Ail said:
That's kinda pushing it. I know you're trying to make a point but still... It took my wife all of 4 tries to beat one song in easy and she had never played a console game before in her life, the only thing she plays is MMORPGs on the PC... She had never played a musical instrument either before... Granted it wasn't a perfect but she did it and all it took to convince her to try it was see me playing the game. As for people that actually play Guitar in real, well I have a friend that beat every GH:WT songs on expert on his first try and yes he plays guitar in real... And that's what attract a lot of people with GH and Rockband, the instruments look like real instrument and when you see a guy playing the guitar and hear a Rolling Stones or an Aerosmith song, you want to do the same... That is one key thing most people didn't mention in this thread, GH and Rock Band are built around songs most people of a certain age have danced to and heard countless times on the radio and tv, songs by bands a lot of us were big fans of. Wii Music, not so much, mainly dare I say, kids tunes, and seeing the pile of money Nintendo sits on, it really feels like they were real cheap in that area.... As for the whole creativity argument. Fact is most people that play music in real actually play music composed by someone else. So in the end it's all more similar to the GH3/Rock Band experience... Very few people actually try to compose their own music... |
A couple of points:
First, I don't think I'm pushing things at all. As far as I know, it takes most people several tries to get through their first song, on Easy, in Guitar Hero, despite the songs deliberately being quite forgiving, and even then their victory is touch-and-go.
This despite the fact that the early songs are tailor-made for novices: the jewels move at the rate of molasses, there are only three of them, and they are few and far between, with none of the early songs requiring you to press more than one button at a time. Nonetheless, it still takes multiple attempts to beat the song, not because the song is hard, but because the method of control is so inaccessible in the beginning. Sure, you will get used to it, because the game looks fun and is worth getting used to, but that doesn't make it accessible. By contrast, you can dive into Wii Music's mechanics quickly: the challenge comes from making the music itself.
Second, it's true that most people play music that's composed by someone else. But, from my personal experience, most people start to improvise after the first few play-throughs: add a few notes here, stretch out that note there, emphasize a beat here...you try to make the song your own.
I'm going to guess that you don't play an instrument yourself (you should!), or you wouldn't have made that claim in this manner. The next time you're at a music store, browse the classical and jazz sections in particular. You'll notice that there are dozens of recordings of the same song, but by different performers. Listen to three or four of them. The differences in their interpretations are obvious from the get-go, despite the fact that they're usually playing the exact same notes, but with radically different interpretations.
Guitar Hero doesn't allow that; you play the same song by the same rules everytime. The makers of the game, in fact, once compared the experience to a recording which only continues if you insert the proper input at the proper time. That's not what musicians do.
Wii Music, on the other hand, is built to allow just such an improvisation (not to make your own song from scratch. Sadly.). Your own argument shows that Wii Music is in fact closer to what people who actually play music do.
Third...Nintendo mostly went the cheap route in the song selection, and that sucks. But "mostly kid's music"? Hardly that, my friend! As you see, they ain't all "Twinkle Twinkle" and "Yankee Doodle." A lot of it is licensed pop songs, Nintendo themes, or classical music. I'd also add that you can do a lot with "kid's music." Mozart alone composed a dozen variations of Twinkle Twinkle, for instance, and I consider him to be a real musician...
