Surprisingly, I like Wii Music.
Maybe that's not surprising to you, but it certainly caught me off-guard. When Nintendo revealed its upcoming music game at E3 (if indeed it can be called to be a game; creator Shigeru Miyamoto regards it more as a toy), I was skeptical. When I actually played it, I was even more doubtful. It lacked focus or structure; it was, in short, fairly pointless.
But Nintendo has a slightly more fleshed-out version of the game on display this weekend at Penny Arcade Expo, and despite this version sporting only a few modest tweaks, I think it has won me over. The difference: A sense of purpose. While the game's primary mode remains the same -- a group of faux musicians jamming together and playing individual notes or beats of a predefined music track --
the single-player mode now has added depth. Rather than simply pantomiming music with a phantom backing band, you can record their own personal renditions of each tune's six tracks, including melody, harmony, rhythm and percussion. You can save performances, then splice them into the standard rhythm tracks, allowing you to effectively create a complete custom performance of each track. This also works for group performances, although it has more impact with a single performer.
I sat in for a show floor jam session with 1UP's very own Andrew Pfister and developed a better sense of how Wii Music's cumulative music feature works. Andrew took percussion (a drum set) while I sat in on harmony with the NES Horn (a woodwind shaped like an NES controller which emits 8-bit square and triangle waves). You play the drums by mimicking drumming motions with the Nunchuk and Wii Remote, while you use the NES Horn like a flute, with the Wii Remote held at mouth level while you tap the 1 and 2 buttons to create notes. Our initial performance of the Super Mario Bros. theme seemed fine, so we played through the tune a second time. This time through, the game used our previous performances for the percussion and harmony tracks...which made for a cacophonous din once we began performing with our second set of instruments.
The instrument selection has expanded drastically, with some unconventional choices. Besides the NES Horn, the new build of Wii Music features such oddities as the cuica (a wheezy samba percussion instrument), the Cheerleader (a teenage girl in cheerleader get-up shouting cheers in time to the music), and the Cat Suit (a cat costume which causes your in-game avatar to belt out cat noises). In other words, it's going to become the bane of parents everywhere with its vast and discordant "musical" possibilities...but on the other hand, it's non-violent and might even foster creativity, so they probably won't complain too vigorously.
Wii Music is hardly a me-too music game, and there's no guarantee that gamers will accept its unstructured approach to collaborative tunesmithing.
Then again, everything Nintendo develops seems to turn to gold these days, and Wii Music's simple track-mixing feature seems like a potentially addictive element that could reel in even the skeptics.
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3169686&p=44