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Wii Innovate? I Think Not
Originally a Wii Music Review that became… something else.
by Charlie Reneke
We're currently in the middle of Nintendo's remarkable run with the Wii. Hardly anyone would have guessed that a machine so different from the standard model of a game system would become the top console of it’s generation.
And yet it has.
Despite being highly underpowered to the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, the Wii has captured the imaginations of the gaming public in a much bigger way then even the Playstation 2 did. Nintendo promised it would be a system that would transcend demographics, which drew laughter. No game system will ever appeal to children and your average senior citizen.
And yet it has.
True story: I took my Wii to my uncle’s house for our family’s big Forth of July celebration. I took with me Wii Sports and Boom Blox. I turned bowling on it, and soon the twenty or so people there at the party were trying to figure out an appropriate method to decide when everyone got a turn. This is not in my family’s nature, mind you. We can barely make it seven turns into a game of Monopoly before someone gets mad and throws the board off the table. Wii was able to bring my family together.
My grandmother is 84-years-old. She had never played a video game in her life. My aunt dragged her, practically kicking and screaming, to the television so she could try a couple swings with Wii Sports Bowling.
Two hours later, she finally gave the controller back.
The next day, I got an angry call from her saying how her arm was sore and to never even mention that cursed game ever again in her presence.
Two days later, she called up and asked me to bring it back.
She owns her own Wii now.
Nintendo promised the moon with the Nintendo Wii, and they delivered it along with other parts of the heavens. They’ve changed video games forever. I will safely say that motion controls will never go away. Within two more console generations, it will replace buttons as the dominating game interface on all consoles. The genie is out of the bottle. Nintendo’s innovation will be the standard, like the D-Pad and Analog sticks before it.
But while Nintendo has once again changed the standard on controls for game consoles (whether some people like it or not), true innovation on the Wii is practically non-existent. The games themselves are mostly the same they always were. The most groundbreaking games for the Wii have not been made by Nintendo themselves. I can think of only a handful that are a truly new experiences that can be found on the console.
Boom Blox is one. It was conceived by Steven Spielberg and produced by Electronic Arts. It’s a game so firmly based on it’s control scheme that it could not have been accomplished before the Wii.
Nintendo’s offerings have mostly been retreads of old ground with new interfaces.
That’s fine with me. Part of the reason I’ve been loyal to Nintendo all these years is that I happen to like the style of games Nintendo makes. The Nintendo fan base is loyal. Trust me, after naming the worst ten games they ever made, I found out all about that.
Of the many things I truly appreciate about Nintendo, their willingness to experiment with new game types has always been most important to me. During the Gamecube/Gameboy Advance era, they gave us some pretty wacky game ideas. Take a read of these descriptions.
-A platform game where you use bongo drums to string together acrobatic combos leading to boss fights that play out like boxing matches.
-A real time war simulator set in Feudal Japan where the battlefield is a giant pinball table and you must defeat the opposing army using a giant stone ball while using a microphone to call your troops out of harm’s way.
-A minigame collection in which you have between one and four seconds to successfully complete a game before things get even faster and more games are thrown at you.
These are just of the wacky ideas that Nintendo came up with. They didn’t always sell great, but at least the effort was there. And I’m also not claiming that Nintendo is the only company that can bring the new ideas to the table. Sega did so with awesome results during the Dreamcast era, and Sony gave us stuff way off the beaten path like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two of my top three games of the last generation. But with Nintendo, making those bizarre ideas into fun and functional games worked more often with them then with any other company.
I guess that’s why I’m so disappointed in Nintendo’s output since the Wii came along. I want stuff that I’ve never seen before. With such a daring console, I expected it. And my expectations have not been met. Thus far Nintendo has only published one game that is kind of different from what we’re used to, the highly underrated Endless Ocean.
Everything else has been new versions of old games. Even Wii Fit is little more then a more technologically advanced version of the same old games we played on the Power Pad back in the NES era.
This brings me to the reason I’m here today. Wii Music. Nintendo’s latest attempt to go off the beaten path. It’s a reminder that the beaten path is there for a reason. Sometimes if you go off the path you end up lost in the wilderness and eaten by bears.
For you fanboys, out there, this will be the part where things get nasty. If you can’t deal with that, stay away.
Nintendo has attempted to market Wii Music not as a game, but as a toy. This alone has some gamers furious. I personally don’t care about that aspect. Fun is fun. As long as the product is entertaining, I don’t care what you call it.
Wii Music is not entertaining.
