AND YOU CAN TRY TO STOP MY DANCING FEET BUT I JUST CANNOT STAND STILL: While I do not consider myself a Wii aficionado, I would nonetheless like to sing (and dance) the praises of a couple of deeply girly new games that entered the Cosmopolitan household earlier today: Just Dance and Dance on Broadway.
By way of background, as my husband can attest, I (a) am a lousy dancer and (b) have spent a goodly amount of time and money over the last couple years trying to find some Wii-enabled way to dance in my living room without anyone having to see me. (I am totally one of those people who spends half an hour watching the college-age Asian guys jamming away on the full-arcade-style Dance Dance Revolution.) Sadly, even the at-home versions of DDR are a little too complicated for me. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw Cosmo Girl and a friend bopping away to Just Dance last weekend.
There are two basic differences between DDR and Just Dance: first, no dance pad. You hold the regular Wii controller in your hand and mimic the moves on screen, and the system figures out if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing based on the controller's movements. Second, no getting booed off the stage if you screw up. So Cosmo Boy can happily hop around following the occasional move and still thinking he won ("I WON THE DANCING!!!!"), rather than me standing behind him stomping on enough of the right circles to keep him in the game. The music is fun (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Heart of Glass, Who Let the Dogs Out, Kids in America, U Can't Touch This, Cotton Eye Joe, et al) and the dancing is wiggly and giggly. Good stuff.
Once Cosmo Girl and Boy went to bed, however, it was time to cue up Dance on Broadway. Same concept, but listen to this song list: All That Jazz, Lullaby of Broadway, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Dreamgirls, Age of Aquarius, Cabaret, Luck be a Lady, (a bunch of others, all well known) . . . and, of course, You Can't Stop the Beat. Best parts: scrolling song lyrics, for the 3% of people who buy this game who don't know them all by heart already, and thematically appropriate (while not difficult) choreography. So having Fosse'd, charleston'd, jazz hands'd, and fail'd to stop the beat, I am happily ready to sit down for Mad Men. (Which does not as yet have an accompanying Wii Dance option, but give them time.)
