B-Boy Review

Players dance off against one another like a beat-'em-up without any connections - players take it in turns to prove themselves with their best moves. Pulling the slickest and most accomplished moves, linked with well-placed timing, is rewarded with medals that can unlock more moves and combos for later battles. Each throwdown lasts around 45 seconds with four buttons assigned to Toprock, Freeze, Windmill and Sixstep. They may not mean a lot to you, but tapping the buttons and watching the motion capture soon makes it easy to understand how you link these moves into combos. Balancing on your swede, or any limb, is done with the left and right shoulder buttons.

"Let me see you take 'em right off. C'mon, squeal".

Which is fun while it lasts, but watching your opponent throwdown in front of you quickly becomes frustrating. It's like watching someone else play a game. Turn-based dancing just isn't compelling enough. This stop-start nature never feels like a full game where the player is progressing. It's more a case of going one-on-one for a few cocky rewards, making it feel like a practice session rather than the real thing. It suits the handheld nature of the system, but it's not something I want to keep switching my PSP on for in the first place.

Another big problem I have with B-Boy is that I'm a fussy consumer. With so much media to entertain me, I can afford to be fussy. So with a game like B-Boy I want it built around my soundtrack. The gameplay is fine, but it never feels much more than a stretched out mini-game. A customisable soundtrack could have given it a much longer lease of life, adding a little more interactivity to my personal music collection.

Banana skins: fatal in any dance-off.

Don't get it twisted - I'm down with hip hop (if that doesn't make me sound like David Cameron campaigning at a youth club). But any game that's built around music needs to be able to handle customisation as far as I'm concerned. We've had the option to import our own soundtrack for long enough now that we pretty much expect it as standard. And it's no excuse if the hardware can't support the feature - if that's the case I question the reason for creating a game with music as its central appeal.

Guitar Hero got away with it because there was the novelty of a big plastic guitar to pose with while banging along to The Ramones. But for the next-generation sequels we'll be able to buy specific tracks to download and play along to. No more filler from Franz Ferdinand. Sony knows this with the PS3 version of SingStar too. Microtransations are good for me when I don't have to put up with some one else's' Madonna choice and can instead opt for Gina G, no matter how naff. I don't want some marketing committee on the other side of the world deciding for me what's cool. I don't even want to be cool, I just want to sing Ooh Ahh, Just a Little Bit. Like I said, I'm a fussy consumer. And games have been about customisation and choice for long enough now.

I see TK Maxx has got a sale on.

So with B-Boy, no matter how much I dig Eric B & Rakim's Don't Sweat the Technique - and believe me it is a stone-cold classic - it still gets old too quickly. I want a change, that's why I've got 3,000 plus songs on my MP3 player. In B-Boy I'd like the option to throwdown to Aspects, Booty Bouncers and Celph Titled. And I'm not being a smart-arse by name-checking obscure hip hop. It's the digital age, don't give me a soundtrack of 20-plus tunes. No matter how banging they are, it's not going to be enough in the long run.