I tried desperately to find a single redeeming aspect of it. I spent way more time with it then I wanted to as if I was on a quest to find something, anything, entertaining about it. I failed.
Let’s start off with the graphics. I don’t really care about graphics, but most do and so I figure I’ll get it out the way. Wii Music is horrible looking in the same way Wii Sports, Wii Play, or Wii Fit is. The Wii was not a machine designed to wow you visually, and Nintendo is desperate to convince gamers that ugly is good. I don’t understand this myself. It’s not like the machine is incapable of doing much better then this. I guess the feeling is Nintendo sucked people in with Wii Sports and thus games designed purely for the casual audience have to look every bit as bland and lifeless as it does. I can almost understand it, like Nintendo is in fear of intimidating all those non-gamers they created the machine for in the first place.
But, according to Nintendo and depending on what mood they‘re in, Wii Music was not designed for everyone. It was designed for children. In this case I can’t see why having better graphics would possibly hurt. Do they consider five-years-olds so unsophisticated they could not handle having a game with a little stylized flare to it?
I tested this theory out by taking Wii Music to a friend’s house so that his young children, ages seven and five, could monkey around with it. I wanted to see how the target audience would respond.
The seven-year-old told me, in these exact words, that the game “looked like a doctor’s office.”
Have you ever known a doctor’s office to be something visually appealing? Of course not. They’re sterile, bland, and lifeless. Wii Music is all of that and more.
I had a tough time convincing the five-year-old that playing Wii Music was important to me. He kept wanting to play a, his words, “better game.” So much for the neighbors.
The ultra-stripped down visuals that I hypothesized were done to make the game less intimidating actually turn people off. After all, nobody wants to be stuck in a doctor’s office.
Moving on to the actual music in Wii Music. If the graphics were a turn off, the music itself is a slap in the face. The most criminal offense is that most of it is done in MIDI format. Someone really needs to remind Nintendo that this is 2008 and that games have actual soundtracks these days. In fact, Super Smash Bros. Brawl featured over 100 songs, with the only ones in MIDI being exact ports of classic NES tunes. It just comes across as incredibly cheap.
There are sixty-six instruments to choose from in Wii Music. They range from serious stuff (pianos, violins, harps) to whacky stuff (a barking dog, a clapping hand, and a flute shaped like an NES controller that plays mono-synth NES chirps). If the tunes weren’t almost all in MIDI, this would be something exciting. Sadly, it’s scientifically proven impossible to enjoy Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in 2008 when the sound is coming from what sounds like a dusty old Super Nintendo with one of the AV cords fried.
There are fifty-two songs in Wii Music. Most of them are public domain. Nine of them classical symphonies, including Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Once again, this was designed for children. Twenty-three tunes are ‘traditional’ songs, usually folk music. The US song selection is represented by Yankee Doodle, a song that the British used to make fun of Americans during the revolutionary war (roughly translated, Yankee Doodle is a way of saying Americans are ‘homosexual hillbillies’). It also includes stuff like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Turkey in the Straw, La Bamba (the Mexican Folk version), and Happy Birthday to You, which is one of the few licensed songs Nintendo actually has on here.
Thirteen Songs make up the ‘popular’ selection of tracks, and this section for me is the biggest puzzle. I will stress once again that Nintendo designed Wii Music for young children. In that spirit I ask, what the hell kind of song selection is this? Among the thirteen licensed tracks of the popular section include the theme song to Chariots of Fire, a movie that won best picture the year I was born. I’m 27, that movie is out of MY demographic, let alone a child in this day and age.
Other songs include what I think is a cover to “Please Mr. Postman” and Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” Such inclusions make me wonder if every breath Nintendo took while making this game was filled with nitrous oxide. How else can you explain including “I’ve Never Been to Me” in children’s game besides some kind of bizarre, laughing gas induced joke that makes sense only to the developers?
Nintendo was also kind enough to include seven themes to ‘classic’ Nintendo games. I say the word classic in a bit of jest. The themes to Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers are there. The other five include two songs from Animal Crossing, a game who’s music is so utterly unmemorable that it allows you to set your own theme to play every hour on the hour. Also included is the Wii Music theme as some kind of final jab to your heart, along with themes from F-Zero and Wii Sports. This is the biggest insult of all. I go back to Smash Bros. Brawl, a fighting game, that had more classic Nintendo tunes in it. Forgive me, Nintendo, for being so enthusiastic with you that I would assume you would include more tracks then this. I guess I made an ass out of u and me.
