For years now, Dance Dance Revolution has always been about your feet. Oh sure, the real DDR freaks are known to construct elaborate routines with practically every appendage they've got, but up until now, all you've needed to play the game was two feet and a moderate sense of rhythm. With the upcoming DDR Hottest Party for the Nintendo Wii, which was announced last night at Konami's winter press event, you'll be getting your hands in on the action.

　　DDR Hottest Party will be the Wii debut for the long-running dance series; and this time your hands will be in on the dancing fun.

　　In addition to the traditional dance pad that any console DDR fan will be very familiar with, DDR Hottest Party will make use of both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk accessory. As you follow along with the music and cascading arrows onscreen, indicating where your feet should land on the dance pad, you'll occasionally see icons for the remote and/or Nunchuk. A small icon means simply moving one or the other; a longer icon requires you to shake the controller for as long as the icon is onscreen.

　　Because the game is in an extremely early state, the icons featured in the demo were very rudimentary, and you could use either the remote and Nunchuk for the one icon. However, Konami producers told us they plan to eventually have separate icons for each controller, as well as the addition of more motions for your hands than a simple shake of the controller. There's even the possibility, according to producers, of having icons associated with user-controlled "flair" moves. We're not sure what that might mean, but somehow it brings an image of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever to mind.

　　Hottest Party will include support for up to four players, including both cooperative and competitive dance modes. Among the other things the Konami team is experimenting with is the idea of using the Wii Remote to throw "arrows" at your competitor in dance battles, which sounds like a really fun concept, though it's more or less still in the conceptual stage at this point and wasn't on display last night. Similarly, for cooperative dance routines, the Konami developers are looking to find ways to coordinate movements not just on the dance pad but between the remote and Nunchuk, as well.

　　The demo on hand at the Konami event featured three songs: "Will" by Naoki, Jet Rocker's "Lips of an Angel," and an updated version of "Gonna Make You Sweat" by C+C Music Factory. According to producers, the final soundtrack of Hottest Party will be completely new from the ground up and will feature popular tunes from the last four decades. No details on other songs yet of course, but we expect to see that information later on in the year. DDR Hottest Party looks to be shaping up as a natural fit for the multiplayer-centric, party-game focused Nintendo Wii. There is a lot of work yet to be done on the game, and we'll keep our eyes on its progress throughout the year.