. When he is at work we can't play (our home computer is in a whole other room). Having said that the game is great. It's easy to hook up. There are many albums to choose from and different levels. My son who is six can play on his own. My four year old daughter plays by only hitting the up and right squares and one of us hit the back and left squares. This helps her not to be overwelmed. There is a calorie counter on this game as well. I have used it for my workout. It's a lot more fun then going to the gym. The Christian music is a huge bonus. It has the words on the screen so those of us who are not dancing can learn the songs. Our family loves this game and plan on adding more pads and music choices in the furture. Worth the by.
Awesome family entertainment January 7, 2009
We use this with our projector attached to our computer and it works great. Lots of songs, lots of expansion packs, many different types of dance modes, levels, etc. Great gift for my wife. She loves it.
This year's best Christmas present December 28, 2008
My mom and I each got one for Christmas, and LOVE it! We like playing DDR at the arcade, but since neither of us listen to much of anything but KLOVE (Christian radio station), we never know which songs to choose. Problem solved. Now we can save our quarters and listen to great music. We are thinking of buying one for my grandmother also, if my five year old can do it on the easy level, I'm sure grandma can handle it.
 Dance Praise not packaged as advertised December 27, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
My kids were excited to receive Dance Praise 2 - the Remix, until we discovered that it did not work. Apparently someone, somewhere, switched the dance pad that was inside the box (it didn't even look like the Dance Praise pad), and so the one enclosed did not have the ability to connect to the usb port on my computer. I tried to go directly to the Digital Praise company that makes the item, but they were not very helpful nor willing to stand behind their product with quality assurance, just wanted to place the blame on someone else. Amazon allows returns, which I appreciate (good customer satisfaction policy), so I returned the item. Other companies could learn from this.
P.S. A gentleman from Digital Praise just did go out of his way to give us a call and apologize for the problem, stating their willingness to make it right. Bravo for good customer relations, Digital Praise!
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