Wrap your fingers round the neck of one of Guitar Hero's plastic axes, and a spell is cast. The clunky peripheral becomes a weighty Fender in your hands, and your living room is twisted into a huge stadium rock venue. Most of us have been tricked by the game's magic, our foot on a amp stack and our long hair tumbling around us as we thrash our heads, only to realise we've just left a footprint on an occasional table and imagined the whole thing.
Guitar Hero's success certainly comes from the way it lets gamers struggle free from the sluggish bonds of the sofa and pose and strut like a bold rock legend. But playing Adult Swim's careful parody, Pole Dance Hero, it starts to become clear that all along the gaudy toy guitars might have been getting too much credit.
A relatively simple, cheek-prodding Flash release developed by This is Pop, Pole Dance Hero strips the series it apes of most of its component parts. Gone are the peripherals, the pomp, and the pretense. All that remains is the familiar 'track'; and endless rolling road that tumbles towards the front of the screen. Down this road roll three lines of symbols. As the symbols (in this case punters' grubby tips) reach a line, you must press a corresponding key in time.
Maintain a sequence of timely button pushes and your 'dancer' works up an increasingly impressive speed and she swivels round her pole like a fleshy, underdressed gyroscope. Fail and she falls to the floor, landing in an ungainly heap.
That really is all there is to the gameplay, aside from a few different music tracks, online leaderboards, a difficulty setting and lashings of Adult Swim's trademark puerile wit. And that is all you need. Pole Dance Hero is silly, brilliant and addictive, without ever needing you to invest in an expensive novelty controller. It does lack any sensation of performing, and it's certainly not the party game the genuine hero series is, but as a virtual snack it certainly serves its intended purpose with flair.
What really makes us tick? It's not prancing about in suburbia like a pantomime rocker in the cowardly privacy granted by our living room curtains. It's pressing a handful of buttons in time to some arbitrary symbols.
Adult Swim's latest knows this, and dilutes the whole performance based gaming craze into a delicately gaudy Flash title you can enjoy to the fullest in a five minute break. You've probably made a futile New Years Resolution about giving up smoking, so you can use all those saved moments to brush up (and down and around) on your pole dancing skills.
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Play Pole Dance Hero here.
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