Opening Comments: What I Started With
Started: 24 October 2008 (14:51 PST)
Finished: 24 October 2008 (16:01 PST)
Posted: 27 October 2008 (18:00 PST)
I should certainly start this out with some basic "credentials", if you will, for my reviewing this game. I wrote these out ahead of time, since I don't actually need the game on hand to list them.
First off, I have never played any music game before Wii Music, unless you count button-timing minigames in Brave Fencer Musashi and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that happened to be put to a musical theme. I have no experience whatsoever with Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or any of their clones and knock-offs (especially not Guitar Fever, though Ashens did a funny job reviewing that on YouTube).
Second, my interest in Nintendo and its products is largely transient (though my interest in the company itself is quite a bit deeper, it has nothing to do with their products and everything to do with their business strategy). During the latter half of the 1980s, I was a "Nintendo kid": I was the most frequent user of the family's NES, and was generally enamored with the likes of Super Mario Bros 3, Dr. Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Adventure of Link (as well as a slew of other non-Nintendo-made titles such as Dragon Warrior, Skate or Die, Ninja Gaiden, TMNT1 and 2, Rampage, and Battletoads).
When the 1990s hit, I moved on to become a PC gamer (mostly playing FPS and adventure games). Around 1998 I got back into consoles with Squaresoft RPGs on the PlayStation (it was Xenogears that drew me back, if anybody is curious). My buying of games for the PlayStation (and later, PlayStation 2) lasted until circa 2007, when I picked up a Wii. So for roughly... oh, 17 years or so between 1990 and 2007, my only experience with Nintendo was with Game Boy handhelds and the DS (and even there, I didn't get an original Game Boy until 1996).
Third, I will admit that I went into this experience, shall we say, mildly hyped. Though interestingly enough, most of my personal hype revolved around my idea of how the controls were designed to work, not of how the game itself played. I also read the Iwata Asks series on the game, so I'm a bit more informed about how the game actually works and what into making it than the average consumer is. Ultimately, I go into this game fascinated by the concept behind the game and the method of the game's creation more than anything else.
Fourth, I have a slight bias towards the Wii, specifically in terms of what the system is capable of which other systems are not capable of (at this time). With roughly 20 years of what can be termed "traditional" gaming under my belt (12 years overall if you want to get overly technical and skip my PC gaming years), I have grown a bit weary of said traditional gaming. As such, the motion, pointer, and tilt controls of the Wii Remote hold a definite allure to me which a normal gamepad no longer does. Which is not to say that I despise traditional gaming; far from it. It's just that I have a higher appreciation for non-traditional gaming now than I do for traditional gaming. How much this preference is, is difficult to gauge, but I'd say that it swings roughly 60/40 as of this time in favor of the Wii's control style.
Fifth, I am highly informed about Blue Ocean Strategy and relatively well informed about Disruption Theory, in part due to Sean Malstrom's blog and in part because I actually read the entirety of Blue Ocean Strategy cover-to-cover. Meaning that I have at least some grasp of what Nintendo is up to with their overall business strategy as well as with their releasing Wii Music as it is. Whether this will affect my bias towards or against the game is hard to say, but I am going to do my best to not allow it to interfere.
And finally, I think I should clarify that my musical experience has been more or less entirely on the "listening" end prior to this, with no real appreciation of what it meant to play an instrument or compose. There was one potential exception to the former, if you're being particularly broad about it, but I don't think memorizing an 18-note ditty from The 7th Guest that was a solution to a puzzle in said game really counts as any sort of real musical training.
Next up: the review begins!
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
