Pump It Up Exceed Portable

In the arcades and on the home consoles, Andamiro's Pump it Up game featured choreographed moves where players stepped in time to the tempo and rhythm of a song. The PSP transplant of PIU Exceed foregoes all that and you're left with finger-smacking five buttons to the cues on screen instead of shuffling your feet around like a rabid dancer.

Since the original Pump it Up is a physically demanding game and the PSP version isn't, it's best to view the portable version in the same vein as a game such as DJ Max Portable. That is, a rhythm game where onscreen cues must be hit with proper timing and coordination. There's nothing more and nothing less to it since PIU purists won't be moving their feet to this release. That said, PIU Exceed is an enjoyable rhythm game with a large selection of K-pop and remixes of classical music pieces thrown in for good measure. In the early going in Home Mode which allows for multiple misses without kicking you out of the game, all eight of the playable songs are from Andamiro's internal music production crew known as Banya. The music selection screen is appropriately dubbed "Banya Channel" where songs are selected from a rotary array where the name of the song and some artwork is displayed for each track. In addition to the 8 available songs, another 19 may be unlocked upon fulfilling game conditions.

In Arcade Mode, players have 1 minute to select a song from the available roster of 34 songs and a few unlockable tracks that aren't ready for play yet. Unlike the forgiving Home Mode, miss too many cues in Arcade Mode and the game ends with a thunderous slam. «NCS Game Notes»