Unlike most, I was not expecting Nintendo to give us a song list that rivaled Guitar Hero or Rock Band. I just wanted a little effort. Maybe Nintendo should have held the game back and tried to license more music. More then likely they were trying to get the game under a very tight budget. In this they succeeded. I would venture a guess that Wii Music is one of the least expensive games Nintendo has released in decades. But with the graphics already blatantly ugly and the game having little else going for it in terms of goals or objectives, the music really had to be spectacular to be worth while. The only spectacular aspect of it is how bad Nintendo failed.
From a playability standpoint, Wii Music is what I would describe as ‘sometimes functional, mostly broken.’ Don’t walk into it expecting a game anything remotely like Guitar Hero. There really are no notes to hit. You basically waggle the Wii Remote to keep the music going. In some aspects, this works. The faster you wave, the faster the song moves along. But pitch control is way too difficult to pull off.
All the instruments have different waggling methods to activate their sounds, and very few of these work right. Some use the nunchuk, such as the guitar or harp. Some require you to flail the controller like you’re using a drum. Some of them you exclusively just press buttons for, like the flute. Only the button pressing ones have any sort of reliability. The rest are an exercise in frustration. Sometimes you’ll move the controllers and nothing will happen. Sometimes the smallest movement you make while trying to position your hands correctly will result in a note being cast. If you were actually able to invest yourself emotionally in the outcomes, this might be a deal breaker. Don’t worry, you’ll be so bored by this point you won’t care if your dog chews through the power cord.
I was unable to get a party of four people together to try out multiplayer modes, because five minutes in my neighbor and his kids wanted to play something, anything else. I half expected one of them to ask for permission to go shovel snow.
I’m not one of those jaded gamers looking for any excuse possible to hate on a game. And anyone who accused me of being anti-Nintendo has clearly never read my stuff before. I love Nintendo, and I love the games they make. So it’s with a very heavy heart that I do declare that Wii Music is the worst game Nintendo has ever made, and an actual contender for worst video game ever made.
There have been games more broken and games less fun, but it’s the fact that Wii Music was brought to us by Nintendo, under the direction of Shigeru Miyamoto, that feels like a betrayal worthy of Sammy Gravano. I trusted Nintendo to impress me and they failed in every aspect. Although it could be said that truly awful games like E.T. for the Atari 2600 were made with good intentions, I’m not sure that one could say the same thing about Wii Music.
The biggest insult I can say about any game is that it’s unambitious. In the case of Wii Music, it might be the least ambitious title Nintendo has ever made. No effort was made to make the game nice to look at. No effort was made to give us a decent song list. No effort was made to make the game fun to play. It’s been said that Miyamoto’s talent is so great that his games are effortless. I guess that’s proven wrong here. Wii Music is what a game with no effort looks like. And the results are not pretty.
A few years ago, Nintendo quietly released Electroplankton for the DS in North America in limited quantities. At it’s core, it’s exactly the same game as Wii Music, but done right. It’s not a real game either, but rather a toy. Perhaps a better description would have been an ‘interactive musical instrument.’ There were no songs preloaded and no objectives. It featured washed out MIDI sound and very simplified graphics. And it was fun. Maybe because without having the songs present it became more about you conducting the music. Having actual songs, public domain or otherwise, fences you into doing what the game wants you to do instead of giving you the freedom to create your own melodies.
I’m not sure how Wii Music made it out of Nintendo’s quality control department. Someone surely noticed the game was not finished, bowling shoe ugly, sounded prehistoric, and was just plain not at all fun. Part of me thinks that Nintendo really didn’t want to release it but trapped themselves into doing so by featuring the man himself, Mr. Miyamoto, flailing his arms like a madman while playing Wii Music to open E-3. They would have never heard the end to questions about ‘where’s that game they showed off x amount of years ago’ and decided to preemptively shut people up.
I kid, of course. Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing with Wii Music. That it would sell well no matter how bad it was. In fact, despite selling many less units then projected, it’s still passed 500,000 copies in North America at $50 a pop and has almost certainly turned a very large profit. But at what cost?
Wii Music has reduced Nintendo, once the leaders in innovation, to that of push-ware companies like EA, throwing stuff out onto the market with little regard for whether the game is any good because they know the Nintendo brand name will sell. Pushing the envelope got Nintendo the leadership in the seventh generation of game consoles, so I question why they’ve chosen now to stop. Sony and Microsoft are not stupid, and they will fight back in the eighth generation. Nintendo will not be able to release stuff like this and hold onto the console lead. But as they close out 2008 with nothing left on the table and barely any blockbusters scheduled for the first half of 2009, you have to wonder if they simply decided that after Super Smash Bros Brawl released last March that they would take an extended vacation.
