Where the Elite Meet to Keep the Beat!

I admit, when I first heard of "Elite Beat Agents," I was more perplexed than anything. "So... they're secret agents... who dance?" I asked. "And you have to help them dance so they can save... people... and stuff? Am I missing something?" But once you let go of the need to make sense of the premise of the game, it turns out to be a lot of fun - and surprisingly difficult.

As I understand it, the Elite Beat Agents are a crack team of nattily dressed gentlemen with interesting hair. Their leader, the General, intercepts distress calls from around the planet (ranging from a teenage girl who has to break a date with her crush because she's forced to babysit to a speed-demon taxi driver who has to risk losing his license by rushing a pregnant woman to the hospital), and sends the agents out to help people by busting a move. The better the agents dance, the more swiftly the problem is resolved - and that's where you come in.

The main screen is a map of the globe, with little icons showing the stages you can play. Clicking on one shows a thumbnail map of the person in distress, the song you'll be playing to, and the difficulty level (which goes from one to seven stars). When you choose a stage, you watch a short comic-book-style animation explaining the person's situation. They yell for help, the Agents are deployed, and the stage begins.

The top screen shows a continuous animation of the agents, and during short breaks in the song, there are little skits that show your progress. Small dots appear on the lower touch screen, and you have to tap them with your stylus on the beat (a shrinking ring closing in on the circle shows you which one to hit next). The closer you match the beat, the more points you get. As the songs become more complex, the challenges get harder, too - you have to follow a rolling ball around the screen and keep your stylus centered on it, or you have to double-hit dots or hit a series in rapid succession. The harder songs have little or no backbeat, which makes it more difficult to hear when you're supposed to tap and forces you to rely on the visual screen. Does it sound hard? It is!

As you tap, scoot, and roll, the agents dance, responding to your moves. If you screw up (miss a beat or hit the wrong dot), they fall down, stagger back up, and clutch their heads. If you screw up badly enough, you fail, but I haven't done this yet. At the end of the song (assuming you make it through), you watch a short skit showing the happy ending, and your performance is graded on a scale of A to F. Once you clear all available stages, new ones pop up, but if you want to redo a stage for a higher score, you can always do this.

I guess I'm not very elite, because I haven't gotten anywhere close to beating the game, but it's entertaining. Many of the songs are surprisingly difficult, but in a way that makes you want to figure it out and beat the stage. The music ranges from relatively current pop hits ("Sk8ter Boi" and the like) to cheesy yet timeless favorites ("YMCA" or "September"), but you don't need to be familiar with the song to be able to successfully play the stage, though it helps. Like the best DS games, you can easily pick it up when you have just a few minutes to play, or you can get sucked in for a longer period - it's addictive but doesn't require a big time commitment. Even the most rhythm-challenged can have fun with this silly, light-hearted game.