Wii Music Impressions

Rather you play the air guitar, a real guitar, or Guitar Hero, almost everyone at some point in their lives wished to play an instrument. Maybe you wished to play something a bit more elegant like a cello or maybe you wanted to rock out with the drums or be the hit guitarist that every groupie wanted to sleep with. Needless to say, not all of us with the passion for music has the talent and we might turn to some musical games as a way to fill the empty void we have in our talentless hearts. It's such a shame the Wii Music doesn't really do that...It more or less only hints on what the game could have been.

Wii Music is an extremely simple game (if you even want to call it that) that anyone can pick up and swing their Wiimote around wildly to sound like some amazing conductor or musician. The whole game is played in a total of five different styles. The first style is the 'piano style' where you hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck out in front of you and move your hands up and down to represent the moment of your fingers hitting the keys. The second style is the 'guitar style' where you hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck like a guitar and swing the Wiimote in the motion of strumming the string.

The third style is the 'violin style' where, you guessed it, you hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck like a violin and move the Wiimote in the motion of a bow across the stings. The fourth style is the 'trumpet style' where you hold the remote out in front of your face and rotate between the '1' and '2' buttons to represent hitting the keys. Then the final style is the 'drum style' where you hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck in front of you and move them up and down like you're beating a drum.

The problem with this is that that's it. You would think that they would alter the styles a bit to fit the instrument a bit more such as requiring you to hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck in the 'V' shape like real drum sticks or have you move the Nunchuck up and down to represent moving your hand up and down the neck of the cello. However, you don't. Like I said a little awhile ago, the game is extremely simple. Honestly you don't even need to hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck in any special way to play it and most of the time, you can get away with just swinging the Wiimote.

There's a couple of different game modes, each one containing a sub-mode. The first mode- and probably the most played- is the Jam Mode. In here, you can do a couple of things like Instrument Improvements. Here, you select an instrument from a list which includes anything from the ukulele, a variety of drums, the guitar, the piano, and xylophone. Once your instrument has been chosen, you can "learn to play it" or you can practice with the virtual teacher Tute. But basically...You just move the Wiimote and play a unselected song.

Next, you can do a Jam Session where you and up to three other people can pick instruments, a song, and design a little stage to play on. Again, you basically just swing the controller around until the song finished. Once it is finished, you can choose to save a video of you playing and make a decorative cover for it. You can then rewatch your videos or send them to friends over WiFi. This is a kind of cool feature but it's nothing amazing.

The next mode you can play is called Lessons. Here, you can choose to go through a series of lessons for each instrument starting with the basics and moving on to slightly more advanced styles. This makes the Jam Mastery mode about the only mode where rhythm and timing actually matter...

The next mode is the Game mode which has a couple of different games you can play, but I'm not going to lie, many of them aren't really fun. The first game you can choose to play is the Maestro mode where you take the form of a conductor and conduct an orchestra. Here, you might want to try to keep up with the timing in order to execute the song, but I had a couple issues with it. The first being that the Wiimote wasn't sensitive enough to handle light taps. Like a real musician, you have to start slow so you begin by playing a lot of simple, easy songs like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. This required easy movements with the Wiimote but the game would not read my movements unless I moved my arm in large arcs or moved it quickly. This resulted in the song being played too fast and even though it sounded like it was suppose to, my score suffered due to speed.

The other issue I had with it is that you don't feel like a conduct. All you do is move the Wiimote up and down...Even with more "complicated songs" (and I use that term very, very loosely with Wii Music) just make you increase the speed you swing the Wiimote.

Another game mode is the Handbell Harmony. In this game, you and up to three other people hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck up like giant bells. Each bell in your hand is a different color. Then on the screen there is a bar. Different colored bells then show up and move across the sceen, similar to Guitar Hero or Rock Band. The idea behind the game is that you hit your color of bells when it passes over the bar. (I could actually see this being fun for awhile with a group of people, but like most Wii games, the magic wears off fairly quickly.)

The final game is called Perfect Pitch. In this game, a tone is played and you need to match its pitch with one of the choices given to you. This is an ok game that gets old very fast...

Though Wii Music does have a final mode, but I was unable to play it. The final mode is the Drum Mode but it requires the Wii Fit Board which I do not own. Based on what I've seen...The Drum Mode actually looks fun and is what I was hoping the rest of the game would be like. A virtual drum set appears before you and you actually need to move your hands in order to select the drum you want to hit making you feel like you're actually playing a real set. This is something I feel the whole game should have been.

The bottom line is that Wii Music is definitely designed for people who want to pretend that they're actually playing something even though they aren't. The game doesn't really focus on rhythm or timing- only the Lesson Mode seems to really be effected by how you move the Wiimote. There's these little things in the bottom-right corner of the screen called be-bops that are suppose to help with rhythm and a metronome ticking comes from the Wiimote to help you keep rhythm but it doesn't matter because for most of the time, the song sounds the same regardless of when or how fast you move the remote. The same goes for timing. Hell, I got a 'good' on the first song when I was moving the Wiimote and Nunchuck as fast as I could.

This leaves Wii Music feeling like a broken game, if you even want to call it a game... It's a mixture of lazy development since Nintendo didn't go as into depth as they could have- and should have- with the instruments as well as their fear of losing their casual audience by making the game as simple as it possibly could. The amount of wasted potential makes me want to cry because Wii Music could have been a truly unique experience; there is so much that could have been done with the Wii's motion controls that Nintendo hardly even touched on with Wii Music.

So I guess that leaves me with playing my air cello until next year.