The fanboy in me says “Shut up, you know Kid Icarus is on the way.”
Ah yes… all is forgiven.
Originally a Wii Music Review that became… something else.
by Charlie Reneke
We're currently in the middle of Nintendo's remarkable run with the Wii. Hardly anyone would have guessed that a machine so different from the standard model of a game system would become the top console of it’s generation.
And yet it has.
Despite being highly underpowered to the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, the Wii has captured the imaginations of the gaming public in a much bigger way then even the Playstation 2 did. Nintendo promised it would be a system that would transcend demographics, which drew laughter. No game system will ever appeal to children and your average senior citizen.
And yet it has.
True story: I took my Wii to my uncle’s house for our family’s big Forth of July celebration. I took with me Wii Sports and Boom Blox. I turned bowling on it, and soon the twenty or so people there at the party were trying to figure out an appropriate method to decide when everyone got a turn. This is not in my family’s nature, mind you. We can barely make it seven turns into a game of Monopoly before someone gets mad and throws the board off the table. Wii was able to bring my family together.
My grandmother is 84-years-old. She had never played a video game in her life. My aunt dragged her, practically kicking and screaming, to the television so she could try a couple swings with Wii Sports Bowling.
Two hours later, she finally gave the controller back.
The next day, I got an angry call from her saying how her arm was sore and to never even mention that cursed game ever again in her presence.
Two days later, she called up and asked me to bring it back.
She owns her own Wii now.
Nintendo promised the moon with the Nintendo Wii, and they delivered it along with other parts of the heavens. They’ve changed video games forever. I will safely say that motion controls will never go away. Within two more console generations, it will replace buttons as the dominating game interface on all consoles. The genie is out of the bottle. Nintendo’s innovation will be the standard, like the D-Pad and Analog sticks before it.
But while Nintendo has once again changed the standard on controls for game consoles (whether some people like it or not), true innovation on the Wii is practically non-existent. The games themselves are mostly the same they always were. The most groundbreaking games for the Wii have not been made by Nintendo themselves. I can think of only a handful that are a truly new experiences that can be found on the console.
Boom Blox is one. It was conceived by Steven Spielberg and produced by Electronic Arts. It’s a game so firmly based on it’s control scheme that it could not have been accomplished before the Wii.
Nintendo’s offerings have mostly been retreads of old ground with new interfaces.
That’s fine with me. Part of the reason I’ve been loyal to Nintendo all these years is that I happen to like the style of games Nintendo makes. The Nintendo fan base is loyal. Trust me, after naming the worst ten games they ever made, I found out all about that.
Of the many things I truly appreciate about Nintendo, their willingness to experiment with new game types has always been most important to me. During the Gamecube/Gameboy Advance era, they gave us some pretty wacky game ideas. Take a read of these descriptions.
-A platform game where you use bongo drums to string together acrobatic combos leading to boss fights that play out like boxing matches.
-A real time war simulator set in Feudal Japan where the battlefield is a giant pinball table and you must defeat the opposing army using a giant stone ball while using a microphone to call your troops out of harm’s way.
-A minigame collection in which you have between one and four seconds to successfully complete a game before things get even faster and more games are thrown at you.
These are just of the wacky ideas that Nintendo came up with. They didn’t always sell great, but at least the effort was there. And I’m also not claiming that Nintendo is the only company that can bring the new ideas to the table. Sega did so with awesome results during the Dreamcast era, and Sony gave us stuff way off the beaten path like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two of my top three games of the last generation. But with Nintendo, making those bizarre ideas into fun and functional games worked more often with them then with any other company.
I guess that’s why I’m so disappointed in Nintendo’s output since the Wii came along. I want stuff that I’ve never seen before. With such a daring console, I expected it. And my expectations have not been met. Thus far Nintendo has only published one game that is kind of different from what we’re used to, the highly underrated Endless Ocean.
Everything else has been new versions of old games. Even Wii Fit is little more then a more technologically advanced version of the same old games we played on the Power Pad back in the NES era.
This brings me to the reason I’m here today. Wii Music. Nintendo’s latest attempt to go off the beaten path. It’s a reminder that the beaten path is there for a reason. Sometimes if you go off the path you end up lost in the wilderness and eaten by bears.
For you fanboys, out there, this will be the part where things get nasty. If you can’t deal with that, stay away.
