EyeToy Groove

I'm a huge fan of the Eye Toy peripheral for the PS2. I loved the mini-games included with the first release, Eye Toy: Play, and I have enjoyed the tech demos released by Sony and others over the past few months. The only real complaint I had about the Eye Toy was that there wasn't a “full” game available. Eye Toy: Groove addresses this complaint. Groove takes the Beat Freak mini-game of Play and expands it into a full-featured game that expands the Dance Dance Revolution concept into a whole-body affair.

The basic idea of Groove is pretty simple. To the beat of a chosen song, various symbols emerge from the center of the screen and the player must intercept them when they cross a certain point on the screen. This can be done with hands, elbows, knees or feet, and often requires a good mix of the above. Momentum is lost when the player is a little late or a little early, and even more so when they miss altogether. Miss the timing too many times and Game Over.

I'm not the king of all rhythm games, surely, and I found the game truly challenging on the Dynamic setting, though it is a bit too easy on the lower settings. All of my friends seemed to be about my level of talent, and I'd love to see someone really good go at one of the harder songs on the highest difficulty. I imagine the body parts would really be flying. Raising my knee to hit one corner of the screen while using both hands to hit two other sections, all in time to the music, was pretty much beyond me, but I had a consistent blast while trying.

Still, at around thirty dollars MSRP for the non-EyeToy included version, Groove is a good value that really expands the life of the Eye Toy itself. I still prefer Play because sometimes I'm not in the mood for a rhythm game (heck, I'm hardly ever in the mood for a rhythm game), and Play offers amazing variety and heightened goofiness. Groove is better produced and more focused and should really appeal to fans of rhythm games and fans of watching their friends look like idiots.

- Tolen Dante