One more Dance Dance Revolution game to get out of the way before steering the blog back to more "serious" topics. The DDR gameplay is so solid that it can withstand any type of music, whether it be remixes of classical music as in Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix or versions of classic Disney tunes as in Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Mix. I've never watched any of the tween Disney Channel TV shows, so I didn't have any particular interest in Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Channel Edition (released on PS2 in January of 2008) aside from the fact that it was another DDR game to try out and cross off my list.
The game features some songs from High School Musical, a super bland and cheesy made-for-TV movie that became a mega hit for Disney and made its male lead, Zac Efron, a star. The music from that movie isn't half bad, assuming you like cheesy pop like I do. A large part of the game's tracklist is in a similar "squeaky clean" pop vein as well, and I particularly enjoyed the songs from Hannah Montana, which shouldn't be surprising since many of the songs were written by the same folks who worked on High School Musical. The rest of the tracklist is balanced out by a number of more R&B type tracks, which are a welcome change. None of the songs became great favorites of mine, but I enjoyed them more than I expected.
As you'd expect, the game's difficulty is pretty low. There's a basic mission mode where you go through songs at low difficulties to unlock an alternate outfit for every character (Disney Channel characters, of course). However, at the higher difficulties the songs get to be as challenging as any other DDR game. There are also a handful of classic DDR songs to unlock. Overall this turned out to be an enjoyable, albeit pretty cheesy, iteration of the long-running franchise, and adds a nice bit of variety to the series as a whole.