Nintendo has attempted to market Wii Music not as a game, but as a toy. This alone has some gamers furious. I personally don’t care about that aspect. Fun is fun. As long as the product is entertaining, I don’t care what you call it.
Wii Music is not entertaining.
I tried desperately to find a single redeeming aspect of it. I spent way more time with it then I wanted to as if I was on a quest to find something, anything, entertaining about it. I failed.
Let’s start off with the graphics. I don’t really care about graphics, but most do and so I figure I’ll get it out the way. Wii Music is horrible looking in the same way Wii Sports, Wii Play, or Wii Fit is. The Wii was not a machine designed to wow you visually, and Nintendo is desperate to convince gamers that ugly is good. I don’t understand this myself. It’s not like the machine is incapable of doing much better then this. I guess the feeling is Nintendo sucked people in with Wii Sports and thus games designed purely for the casual audience have to look every bit as bland and lifeless as it does. I can almost understand it, like Nintendo is in fear of intimidating all those non-gamers they created the machine for in the first place.
But, according to Nintendo and depending on what mood they‘re in, Wii Music was not designed for everyone. It was designed for children. In this case I can’t see why having better graphics would possibly hurt. Do they consider five-years-olds so unsophisticated they could not handle having a game with a little stylized flare to it?
I tested this theory out by taking Wii Music to a friend’s house so that his young children, ages seven and five, could monkey around with it. I wanted to see how the target audience would respond.
The seven-year-old told me, in these exact words, that the game “looked like a doctor’s office.”
Have you ever known a doctor’s office to be something visually appealing? Of course not. They’re sterile, bland, and lifeless. Wii Music is all of that and more.
I had a tough time convincing the five-year-old that playing Wii Music was important to me. He kept wanting to play a, his words, “better game.” So much for the neighbors.
The ultra-stripped down visuals that I hypothesized were done to make the game less intimidating actually turn people off. After all, nobody wants to be stuck in a doctor’s office.
Moving on to the actual music in Wii Music. If the graphics were a turn off, the music itself is a slap in the face. The most criminal offense is that most of it is done in MIDI format. Someone really needs to remind Nintendo that this is 2008 and that games have actual soundtracks these days. In fact, Super Smash Bros. Brawl featured over 100 songs, with the only ones in MIDI being exact ports of classic NES tunes. It just comes across as incredibly cheap.
There are sixty-six instruments to choose from in Wii Music. They range from serious stuff (pianos, violins, harps) to whacky stuff (a barking dog, a clapping hand, and a flute shaped like an NES controller that plays mono-synth NES chirps). If the tunes weren’t almost all in MIDI, this would be something exciting. Sadly, it’s scientifically proven impossible to enjoy Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in 2008 when the sound is coming from what sounds like a dusty old Super Nintendo with one of the AV cords fried.
There are fifty-two songs in Wii Music. Most of them are public domain. Nine of them classical symphonies, including Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Once again, this was designed for children. Twenty-three tunes are ‘traditional’ songs, usually folk music. The US song selection is represented by Yankee Doodle, a song that the British used to make fun of Americans during the revolutionary war (roughly translated, Yankee Doodle is a way of saying Americans are ‘homosexual hillbillies’). It also includes stuff like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Turkey in the Straw, La Bamba (the Mexican Folk version), and Happy Birthday to You, which is one of the few licensed songs Nintendo actually has on here.
Thirteen Songs make up the ‘popular’ selection of tracks, and this section for me is the biggest puzzle. I will stress once again that Nintendo designed Wii Music for young children. In that spirit I ask, what the hell kind of song selection is this? Among the thirteen licensed tracks of the popular section include the theme song to Chariots of Fire, a movie that won best picture the year I was born. I’m 27, that movie is out of MY demographic, let alone a child in this day and age.
Other songs include what I think is a cover to “Please Mr. Postman” and Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” Such inclusions make me wonder if every breath Nintendo took while making this game was filled with nitrous oxide. How else can you explain including “I’ve Never Been to Me” in children’s game besides some kind of bizarre, laughing gas induced joke that makes sense only to the developers?
Nintendo was also kind enough to include seven themes to ‘classic’ Nintendo games. I say the word classic in a bit of jest. The themes to Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers are there. The other five include two songs from Animal Crossing, a game who’s music is so utterly unmemorable that it allows you to set your own theme to play every hour on the hour. Also included is the Wii Music theme as some kind of final jab to your heart, along with themes from F-Zero and Wii Sports. This is the biggest insult of all. I go back to Smash Bros. Brawl, a fighting game, that had more classic Nintendo tunes in it. Forgive me, Nintendo, for being so enthusiastic with you that I would assume you would include more tracks then this. I guess I made an ass out of u and me.
