Do you also recommend people who like playing Cooking Mama to stop playing video games and learn to cook instead? Or recommend people who play enjoy Roller Coaster Tycoon to quit and start a real buisness? Or recommend people who like playing Phoenix Wright stop and go to law school? Or recommend people who enjoy the Sims to stop playing video games and get a life? Or recommend people who enjoy Rainbow Six to stop playing games and join the army?

People often use video games as ways of living out their little fantasies. And while the most popular games usually embrace the most lavish and unlikely fantasies, there's still plenty of out there who want to indulged our less elbaroate ones as well.

I'm tone deaf, and I don't know jack about music. For me to learn an instrument now would take a LOT of my time, and I'm not sure if I'd have any success, all for something I'm not overly passionate it about. I wouldn't even know which insturment to even try. Wii Music let's have fun while playing make-beleive composer at a very small expense of time and money.

I have no dobut that learning an actual instrument and learning to play actual music would be infintely more of an experience then Wii Music can ever be. But I didn't get it to presue musical prowness, I bought it as fun piece of software for me to fiddle around with.

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.

@Killergran: I'm not so sure about the niche... I mean, this game is clearly made the people in mind who enjoy music. Think about how many people like to sing, dance, "jam" by drumming the table, play air guitar etc. Since the game doesn't require you to know how to play any instruments and it gives you a lot freedom to improvise, it may turn out having endless legs.

@bdbdbd
Maybe we just don't share the same definition of the word niche :)
And I'm not meaning that it won't sell forever and ever. Wii music is a game that will never really lose it's appeal to people, and I believe that 10 years from now we'll be looking at it in awe, wondering how on earth such a game could be released in todays climate.

I'm just saying that Wii Music will most likely not appeal to the gamer in our minds, but to another type of person. That makes Wii Music a niche game. It's not a game for the gamer. It's a game for the budding musician.

@Killergran: If your point was, that the game doesn't appeal but to a small percentage of existing gamers, you may be right. But what i see in the game, is huge potential. Notice that i haven't played it yet, but so far what i've seen is, that the game appeals to people who are creative, but don't know how to play (100% of kids, 95% of parents).

hmm, interesting. might have to give this game a try sometime.

What I like the most is that track thing that helps you out, the one with the note for when you should normally do a gesture, this helped me with how I evolved to music, and in turn getting more people to sound better.

The whole thing was very procedural, my only let down was the lack of an online component for jamming out with friends online, even if it would of sucked.

fun game, if it wasn't made by nintendo it wouldn't get much attention, i still think its the biggest ripoff of the year. $49.99 is too expensive for such limitation in a music game.