With Wii Sports and the ease-of-use the Wii boasts, Nintendo's wonder machine is attracting a massive portion of the “casual” gamer crowd, and also converting a lot of non-gamers into purchasing games consoles. The Wii also seems popular in social situations such as parties. Dancing and karaoke are popular party activities (which may or may not be enhanced with alcohol, depending on age), so it's no surprise that we will eventually get plenty of karaoke and dancing games on Wii. Until then, here's Boogie.

Boogie is aimed at people of all ages. The controls are simple, the character designs are appealing, and the track list is varied. Unfortunately, all 38 songs in Boogie are covers of varying quality, including tracks like Karma Chameleon, Don't Cha, Y.M.C.A., Boogie Oogie Oogie, Baila Me, ABC, U Can't Touch This, Oops I Did It Again, Love Shack and Milkshake. There are plenty of well-known songs, which is what the game should have. For the full list of songs, go here.

The main two sections of the game are the dancing and karaoke modes. Dancing is somewhat simplified compared to other dance titles, like Dance Dance Revolution. For the main part of the song you fill up your Boogie Meter by shaking the Wii Remote in time to the music (the Remote's speaker acts like a handy metronome). Holding down the B-button starts off combo moves, and requires you to move the Remote in specific directions. Performing the same moves over and over reduces the amount of points you gain from the move, so the game encourages you to perform a variety of moves. You can also move your player around using the D-pad to collect power-ups. If you have the Nunchuck plugged in, you can move using the analogue stick.

Speaking of the Nunchuck, having it plugged in opens up more dancing options. You can use the C-button and analogue stick to pose your character (using on-screen targets for assistance) to score points. In certain parts of a song, dancing is halted for your character to sing a solo part of the song. Here, you need to time your character's lip movements in time to the words.

The next part of the game is the Karaoke, which is even simpler than the dancing. All you have to do is time and pitch your voice to the markers on the screen (meaning that you can hum, make noises, wail, yodel or sing in tune to the music). If you want to, you can waggle the Remote to have your character perform simple dancing moves while you sing, but no points are awarded for that. Still, it's a nice feature. Boogie includes a sturdy microphone which, unfortunately, only plugs into the Wii's USB port, this may be a problem in some set-ups.

And on top of all that, there's also a story mode. Each character (of which there are five) has their own short story and has to perform five songs each. You also get to customise the characters with clothing, colours and hair styles. Furthermore, there is also a video editing mode, where you sing and then dance (or vice vera) to your heart's content (there are no points involved, so you can sing your own versions of the songs if you want), merge them together, and then customise the video using a simple video editor.

Multiplayer-wise, Boogie has a 2-player dance-off mode, where you and a friend can compete to get the highest score. There are more power-ups in this mode, including some that affect the other player – temporarily freezing them, for example. There's no karaoke face-off (as the mic is not sold separately), but taking turns on the single player dancing and karaoke modes should be sufficient for most multiplayer situations, anyway. As with any karaoke, half the fun is watching other people look like idiots, the other half is looking like an idiot yourself!