Finally played Wii Music, went in wanting to hate this game...

[Killergran]

MaxwellGT2000 said:

Alasted said:

Godot said:
As a musician and a music composer myself, I have to say that I don't think this game is really a music game. Sure, you can be creative in your arrangement of the song but you're still extremely limited. It would have been so much better with a music creator mode like there is in Mario Paint. In the end, it helps you to keep a beat and how to make the difference between a few musical genre but it doesn't really teach you music. Just like I thought Guitar Hero wasn't worth (because you're much better playing a real guitar instead) it for a musician, I think neither is Wii Music.

It may be good for children or people that don't want to learn an instrument but what I recommend is to stop playing video games and learn an instrument.

I'm a musician myself, and I must say that I respectfully disagree.  Then again, I also loved the Guitar Hero games.

 

I agree, I know it lacks a bit of freedom in making your own music but really it's a good tool for teaching, I'm going to be a music teacher myself one day, I started out in music classes in school and what did we learn?  Not an instrument, not at all, you learn tempo, notes, how long to hold them, definitions, and some styles.  Wii music teaches those things pretty well from what I can see and every learning experience starts at an elementary level, so it's good for kids and adults to learn a few basics, as well as us experienced music lovers to tool around with and have some fun with things we could play in real life.

I find it obvious Godot that your pleasure from music comes from constructing a song from the ground up and it's a very important part of music, but you have to start somewhere being the basics, which this game gives that I've seen no other game offer, sure Mario Paint has a music creator mode but do you think anyone but people with some musical background could make something really good on that program?  Or better yet could that program teach new people the basics?  The idea of Wii music is totally different from what you seem to want it to be.

Wii Music does seem to be a pretty niche game. I know that it's supposed to be 'casual', and all that, but it's not. Not all people could appreciate what it actually does. Any reviewer, or other person either for that matter, that whines about there being no goal have probably never played in a real band, or even popped their head out and taken a good look at life recently. Anyone saying that you cannot get better is probably not musically gifted enough to understand what makes good and bad music.

The people that will appreciate Wii Music are the people that enjoy music itself, and would like to have an opportunity to play around with it and have never had the opportunity to do so. That my friends, is a fairly niche group. People outside this group will find the game limiting, impossible to understand or even pointless.

Take the experienced musician Godot. He plays around with music all the time, so he cannot really see the benefit of doing the same thing but in a much more limited setting. Take Matt Cassamania (IGN dude). He's not musically gifted enough to make sense of the stuff that's happening, and the game gets impossible to understand. A noisefest.

Then take the self-proclaimed hardcore gamer. He thinks that life should be as the games are. Objectives. Points. Finish-lines. He sees nothing of this in Wii music, and the game becomes pointless. I can see why all of these people hate the game. It is, as I said, a very niche product. What it is not, however, is shovelware. That's the only accusation of the game that I really resent.

What I think the people that call this game shovelware are missing is the enourmous problem of actually making a game where you by wiimote movements actually can create music. Think about it for a while. How would you go about doing that, if you had never laid your eyes upon Wii Music? Most of the production of this game has been by brilliant minds trying to make something very sophisticated and difficult into something very sophisticated and easy, with a very limiting sets of tools. If it had been easy to do this, you would have seen Wii Music at launch, not almost two years later.

No, Wii Music is a very worked through product. It's high production values are not, however, in anything you can see or hear. They are simply in the way the game works. That is not to say that the game is without flaws. From the start, I have said that the two problems I can see with it are the songs and the Midi sounds. Those are not easilly solved problems though, and they are easilly forgivable when looking at what Nintendo has actually achieved.