Every December my family likes to put a tree inside the house, hang glittery stuff on it, and exchange gifts. I know, weird, right? So I put two things on my list my kids would have no trouble getting for me: Wii Music and Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip.

Road Trip is a lot of fun, especially with the balance board. (No, it’s very little like the real thing.)

Wii Music is more complicated to analyze. The immediate comparison that springs to mind is that of Rock Band or Guitar Hero (RB/GH). But this is not those games. In fact, despite the Wii’s reputation as a casual gaming platform, I consider RB/GH to be much more conducive to pick-up-and-play casual gameplay than Wii Music.

Although they are both rhythm games, Wii Music’s primary focus is on arrangement while RB/GH are focused on the physical aspects of performance (rhythm, dexterity, speed). This makes them completely different games. It also means that Wii Music takes a little longer to get into and that you need to spend a lot of time with it to get the most out of it.

I finally had an opportunity to explore the game by myself for a few hours. The game has several modes but the one I had the most fun with was Custom Jam. In this mode, you put together a six piece band to play a custom arrangement of one of the built-in tracks. By default, all six parts are pre-selected and you can click on one of them and play along (up to four people can play together in this mode).

But you can also remove the computer players and play all six parts yourself. The way that works is you remove all of the computer parts then choose a part and play it. Then choose a second part and play that. The part you played first will then play back with you. And so on. I spent a good hour trying to perfect a string quartet version of Daydream Believer. It sounded nothing like the original pop version.

You can adjust the tempo and choose from dozens of instruments for each part. Beyond that, there are a bunch of ways to affect the actual performance. For one, you don’t have to play the suggested notes. You can play any number of notes in between the suggested notes and even skip notes you don’t want to play. This combined with the right instruments allows you to change the style of any song from rock to blues to country… anything you can imagine.

And every instrument allows you to customize the way it sounds in real-time during the performance. Moving the bow on the violion faster or slower changes the volume. And you can control whether you mute the strings or let them ring out. On my arrangement, I let the last note fade and then brought it back in to an abrupt stop for a nice finish. With guitars you can play chords, single notes, bend and mute strings, and hold notes. Pianos can be played strongly or softly. And so on.

Wii Music is much more like learning to play an actual instrument (only easier) than RB/GH. And, in general, I’m a big fan of anything that allows people to discover and share their latent creativity (like Microsoft Songsmith). In addition, it contains lessons that teach the basics of music theory: timing, rhythm, melody, harmony, etc; and some fun music mini-games. I can see this being a good introduction to music for children or even augmentation for anybody learning to play a traditional instrument.

The greatest weakness is the music selection. The early unlockable songs are neither fun nor challenging. The argument, I suppose, is that it makes the learning curve very gradual. But I think it’s too gradual, even for a six year old. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star just feels a bit silly to play. Once you’re beyond those, there are 48 tracks in the game ranging from classical, to children’s, to Nintendo game tunes. I hope that Nintendo plans on releasing add-on music packs that contain more popular licensed music. I’d enjoy Wii Music much more if I could play a custom arrangement of a song from a band like The New Pornographers or Talking Heads.

Comments

1. Curly on 2009-01-29 12:26:09 wrote: I blogged about Songsmith too today, it’s horrible, but amusing.

2. John on 2009-02-03 10:49:36 wrote: I don’t think Songsmith is horrible. The ad was low budget, obviously—I read somewhere that the development team financed it themselves because it’s not an official MS product. But as a software toy (as opposed to a game which implies goal-focused play or a tool)… if it gets people singing and having fun… that’s Good. Plus, the underlying technology is very interesting: software that analyzes singing and detects pitch and tempo. With some evolutionary improvements in the quality of the musical output, I predict entire pop music albums produced by one singer and one producer—no band required (and the singer doesn’t have to be able to sing either). Pop music is already most of the way there. Which is why I don’t listen to much pop music. ;-) But it’s interesting tech anyway.