My Weekend with Wii Music A Game Analysis by Sky Render in 4 Parts
Let's get this clear right from the start: this is not a typical review. I'll be posting it over the course of the next few hours, starting at 18:00 PST, and finishing at 21:00 PST. Timestamps are included for start, finish, and post times in each piece of the review, for convenience's sake.
Each post in the series will contain a carefully thought out and meaningful analysis, and the review will be in 4 parts as a result. Here's an outline of what to expect. I'll add quick links to each one once they're posted, so you won't have to muddle through the entire topic to reach them.
Here I basically give you a breakdown of my experience relating to video games, music, and musical video games. If you want to know how biased or unbiased I am about this review, please look here first. I tried to be as brutally honest as possible.
This is my first impressions of the game from the moment I insert it into my system on up to when I quit for the day, with no real exploration yet of the deeper features of the game.
Here's where I start to look at the finer nuances of the game. Expect a YouTube link or two to video recordings of a few of my performances in this section, for all of you people who want to see how good (or bad) I really am at this game.
And finally, this is where I come to my conclusions about the game and what it means to me, what it's done for me, what I think it will do for me, and even a bit of speculation on what it means for the industry (if anything). I also have a pithy little "score" for various parts of the game, so this is where you want to go if you just want an "out of 10" style of analysis. Warning: I don't actually do an "out of 10" style analysis.
This special addition to the review observes what happens when you decide to stop following the pre-defined note patterns and really make something of your own. A brief but very important addenum for anybody concerned about how much they really can do with this game.
Let's kick it off, then, with the opening comments.
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.
Started: 25 October 2008 (16:35 PST) Completed: 25 October 2008 (18:26 PST) Posted: 27 October 2008 (19:00 PST)
NOTE: I apologize for the less-than-ideal image quality. I can't capture through my component video cables, so I had to use my S-Video cables instead. As a result, there's a bit of color hashing and a bit of fuzziness too. Rest assured, it looks quite sharp on component. You may direct your complaints to my secretary.
To start with, let's get to the unpacking the game and popping it in.
Right from the start, we're thrown into a very basic tutorial of how to play the instruments, and I discover a few rather important facts.
1.) I am in fact a bit ill-coordinated. 2.) The game doesn't seem to mind too much that I am ill-coordinated. 3.) Once you get the rhythm of an instrument, it's really not too hard to play along and sound good.
The tutorial goes through all four of the basic instrument styles: Wiimote + Nunchuk banging (used for piano, drums, etc.), Wiimote + Nunchuk strumming (guitar style), Wiimote only (trumpet/flute), and Wiimote + Nunchuk bowing (violin style). I seem to have the easiest time personally with the piano style, which I managed to get the hang of nicely in time to perform a not-too-bad rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which the tutorial has you play in a Jam Session). Once that's done, it pops us out onto the main menu.
From here, we can access Drum Mode, Lessons, Videos, Games, and of course, Jams. From what the little Maestro fellow told me in the tutorial (with his amusing little voice; he seriously looks and sounds like a Muppet), I need to do jams and rate myself highly to unlock more songs, but we'll worry about that later. A quick glance shows that the Lessons are the game's tutorials, and that there's only the required first one so far. So let's go straight to the games, shall we? I'll try my hand first at Mii Maestro, where you conduct an orchestra.
A quick performance of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star results in a less-than-impressive 55 points, but to be fair, I didn't really read the instructions too well for it. So let's go on to the next song, Carmen. A wild and almost flailing try results in 54 points, so there is definitely more to this than just flailing wildly (unlike what some have claimed). On to The Four Seasons, where I try to keep a more even and proper pace. I seem to have a little difficulty at this, resulting in 52 points. Next is good old Ode to Joy, which I manage a 67 points, consderably better than before. There's a definite knack to this, and I think I'm starting to get a grip on it. So I try the last one, the ever-classic Legend of Zelda theme. This one is not so easy, it seems, but I still manage a 52.
Overall, I've found that Maestro is not my strong point, but I'm really not too shocked, given my musical background (or rather, lack of one). Next, let's see if we can handle Handbell Harmony. We'll be performing O Christmas Tree first, it seems. Overall, I did alright with 65 (and had a bit of a rough patch there when I forgot which bells I was ringing; how embarrassing!), so let's do the next one, Hum Hum Hum. This one I get the knack of it a bit better and manage 76 on. This is clearly more like what most people are used to in music games, with the timing of swings. On to the next song, My Grandfather's Clock. The end result was 77, also pretty good. Do-Re-Mi gets me 59 (I missed a few notes), and Sukiyaki I get 67 on. That concludes the handbells, which I was mostly okay at. I will definitely need to pracice this later.
Next is Pitch Perfect, where I get to find out how tone-deaf I actually am. It basically has you checking your ability to recognize higher and lower pitch notes, to recognize the notes in multi-part harmonies, to spot the theme-appropriateness of a particular music piece, and to see how well you can arrange a simple piece based on pre-assembled notes on a grid. I got 106 on level 1, so I gess I'm not totally hopeless. From there, however, I suspect I won't do so well. Let's see.
Overall, I didn't do as bad as I thought I would (well, except level 7; that's pretty close to how I expected to score throughout all of the later ones). So that covers the various minigames, now let's check out some other bits. Videos lets you see videos you've made and that others have sent you, and has a few sample videos too. It's standard-issue stuff, so instead let's get to the really good bit now: Jam Sessions.
There are 3 kinds of Jam Sessions you can do: Instrument Improv, Quick Jam, and Custom Jam. You can even play along with the menu theme here with whatever instrument your Mii is holding, which is a nifty touch. We'll start with improv.
In this mode, you pick an instrument and just jam with it. Every instrument has a lot of options on how to play it, but we'll get into that later. Overall, the instrument improv is very fun, but unfortunately, there seems to be no way to save your songs in this mode. I say unfortunately because it's a blast, plain and simple: get into the rhythm, toy with what the instrument can do, and just have fun. It's dinking around with instruments at its finest, without the hassle of having to know how to play the instrument. I found I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the timing and tone-matching minigames.
Next up, Quick Jam! This picks some random combination of song and instrument for you, so you can just jump right in. You quickly learn that you don't know the timing for your favorite songs quite as well as you thought you did when you play this mode, or maybe it's just me. Anyway, it's pretty interesting overall, the kind of thing you load up when you just want to play a quickie.
Now we'll take a quick look at Custom Jam. We'll start with Super Mario Bros theme and the Concert Hall, with a classical arrangement. A quick try with me playing the congas results in a fairly good performance. The Overdub feature is explained, and I'm half-tempted to try it, but we'll save that for later. After saving the video and getting a brief playback of it, I unlock a new instrument, and I shut the game off for the day. In the next part: we look into the depths of the Jam Session options, how the instruments work in detail, and we'll get a few videos of my performances. Plus: Drum Mode!
Impressions so far: A pretty interesting game, and certainly proving itself to be entertaining. I can see that I'll need to practice more to fully appreciate the game's nuances, but that's alright; a game that has no learning curve wouldn't be very fun, after all.
