The Black Eyed Peas Experience

So "Imma Be" honest here. "I Gotta Feeling" that The Black Eyed Peas Experience was going to be fun. "Shut Up," "Don't Lie," you know it looks fun too, and your kids would like it unless "They Don't Want Music" games. Personally, "I Just Can't Get Enough" of dance games. But as much as I like to shake "My Humps" and "Rock That Body," the game could only seem to "Meet Me Halfway" and caused more "Anxiety" than "XOXOXO." So "Let's Get it Started" with the review for The Black Eyed Peas Experience.

The Black Eyed Peas Experience is a dance game along the lines of Dance Central or The Michael Jackson Experience. You follow along with the dance moves on the screen, like an aerobics tape that judges you at the end. It stars all your favorite band members like will.i.am, Fergie... uh...

Anyway, The Experience works much in the same way any of these dance games do. For those of you that just want to have fun at a party, you can jump into any of the songs and dance. But the campaign mode is where you unlock new venues, clothing for your avatar, and learn the different routines step by step.

There are elements of The BEP Experience that are actually better than Dance Central 2. Before each move the count in meter shows a silhouette performing the entire move, instead of the simple picture most games have. It's far more helpful to see the move in its entirety instead of trying to memorize dumb names and pictograms.

Which is not to say this game is superior to Dance Central. In general I found my personal Black Eyed Peas experience to be competent, but all too often I had trouble getting the game to recognize moves. It would see the big arm-waving movements, but miss the smaller ones. It's all too fitting that motion recognition in a game like The Black Eyed Peas Experience would dismiss subtlety in favor of bombastic partyrocking, but it does make getting a high score difficult.

But by far the biggest problem with the game, more than any other, is that every single one of the 30 songs on this disc is performed by the Black Eyed Peas. I find music games themed around one group to be flawed in general, but The Beatles, Green Day, and Michael Jackson all had to the catalog to back it up. And I understand that the BEP are celebrated pop/hip-hop musicians, who won a Grammy for that song about Fergie's butt, but they're also a group best experienced in small doses in a club.

Interestingly, the songs in The BEP Experience are far less edited than any music game I've played, which is good and bad. It's almost jarring to have a karaoke track tell you to sing the word "sh--" (unedited) and even more jarring when the line is "Beats so big I'm steppin' on leprechauns, sh---in' on y'all with the boom boom." And the songs are still somewhat edited, usually taking out the words no video game journalist should ever say in print (or anywhere).

Closing Comments

When I say “Black Eyed Peas” if you say “Hell yeah!” then you should think about getting The Black Eyed Peas Experience. For everyone else who is probably thinking “Oh I like that one song, the one with the beat, you know…” stick to Dance Central 2, or Just Dance 3, both of which are fun, multiplayer dance games that feature a wider range of songs.

by Jack DeVries

Posted in: Music