Wii Music (RELEASED TODAY!) [Archive]

Djdoubt03

10-27-2008, 01:01 PM

Despite a wealth of instruments, Nintendo's Wii Music is out of tune.

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Our Final Score
Bad

With Wii Music, Nintendo hoped to make us sound like Beethoven, though we still can't figure out if it meant the famous composer or the dog. Perhaps both, since the game lets us wear a dog outfit and bark incessantly. That lasted 30 seconds and we wished that the rest of this disappointing game was over just as quickly. But we forged onward, experimenting with different instruments and erratically waving controllers in the hopes of creating a masterpiece. Instead, we sounded like a child banging cans together.

What seemed like an innovative way to create music is instead a shallow and at times pointless video game that never lives up to its potential, unless "potential" means tricking millions of consumers to purchase it. We can't blame the company for doing so, especially after seeing the back of the box, where four people happily jam to an unknown piece of music while the advertising proudly flaunts 60 plus instruments. Nintendo delivers as promised, with a diverse and impressive group of instruments and gadgets that include familiar favorites like the piano, violin, electric guitar and various types of drums, mixed with more bizarre selections, such as a gong, castanets and a beat boxer. You play them all by holding the remote and nunchuk in various ways. To play guitar, for example, you hold the nunchuk as you would the instrument's neck and strum the air with the remote. To play drums, you quickly raise and lower both controllers to smash the pads and cymbals. You don't need to mimic these poses for the game to work, but it's fun pretending to tickle the piano keys and wail on the saxophone.

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Yes, even you can jam to horrible MIDI.

Limited technology, however, prevents you from actually learning to read and follow music. All we're left with are a set of notes along the bottom of the screen that attempt to keep us in rhythm, except the game doesn't care whether we sound good or not as you'll win every time. Not even we need that much positive reinforcement.

It's also not as advanced as we thought. Nintendo said that Wii Music gives its users unlimited freedom to create sound with technologically advanced instruments. But when we picked up the controllers, we realized the company duped us into believing that the remote and nunchuk could actually read which drum pad we wanted to strike depending on the positioning of our hands. That's not the case. Instead, you press buttons while swinging to move from one cymbal to the next. Remembering which buttons do what, however, is tougher than we expected. Once frustration set in, we just swung our arms around. As expected, the game told us we did a great job.

Playing with friends is more enjoyable. You select a song, choose your instrument and even decide how everything sounds, so if you want a hip hop (or jazz, country, etc.) version of Ode to Joy with a harp, DJ turntable, piano and steel drums, be our guest. It's these options that make Wii Music entertaining, if only for a little while. You can even save your video, create an album cover (you simply drag Mii characters onto it) and send it to someone via WiiConnect24. That person can, in turn, alter the song and send it back, allowing for limitless customization.

In addition, there are minigames, none of which held our attention long. Mii Maestro lets us conduct an orchestra by waving the Wii remote, swinging to alter the tempo. However, we still don't know how the game scores our performances. Keeping up with the beat oftentimes results in a low rating, while flailing our arms produces an abnormally high mark. The other minigames Hand Bell Harmony (shaking bells in time with the beat) and Pitch Perfect (identify good and bad pitch - the best game of the three), offered little reason to keep playing.

Naturally, a music game is only as good as its soundtrack, and Nintendo bombed horribly. Not only did it commit to lower quality MIDI versions, but the list is all over the place, from Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (the first song available - you must unlock the rest) to O Christmas Tree, Yankee Doodle, Material Girl, Daydream Believer and six Nintendo-themed tracks from Super Mario Bros., Animal Crossing, Wii Sports and F-Zero, among others. In a music genre populated by Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Metallica, that doesn't cut it. No kid rocks out to Do-Re-Mi on the school bus. Even if they did, they'd listen to the covers of these songs. Not MIDI.

Wii Music's General Producer, Super Mario Bros. creator Shigeru Miyamoto, describes the game as a musical toy, and although he's got a point, he must also keep in mind that in an age of attention deficit gamers, toys get old quick. There's some good stuff here. It just fails to replicate the joy that comes from playing Wii's other rockers Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour, which not only features a dedicated music creator, but also a Mii Freestyle mode that allows gamers to alter songs in game. That makes Wii Music feel several steps behind the competition, but with bad MIDI and limited note reading, that's no surprise. Kids that don't know better will probably love making noise and this could encourage them to learn real instruments. For that reason alone, Wii Music serves a purpose. We just wish there was more to it.

Source (http://www.gamedaily.com/games/wii-music/wii/game-reviews/review/6859/2163/)

All these music games are junk. Lets move on.