What do you get when you combine Bust A Groove with the Fourth of July? Boom Boom Rocket, Bizarre Creations’ newest Xbox Live Arcade game. Rhythm games used to be played like every other game: with the controller. In today’s enlightened age we’ve got fancy dance pads, plastic replica guitars, and USB microphones. Boom Boom Rocket is a call back to those simpler times of the early 90s. Firecrackers are launched from the bottom of the screen and it’s your job to detonate them when they cross the pink line.

There are 10 songs featured in Boom Boom Rocket, and each is a remixed version of a classical piece. Combined with three skill levels in normal play and an endurance mode there are 40 different ways to play the single player game. Both the standard game and the endurance mode can be played in local two-player mode. Two-player mode, regardless of whether you’re playing the standard game or the endurance mode is just a points competition so the only difference is that instead of playing hot seat and comparing scores you’re playing simultaneously and comparing scores.

Guitar Hero has its tablature circles, DDR has its arrows, and Boom Boom Rocket has rockets. The rockets can be represented by either color-coded arrows (A is down, B is right, X is left, Y is up) or color coded letters (A, B, X, Y). Additionally, the fireworks can be detonated with either the face buttons of the directional pad. Although either can be used, the face buttons become necessary in the medium difficulty level where two rockets will need to be detonated simultaneously. Whether you choose to press two face buttons or a d-pad direction and a face button, however, is irrelevant.

Rhythm games live and die one thing: their song selection. Taken on their own, Boom Boom Rocket‘s techno remixes of classical pieces with clever names like A