Back when I was in primary school, my school used to be part of the local Christmas fair every year, with students getting the opportunity to set up a stall of some kind. One year, a friend and I set up a stall with a simple concept: pay €2 and try to set the best time on a run of Shaun White Showboarding. My friend's dad transported the console and a widescreen CRT TV to the community hall, the venue for the fair. There, we set up the Wii and the balance board, and started playing ourselves. Beforehand, this seemed to me like it would just be a fun day hanging out with my friend, getting to play on the Wii while at the Christmas fair... but people absolutely loved it. Not only did our stall do well, it made the most money out of any stall there.

This was incredible to me. I don't want to make it sound like it was the 1950s and technology was unheard of, but when you grow up in the Irish countryside during the financial crisis, grownups don't really care about gaming and your classmates, while of course owning a Wii like everyone else in the world did, mainly had their lives revolve around either farming or GAA (look it up if you don't know). I am not kidding when I say that running this stall was one of the key events in my life. It opened my eyes to the fact that anyone can play and enjoy games, they just don't know it.

Of course, not everyone can play and enjoy every game. Today, many games come with an extraordinarily high barrier to entry, as I mentioned in my review of Alan Wake 2. The system requirements are often very high, the cost of entry is enormous (even with services like Game Pass being a thing) and a lot of the time games expect the player to have some sort of prior experience, both to be able to play them and understand what they are trying to do (check out this video for more on that). It is not impossible, but it makes it very difficult for people to get into gaming. The Nintendo Switch is now the console most people gravitate towards when getting into games, which is a brilliant choice. That console is a remarkably creative piece of engineering with some of the best games of the past decade being released on it. But it's not the Wii.

Since the Wii's release in 2006, we have never again come close to that brief glimpse into the utopia that Nintendo summoned from nowhere almost 20 years ago; a world where anyone can play games together whether they have zero experience or have been playing games their whole life. No longer could people roll their eyes at the corporate ads depicting people from all sorts of demographics laughing and playing games together, because they had seen it happen themselves in their own homes. The Nintendo Wii is the most democratic game console we have ever had.

So, what does any of this have to do with Just Dance 3. Well, late last year my housemate and I had some friends over, and we decided to play Just Dance 2014, which we have on the PS4. After some downloading of apps, and syncing with consoles, we played for a bit, before just looking up Rasputin from Just Dance 2 on YouTube and attempting to emulate that ourselves instead. Naturally, this led to a fair bit of lamenting about "the good old days", when Just Dance was good. Back when it was on the Wii. It was at this point my housemate suggested she bring her old Wii to the house, along with the original Just Dance, which I thought sounded like a great idea.

Fast forward to now, and I have just finished getting five stars on every level in Just Dance 3. Whenever we have friends over, Just Dance is usually put on the agenda. Again and again, I have seen what I saw all those years ago at that Christmas fair stall. My favourite instance of this was my own brother, initially reluctant to play, stating that "we have to get Just Dance for the Wii at home", after we had played for just a couple of hours.

Out of the first three games, this is the best one. The gameplay formula is perfected, as is the tech. Long gone are the unfair "shake" moves from the original game, replaced with golden moves which give you a chance to make up points if you can nail a crucial pose. The game includes "Dance Crew" levels, choreographed for four people, alongside the traditional Solo and Duet modes. The ambiguous pictograms from Just Dance 2, which often confused people more than they instructed them, are much improved in this edition, while still requiring you to pay attention to the dancers themselves in order to get the highest points possible. Paying attention to the dancers is very important here, because you need to do a pretty good job at matching the entirety of their moves if you want to beat your opponents, thanks to the excellent tracking.

This tracking has absolutely no right to be as good as it is. When I started playing, I was under the impression that so long as the movements of my right hand matched that of the dancer on screen, I would do pretty well, but the main thing I have learned on the road to five stars is that if you want that perfect score, you better start moving your entire body. You better start actually dancing. Let me remind you that the Wii remote does not have a gyroscope in it. And yet, somehow, an IR sensor bar, placed at whatever level your TV might happen to be at, at whatever angle your room might require you to stand at, combined with an accelerometer and IR sensor in one hand, allows the remote to calculate where it is well enough for the console to judge how well you are dancing. I have seen some people online mention how they thought the tracking on the Wii edition of this game was not great, and while there are definitely a few golden moves which even I think are broken, trust me when I say that you just need to move your feet more, or pay more attention to the transitions between moves, or simply be more on time.

It is remarkable that this accuracy is possible, but this is exactly what makes the Wii so great. Plug in all of the colour coded cables to your TV (RIP AV connections) and the IR sensor bar and you're good to go. This is one of the key things Microsoft was missing in the Kinect (apart from the bad tracking); the plug-and-play concept of the Wii that not only makes it easy to play, but to set up. That is usually the first thing people will experience with your system; if it is an easy process, people will already be looking forward to playing games. No one wants to be adjusting cameras to 15 degrees of the angle of the blah blah blah. Just let them play the damn game.

The dances themselves in the game are mostly really great fun. There are all sorts of genres here, although naturally late 2000s pop is the prevailing source, especially after so many of the classics have been depleted thanks to the two previous entries in the series. Still, the game manages to offer roughly 50 dances, when you count the unique songs that can be unlocked with the stars you get from completing levels. This is the core gameplay loop of Just Dance 3: Play levels, get between 1 and 5 stars based on your performance, these stars are added to your total, unlock new songs, variations and mash-ups as you accumulate more stars. It feels consistently rewarding, and the "Hope you like gold..." message was pretty cool when I finally mastered the game.

I am not going to lie, some of the choreographies are definitely a bit emasculating and others are probably a bit racist, but you need to accept that if you want to play this game. The great thing about Just Dance 3 is that it truly fulfils the mandate of its title. No matter what, whether you are aiming for perfect scores on every title, or dancing with your friends, despite the moves being choreographed, the route to success or just having fun is the same: just dance. I genuinely mean that; trying too hard actually does not work, once again highlighting how good the tracking is.

If it is still somehow unclear, I would very strongly recommend this game to everyone. Get the Wii out of the attic (I know you still have one), pick up this game from wherever you can (this is the best selling third-party Wii game, there are nearly 10 million copies out there), and get playing. I did not think I liked dancing before I played this game, but it reminds you why moving your body to music has been part of human culture since it began. By managing to create a game which simultaneously allows you to learn to dance without restricting your movement, have fun while being competitive and offer a perfectly low skill floor, but a brilliantly attainable skill ceiling, this game can, and should, be played by everyone.