So, in order to play the Dance Central 3 challenges, I need to do what I’ve been putting off doing and import all the songs from Dance Central and Dance Central 2. As I said in a previous post, I really like the fact that Harmonix lets you do this; I only wish Ubisoft would follow in its footsteps and let you do the same thing with Just Dance.
The steps are really simple. Here’s how it’s done.
1) First, find your original Dance Central and Dance Central 2 game boxes. Inside both games you’ll find the manual. Flip to the back page and you should see a 16-character code (for Dance Central) or a 25-character code (for Dance Central 2) listed over the words “Hang on to this code to keep on dancin'”.
2) Start up Dance Central 3. The first time you start the game you should get this message:
Don’t leave your songs behind! If you own Dance Central or Dance Central 2, you can import songs from those games into Dance Central 3. Do you want to important songs from previous titles?
Your choices are OKAY, NO, and LATER.
You can do it now, or if you choose to do it later, you’ll go to the Main Menu and select Buy More Songs, and then Song Import Offers.
3) Under Song Import Offers, you can choose Dance Central Import, Dance Central 2 Import, or Enter Other Code. Choose the game whose songs you want to import.
For Dance Central
4) You’ll be brought to a screen where it asks you to “Please enter your code to redeem your Dance Central content”. Enter your 16-character code.
5) You’ll then see a screen where you’ll be asked to confirm your purchase. 400 Microsoft Points will be deducted from your balance (about $5). If you don’t have a points balance, you can always buy a card from Amazon
Don’t be thrown off by the Dance Central 2 logos–they obviously designed this process for importing to DC2 but didn’t bother to update it for people going from DC1 > DC3. Incidentally, if you’re already imported from Dance Central to Dance Central 2, all your DC and DC2 songs will get imported when you import from DC2, so you don’t need to import from DC again.
6) The 202.70 MB download will proceed. It’ll take about 5-10 minutes depending on your connection.
For Dance Central 2
4) You’ll be brought to a screen where it says “Enter the 25-character code from your prepaid card.”
5) A screen will say “This code entitles you to download Dance Central 2 POP Key.” Your default storage device (in my case the Hard Drive) is selected. Select Download Now.
6) This first download will complete very quickly and you’ll end up on this screen. Press B to go back.
7) When you exit out, you’ll be brought to a screen where you’ll be told to download the Dance Central 2 Import Pack (739.4 MB). Again, it’ll cost you 400 Microsoft Points.
8) This download will take a good 10 minutes or more. Remember, it’s not just importing the songs, but also all the choreography, graphics, and so on.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t crazy about the fact that I had to pay an additional $10 to import songs that were discs that I’d already paid well over $100 for. But whatever must be must be. The good news is, since I spent 800 points during the New Year New You promotion, I should be getting 100 points back (well, I hope they count this as an “add on”, although given all the quibbling I had to do just to get them to fix their language, who knows? We’ll find out in late February).
The end result? In Dance Central 3 you’ll have a super long list of songs.
All the songs are categorized by the levels defined in Dance Central 3 (Warmup, Simple, Moderate, Tough, Legit, Hardcore, and Off the Hook), and little letters that say “DC” or “DC2” to the left of the song will identify if it’s from Dance Central or Dance Central 2 respectively. Unfortunately, your high score from the previous game is not carried over, so you’ll have to establish your high scores again from scratch.
What’s nice is that these songs can be used in playlists, something I’d especially welcome in Fitness Mode. All told, I had a whopping 123 songs to choose from after the process was complete.
So that’s how you import DC and DC2 songs into DC3. Now, back to exercising!