Bust A Move (Bust A Groove) Thread.

[BustAGroovey]

Eh, I thought this series deserved a thread. The Bust A Groove/Move games are very great music games that were sadly overlooked. Maybe due to the fact music games weren't so popular back then? Who knows...

Call me crazy..I love this series more than DDR. Probably due to the fact I've known Bust A Groove longer and it serves great memories. Also, it got me into music games in the first place.

I have all three games...Bust A Groove 1, 2, and Dance Summit 2001: Bust A Move. Not many people know about Dance Summit since it was the only one that didn't make it state side. It's for the PS2 and up to four players. The gameplay in Dance Summit was different from the other two and had a complete new cast of characters. It seemed like more of a spin off than a true sequel.

[Agent J]

I was a huge Bust A Move/Groove fan when the games came out. I thought the music was awesome overall (the first game had Avex Trax doing the music production so it's almost guaranteed to be great) and I thought the gameplay was a blast, an interesting change from Parappa the Rapper. I also loved the characters in the game, I thought they had a ton of personality, unique design, and their dance animations were great. In fact, I think I still prefer them to the DDR characters. Anyway, I was such a huge BaM/BaG fan that when I first heard about DDR, I thought it was stupid and made no sense.

All that being said, I only have the original Bust A Groove US release. A friend of mine gave me MP3s from most of the soundtrack before the US release, and I thought that the American version's censorship of some songs and other elements (Hiro's cigarette, Strike's flask of alcohol) were kinda lame, and the English dubbings of the songs were ok at best (Shorty's theme) to absolutely terrible at worst (Capoeira's theme). Kitty-N's dub theme wasn't bad, but I thought the original sung by Morinaga Hatsumi was much, much better. So I didn't pick up Bust A Groove 2. Though talking about it now, I'd kind of like to play it. I'll have to look into to picking up the JP version from somewhere.

Is Dance Summit 2001 any good? I remember reading about it and not being all that enthusiastic about it because it looked like Enix was taking the series in an odd new direction and also because it was on PS2, which I didn't have at the time and I didn't see myself getting one anytime soon.

Oh yeah, interesting side note: did you know there was a Bust A Move arcade game? I've never seen one in person, the only evidence I had that it even existed was a review on GameFAQs. I recently managed to track down an image of it, though. It's a flyer for the game. It's odd, because the way it plays is you have buttons for up, left, and right, and a foot pedal for down. Then there are 2 other buttons, a "dance" button that you press at then of each sequence and a "jammer" button that you press to attack. So if you have the sequence UDLR, you have to use your foot to hit that one down, although I suppose if you were fast enough you could hit it with your hand. =P Oh yeah, attacks can only be used at certain moments, too.

[BustAGroovey]

Dance Summit is okay for a party game. If you have three other people that like Bust A Groove to play with, you might enjoy it. The differences is this game is ..for one..there are 8 teams of 4 that have their own style of dancing, stage, and music..you pretty much pick one of the teams..and then choose a character. You are trying to be the best member of that team...so you are not actually dancing against other teams. All characters are brand new..and they dont really have much personality as the characters did in the first two games. They pretty much just look different..and they have character profiles you can unlock but it's in full Japanese text. What you may notice is that some dance moves were recycled from the first two games. For example, The School Mates team has some dance moves that are a combination of Shorty and Kelly. The Data Be Bops team has some of Heat's moves and so on...

Also you can't attack in Dance Summit. To get big points..you have to try to do team combo's with the other characters on your team or try to pull off Fevers...and fevers are hard to get. All this happens depending on what each player presses when the "Free" button pops up. To get a Fever three people have to press the same button while you press a different one. Normally to do team combos..you have to press the same button as another character..lol sorry if this is confusing.

One thing I do like is that the songs are longer..they can last around 3 minutes and 30 seconds. You can also unlock remixes of the songs as well.

I did hear that they made a arcade version of Bust A Groove when I saw a small article I had in a magazine. It's really hard to find pictures ..so I never really seen what it looks like besides the ones in the links you gave.
I did notice a tiny difference in the screenshot..there appears to be a bar at the top. Maybe a new "Game Over" bar if you miss too many times.

I really hope SquareEnix makes another Bust A Groove game..I would be so happy..or at least I hope Konami somehow finds a way to make their characters more important.