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Good: Ummm:.

Bad: Nearly everything

Voice recognition is apparently a tricky thing for developers to get down. Most games that require singing via a microphone can be tricked by simply humming at the right timing and tune of the song. Boogie is a completely different beast.

I was intrigued by the YouTube video of a two-year old girl mumbling incoherently into the microphone and passing a Boogie song with flying colors, so I thought I'd take it a step further. I managed to pass Fergie's hyper club-crap song "Fergalicious" by muting the television and singing along to a YouTube clip of Guns N' Roses' 1991 epic piano ballad "November Rain". For those familiar with both songs, you know that they couldn't be more different, in every possible way. One sounds like something you'd hear at Abe & Jake's on a Saturday night, and the other would be more appropriate at a funeral. The timing and pitch are completely different, and yet I managed to get a gold medal on Hard mode in Boogie by doing this.

(For those who aren't familiar with just how opposite the songs are, have a listen: Fergalicious and November Rain ... mind-blowing that Boogie apparently finds them indistinguishable, no?)

So basically, don't worry about actually singing the songs in Boogie. Just sing any song you'd like, read from the phone book, scream jibberish, or slam the microphone into your forehead. You're sure to get a fantastic score.

But Boogie isn't all about singing, right? Sure, you get to "dance," if you'd like to call it that, but this equates to flailing your arms around to a beat. Do it enough and you can fill a meter that will allow you to "strike a pose" to earn extra points. That's pretty much as deep as the gameplay gets in Boogie. It's the only game I've ever played that you can beat by flailing your arms and screaming incoherently. The fact that you could conceivably beat this game while in mid-seizure isn't exactly a positive aspect.

There's a decent selection of cliche karaoke songs (Oops I Did It Again, ABC, Groove Is In The Heart, Karma Chameleon, etc), but there's hardly any incentive to play through them thanks to the shoddy gameplay. You can purchase new songs and accessories, and it also features perhaps the worst attempt at a "story mode" I've ever seen in a game. It's a half-assed attempt to add any semblance of longevity to this mess. Stay far away.

Graphics: 6.5

Sound: 7.5

First Play: 5.5

Replay Value: 4.5

Gameplay: 5.0

Overall: 5.3