Machogames: Get Your Jam On With Underrated Wii Music

If you ever watch TV, and we’re sure you do, you’ve almost certainly seen commercials for Wii Music, Nintendo’s big holiday title for its flagship console. Despite the major marketing push, the game has been dogged by slow sales since it’s release last month.
Having given the game a test run over the past week, we’re having a hard time figuring out why Wii Music isn’t doing better. We have a different standard for Wii games here at Machochip, with “fun” being the primary criteria for us to embrace a game on that console.
And Wii Music, we think, is a lot of fun.

Some of the reluctance of Wii owners to embrace Wii Music to this point may have to do with misconceptions about what the game actually is. It is not at all like other music games, such as the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, where players just play along to well-known songs on a set of fake instruments. Nor does it teach the player how to play an particular instrument, like a number of computer programs do these days.
What Wii Music does is teach players about music while allowing them to play with their friends in a fun, entertaining atmosphere. The standout feature of the game allows you and up to three other friends to pick a song and engage in an informal jam session. If you want to up the tempo of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to a disco beat, you can. And if you like the way it sounds, you can record it and share it with your other Wii Music friends over the internet. Players aren’t forced to play the song as it is, and the gameplay makes it easy to mix things up. Playing fast or slow, or adding notes where notes are not, is as simple as strumming a fake guitar or banging on an imaginary keyboard.
And playing those instruments is as simple as moving your Wii-mote. Unlike Rock Band and Guitar Hero, no additional controllers are required to play, just the aforementioned Wii-mote and its nunchuk. This gives the game a real free-form feel to it, and you never feel hemmed in. The game is not repetitive at all, like the other popular music games can be at times. If you care more about making your own improve tunes, and not mastering someone else’s popular track, you’ll love Wii Music.
Playing drums in Wii Music, we felt, was the most fun part of the game. An on-screen display of a drum kit appears, and you simply bang away to the beat. Add the Wii’s balance board, and you know have pedal action for the kick drum and the high-hat. While you’re not hitting an actual pad like in the other games, you do feel like you’re actually playing the drums here, rather than hitting a colored button in time to a predetermined beat.

As far as teaching you about music, the game has a pretty interesting tone quiz that gets progressively harder as you play along. Beyond that, just by putting in some time with the game you’ll feel like your learning more about the general theory of music, be it different tones, different tempos and the song-making process as a whole. The game is easy to pick up and fun to keep playing. The only part of the game we did not like was its “maestro mode,” which allows the player to move the Wii-mote back and forth, at different speeds, to conduct an orchestra of Miis. This felt really repetitive, and we abandoned it rather quickly to get back to our improve jams.
If you have a Wii, we’d recommend picking up Wii Music, having a few people over and getting down on some of the more than 60 instruments included in the game. The unstructured atmosphere and easy to learn gameplay makes this a perfect addition to your party game arsenal.
Wii Music retails for about $50 at Amazon.