Dance Factory lets you play a dance game style game with any music CD you own. This would be great if it worked - but more often than not it is off just enough to drive you completely insane.

The game does come with five built in songs, and these are good to get you practicing on "well done" songs. They are I Like It, I Love It; I Like the Way; Pon de Replay; Don't Cha; Get Down On It. So far so good - these are fun to dance to, although DDR fans will find the up and down are REVERSED which will probably really bug you. People who have never played DDR probably won't care - but then it will really bug you when you then try to play DDR games :)

The real problem comes when you put in your own CDs. I had brought a pile of CDs over to the machine. I was actually lucky - I've given away most of my CDs at this point because everything is in iTunes. I've only kept my favorite CDs around - maybe 50 - for backup reasons. Luckily these have some of my favorite dance songs on them.

So I began popping them in. These songs had solid beats in them. You would think the game could easily pick out those beats. But NO! It was pretty close but most of the time it was off just enough to bug you completely. Sometimes it would get the half beat. Sometimes it was just off the main beat.

It got to the point that I would dance along to the music and accept the "poor" ratings just to have fun. It was more frustrating than anything else to dance off beat to try to hit the arrows.

Also there'd be a nice strong obvious part of the song that had no steps at all - and then a bridge or something with hardly any playing that would have a lot of steps. It just made no sense.

I realize completely that you can get bored of songs in DDR games. I was really looking forward to this game for that reason. However, they just don't have the technology down. Maybe in another release or two they'll figure this out and the game will become a must-have. I'm afraid the game really is just not up to that level yet.