Gamertell

Title: Pump It Up Exceed Portable
Price: $12.90 (on sale at Play-Asia - retails for $49.90)
System(s): PSP
Release Date: November 30, 2006
Publisher (Developer): Andamiro (Studio 9)
ESRB Rating: N/A
Pros: 94 songs, Korean or English language options, cool background videos playing while you play, online ranking and a video mode where you can just listen to the music and watch the videos.
Cons: The cool background videos are too cool, and often distracting. Also the control scheme takes getting used to and there is no auto-save function.
Overall Score: 7/10

Not too long ago, Play-Asia had a deal on a special Pump It Up bundle, where you’d receive both Pump It Up: Exceed Portable and Pump It Up: Zero Portable for $19.99. Of course I jumped on the deal.

The Pump It Up games are similar to Dance Dance Revolution, except they have five markers to hit instead of four. This makes the PSP version a bit more difficult, as you would imagine. It also requires a bit of an inventive control scheme to make the whole thing work, as the game involves diagonal arrows facing UP+LEFT, UP+RIGHT, DOWN+LEFT, DOWN+RIGHT, along with a center square/circle thing.

An amazing game my brain is incapable of controlling.

Pump It Up Exceed Portable’s amazingly cool background videos are making me fail. See, my hand-eye co-ordination for this game hasn’t exactly been perfected yet. My brain’s having trouble equating the left and right shoulder buttons with the diagonal up arrows. It accepted down and X corresponded to the down diagonal arrows and the square and right buttons went with the circle.

So when I see a cool brain animation or little dancing figures, my brain loses it’s focus. Instead of remembering L = UP+LEFT ARROW and R = UP+RIGHT ARROW, it’s admiring the video’s color scheme. As you can probably tell, my first experiences in Arcade Mode, where you don’t get multiple chances to replay a song, resulted in multiple “Hey! Why don’t you just get up and dance man?” failures.

Also I don’t get using the phrase “Why don’t you just get up and dance man?” with failure. Is the game telling me that my hand-eye co-ordination is so bad that I should give up following arrow instructions and just dance free-style? I’m thinking that must be it.

Seriously, I can’t stop watching the videos.

The video for the “What Do You Really Want” song by Crash mesmerizes me. I’m simply fascinated. I think it’s because, during certain points in the song, the animated band members’ heads will rotate in a complete circle. This will cause my eyes to immediately shift to the characters because I just have to see what is happening.

A close second is the Banya “Blazing” video. It stars these little cowboy characters who are being chased, and then have to save some weird looking guy and fight a robot. I actually had to let myself die in Home Mode, go to options, turn off the Home Mode’s life bar, and then just watch the video so I could watch what happened to the cowboy. I couldn’t go back and play the song successfully unless I did that.

Oh, and the music’s pretty good too.

Since this is a music game, it’d probably be a good idea if I mentioned whether the tracks were any good. Rest assured, they are. Right now I have the Banya, K-Pop and Pop channels open, and all of them have some pretty catchy songs.

To be honest, I’d seriously either want these tunes in my iPod or, better yet, have them as ringtones. “I Love You Baby” by Pandera and the “Blazing” Banya song I mentioned would be perfect. I tended to prefer the Korean songs or songs without any lyrics, but really they’re all pretty good and are great to dance to.

Even though I managed to get Pump It Up: Exceed Portable for an incredible price, after playing I would have to say that it is worth buying at the full price of $49.90. Its a great game, and now that I’m getting the hang of the control scheme I’m really enjoying the game.

COMING NEXT WEEK: Next week Important Importables will review Pump It Up: Zero Portable. Might as well, since the deal was a two-for.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Last week Important Importables talked about why people should love Princess Maker.

Site [Play-Asia] Site [YesAsia] Site [NCSX] Site [Himeya Shop] Site [JBox]