Renting games as a kid was always a gamble, there was nothing worse than being stuck with an absolute disaster of a game that was either too hard or too boring all weekend. Whenever I got to baby-sit my brother, which really wasn’t that often, I was allowed to rent a game for the evening for us to play. I usually played it safe and chose one of two stand by games if there wasn’t anything else worth trying – Gex 3D Enter the Gecko and Bust a Groove.

My first encounter with Bust a Groove was on the demo 1 disc (I still maintain that it might have been the biggest influence in getting me into console gaming). You had the choice of playing as Pinky or Heat and their respective stages. I was awful at it, and the demo did a terrible job of conveying the controls to people unfamiliar with the new rhythm genre. At age nine, the closest I’d been to a rhythm game was Spice World and although I was right into everything Spice…I’d be hard pressed to actually call it a ‘game’ as such. As a kid right into bubble gum pop and fancy choreographed dance sequences, Bust a Groove glided down from the heavens as a beautifully colourful jagged mess of polygons. Continue reading