Sony PSP
When I was young, I remember grabbing a slab of cardboard and going up to the local shops to do a bit of breakdancing. Someone had one of those massive old school ghettoblasters, and we rolled in, set up, and started toprocking, then breaking into drops, freezes, flares, windmills and headspins. I wasn’t very good, being totally unco as I am, but I was pretty fly with my footwork. You’ll find I still am, if you get me really, really drunk. But unfortunately my mum was right, it was “just a fad”, and I never continued with it. Since the resurgence of the b-boy culture, I wish I had kept it up.
The Sony developed PSP game B-Boy attempts to help me live out my breakdance fantasies, but unfortunately, like a lot of things Sony has done lately to be seen as ‘hip’, it fails dismally. The game is presented well enough – the models and motion capture are superb, with fluid movements of the players. And they’ve nailed the b-boy culture well, featuring many brands of clothes and shoes loved by the b-boy community to be unlocked. Yet even with the authenticity granted by having Crazy Legs and some bona fide breakers and locations, the game fails to maintain interest.
It fails mainly because this rhythm game has no rhythm. This game forces you to use all the PSP’s buttons, making the game overly complicated. Tapping the shoulder buttons in time with the music, then tapping the X or Square to perform a move may not sound very involved, but when performing the moves it just doesn’t feel right. The rhythm of the button pressing isn’t in time with the music. I’m a DJ, not a great one admittedly, so I know how to tap in time with a beat, and in B-Boy the tapping isn’t synchronous. There’s a delay, caused in part by the move animations and this makes the whole thing seem slow, out of time, and unresponsive.
More bothersome is the stop start feel of the game. You battle, you wait whilst the computer does its routine, and then win and go into the next round (suffering an agonising load time) or re-do the battle. There isn’t a great flow to the game, and it feels like a mini-game that’s been stretched into a full game. It may suit the ‘portable’ nature of the game, but you need to be drawn back to it, and there’s nothing here keeping you wanting to play.
Another annoying problem is the music. I love my oldschool hiphop and funk, but, because the PSP has less storage space and memory than consoles, the music tracks are cut shorter. Thus, when doing routine after routine, even though you continually unlock new tracks, you tend to hear the same music over, and over, and over. I’m not sure that custom soundtracks are available for PSP games, but given the multi-media functionality which is thoroughly unutilised on the PSP, this could have been a massive selling point.
B-Boy is a game that looks and sounds pretty good and is kind of fun to begin with. It’s authentic to the B-Boy culture – the developers understand it and pay a nice homage to it without being too condescending. However, it quickly loses its initial appeal because of the poor controls, stop-start nature and terrible loading times, and the far too repetitive nature of the gameplay.