famousringo said:
What makes Rock Band more accessible than Wii Music isn't so much the interface itself. I think it's arguable whether flicking the wiimote and nunchuk is more intuitive than controllers which are custom-built to look and operate like instruments, especially when you add in all of the modifiers for Wii Music instruments which utilize the thumbstick and A, B, C, Z buttons. You could build a case for either one, really. |
I see what you're saying, and on a logical level it may be true, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Granted my sample size is small, but none of us had trouble grasping Wii Music quickly, while all of us had serious trouble adjusting to Guitar Hero's controls at first. Perhaps it's the lack of punishment for getting something wrong, perhaps it's something else, but with Wii Music we all felt comfortable in short order.
Where Rock Band and other rhythm games really get more accessible than Wii Music is the scrolling instruction sheet which tells the player what to do and defines exactly what constitutes success and failure. You can see this in the response of so many people to the game. They aren't willing to go searching for their own goals, they want the game to hand goals to them on a platter, and Wii Music refuses to do this. Wii Music has a scrolling instruction sheet, but it hides it away where the player can't find it, because it wants the player to deviate from the plan.
This also hasn't been my experience. Again, the lack of any punishment for doing something "wrong" in Wii Music let us all play around and settle in quickly, and we quickly started to experiment. By contrast, when you don't press the right button at the right time in Guitar Hero, you lose points, get closer to losing, and get this nasty sound. From what I've seen, most people find that stressful, because most people don't like being punished when they're just starting to learn the ropes.
That said...
This freedom terrifies and confuses a lot of people. Many of them video game reviewers.
THIS, I feel, really nails the "problem." People who review games have the win/lose mentality engrained in them to a far greater extent than the general public, at least when it comes to video games. I think that explains part of why that crowd is so against this game. "What, I can't lose?!" is and was a common refrain from that crowd, and they said it with true horror. By contrast, I don't think most people have that mentality when it comes to gaming. There are tons of people out there who aren't so competitive that they must always have a winner and a loser. I'd argue that the general public is less sanguine about finding stress in their hobby than traditional gamers are.
To the snobcore, freedom is something new and scary. Most of us don't have that problem, though. Not that I'm saying that's the only reason people would dump on the game (it ain't perfect, let me tell you that), but I think it goes a long way. And I would also submit that even amongst the traditional gaming crowd, the more open-minded will be okay with this product, once they've had enough time to abandon the adversarial mindset and take this game on its own terms. The E3 impressions were almost universally negative, if I recall, likely because the reviewers were trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. Quite a few of them came around once they had time to settle down with it, though.
I think it was one of 1up's reviewers that summarizes this best: he hated it at E3, thought it was a waste of time for the first hour he got his review copy, and then he "clicked" after he realized that the point was to do whatever you want.
He sucked, mind you, and I'm surprised at how proud he was of his recordings, but that goes back to my karaoke comment. I think it also demonstrates that the initial terror the traditional gamer will feel will disapparate, if they give it a bit of a chance.
