Nintendo calls you stupid

by Mark Medeiros

Fun factor: Fun

Worth to: Avoid

Wii Music isn’t a game so much as it is a children’s toy trying to justify its dreary existence.

The biggest story that stems from Wii Music is that the game was a freaking joke when it was presented at E3 in all its spiky-haired glory.

But despite all that, Nintendo continued to proclaim that this was their big holiday release of 2008. Wii Music was going to follow in the footsteps of the absurdly popular Wii Sports, Wii Play and Wii Fit, whether we liked it or not. Well, the former two only became such unusual hits because of how they were bundled with hardware and became easy to love when played in short bursts at social events… and thus prompting party-goers to yearn for a Wii of their own (and only to get sick of their new purchase minutes after). I have no personal experience with Wii Fit, but I’ll give it the benefit of a doubt being that it has somewhat honest intentions. But with no bundled hardware, Wii Music has only the E3 video of doucheman to motivate people into running to their store to check in on this latest craze.



Perhaps I shouldn’t review Wii Music as Nintendo’s straight-faced answer to the likes of Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, LittleBigPlanet, Fallout 3 and the like. Our site’s Fanboy might not like me if I did, even if doing so would result in me rating the game a score of EPIC FAIL out of 100. No, maybe I should look at Wii Music’s potential for just straight up fun, for that’s what all games should strive to be in the end -- an amusing way to pass the time.

Except it’s still something of a failure there too

So when you boot up the game, a very demented instructor who looks like a hybrid of Bach and a Muppet explains the game’s basic mechanics. It’s a very long-winded tutorial that feels less like he’s trying to explain the gameplay mechanics as much as he is trying to justify the game’s existence. In a nutshell, you bang the Wiimotes to play piano and percussion instruments: bang one remote while you hold out another to play guitar-like instruments; bang the Wiimote horizontally to play violin; and alternate pressing the one and two buttons while supposedly holding the Wiimote near your mouth to play wind instruments. Imagination is the watchword here, as the game is banking on you closing your eyes and imagining yourself jamming in an orchestra to not notice that the remote only picks up the binary motion of the Wii moving in general. You’re essentially playing Guitar Hero without the five buttons and just the flipper; that’s Wii Music.



The only instrument that grants the player control of what note they’re playing is drums. If you actually thought the E3 demo was impressive in its use of the Wiimote technology, well you’re in for a flaming paper bag of turd on your doorstep. You actually control what part of the drum you hit on by what buttons on the controllers you hold, not by some kind of sophisticated Wii controller technology. If you have the Wii Fit balance board, you could use that as a kick pedal, but that feels like such a petty use of a $90 adaptor.

Noise pollution

Otherwise, all you’re really doing is moving remotes around and making loud noises. Unlike Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, Singstar, Karaoke Revolution,Amplitude, Frequency or any actual music game, you’re not trying to match notes with the song playing in the background. Rather, the game automatically matches whatever notes you’re playing with the song itself, with the sole variation being how many times you opt to play notes and make the song sound like more of a mess. I think “clusterfuck” is a good way to describe any composition you conceive. Jam mode is the game’s main mode, where you and 5 other musicians play a song.

The game gives you an unusual-yet-useless amount of variety. Unusual in that you can re-dub any instrument with multiple playthroughs, create an album cover, and record a full-blown music video that can be sent to other Wii Music owners. Useless because no one owns Wii Music and no one should announce that they own Wii Music to their friends. Also useless because, despite a large variety of instruments that includes everything from cow bells and “guy in a dog suit barking” to “galactic drums,” the audio quality of each instrument is so poor that when so many instruments are mixed together, they all blend together poorly and leave the song sounding like an old ring tone. Though I guess some people dream of creating their own ring tone version of “Wake me up before I go-go.”



I should talk about the setlist itself, a combination of classic music compositions, children’s bedtime songs, 60s-80s pop songs and Nintendo game theme songs, begging one to ask the question “why do I want to play this music?” Nintendo did the exact same thing with the Donkey Konga games on the Gamecube, focusing primarily on free-to-use tracks. Other music games feature a hybrid of classic and contemporary hits, as well as often-solid tracks from little-known acts. Nintendo’s choice of music here comes off as the equivalent of Marge Simpson trying to fit in at Lollapalooza.

Summary

Wii Music isn’t a game, it’s a toy, one that should be marked as targeted towards people aged 3-5. Little kids might have some fun with Wii Music, but like any flashy toy, it’ll be quickly discarded for the next big toy. Anyone with a semblance of an attention span will otherwise get bored of the game before the tutorial ends.


Pros: Mildly amusing mini-games. In particular “Mii Maestro”, where the motion of the remote dictates the gusto that the orchestra plays their music.


Cons: Only five songs for Mii Maestro.