Unlike most, I was not expecting Nintendo to give us a song list that rivaled Guitar Hero or Rock Band. I just wanted a little effort. Maybe Nintendo should have held the game back and tried to license more music. More then likely they were trying to get the game under a very tight budget. In this they succeeded. I would venture a guess that Wii Music is one of the least expensive games Nintendo has released in decades. But with the graphics already blatantly ugly and the game having little else going for it in terms of goals or objectives, the music really had to be spectacular to be worth while. The only spectacular aspect of it is how bad Nintendo failed.
From a playability standpoint, Wii Music is what I would describe as ‘sometimes functional, mostly broken.’ Don’t walk into it expecting a game anything remotely like Guitar Hero. There really are no notes to hit. You basically waggle the Wii Remote to keep the music going. In some aspects, this works. The faster you wave, the faster the song moves along. But pitch control is way too difficult to pull off.
All the instruments have different waggling methods to activate their sounds, and very few of these work right. Some use the nunchuk, such as the guitar or harp. Some require you to flail the controller like you’re using a drum. Some of them you exclusively just press buttons for, like the flute. Only the button pressing ones have any sort of reliability. The rest are an exercise in frustration. Sometimes you’ll move the controllers and nothing will happen. Sometimes the smallest movement you make while trying to position your hands correctly will result in a note being cast. If you were actually able to invest yourself emotionally in the outcomes, this might be a deal breaker. Don’t worry, you’ll be so bored by this point you won’t care if your dog chews through the power cord.
I was unable to get a party of four people together to try out multiplayer modes, because five minutes in my neighbor and his kids wanted to play something, anything else. I half expected one of them to ask for permission to go shovel snow.
I’m not one of those jaded gamers looking for any excuse possible to hate on a game. And anyone who accused me of being anti-Nintendo has clearly never read my stuff before. I love Nintendo, and I love the games they make. So it’s with a very heavy heart that I do declare that Wii Music is the worst game Nintendo has ever made, and an actual contender for worst video game ever made.
There have been games more broken and games less fun, but it’s the fact that Wii Music was brought to us by Nintendo, under the direction of Shigeru Miyamoto, that feels like a betrayal worthy of Sammy Gravano. I trusted Nintendo to impress me and they failed in every aspect. Although it could be said that truly awful games like E.T. for the Atari 2600 were made with good intentions, I’m not sure that one could say the same thing about Wii Music.
The biggest insult I can say about any game is that it’s unambitious. In the case of Wii Music, it might be the least ambitious title Nintendo has ever made. No effort was made to make the game nice to look at. No effort was made to give us a decent song list. No effort was made to make the game fun to play. It’s been said that Miyamoto’s talent is so great that his games are effortless. I guess that’s proven wrong here. Wii Music is what a game with no effort looks like. And the results are not pretty.
A few years ago, Nintendo quietly released Electroplankton for the DS in North America in limited quantities. At it’s core, it’s exactly the same game as Wii Music, but done right. It’s not a real game either, but rather a toy. Perhaps a better description would have been an ‘interactive musical instrument.’ There were no songs preloaded and no objectives. It featured washed out MIDI sound and very simplified graphics. And it was fun. Maybe because without having the songs present it became more about you conducting the music. Having actual songs, public domain or otherwise, fences you into doing what the game wants you to do instead of giving you the freedom to create your own melodies.
I’m not sure how Wii Music made it out of Nintendo’s quality control department. Someone surely noticed the game was not finished, bowling shoe ugly, sounded prehistoric, and was just plain not at all fun. Part of me thinks that Nintendo really didn’t want to release it but trapped themselves into doing so by featuring the man himself, Mr. Miyamoto, flailing his arms like a madman while playing Wii Music to open E-3. They would have never heard the end to questions about ‘where’s that game they showed off x amount of years ago’ and decided to preemptively shut people up.
I kid, of course. Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing with Wii Music. That it would sell well no matter how bad it was. In fact, despite selling many less units then projected, it’s still passed 500,000 copies in North America at $50 a pop and has almost certainly turned a very large profit. But at what cost?
Wii Music has reduced Nintendo, once the leaders in innovation, to that of push-ware companies like EA, throwing stuff out onto the market with little regard for whether the game is any good because they know the Nintendo brand name will sell. Pushing the envelope got Nintendo the leadership in the seventh generation of game consoles, so I question why they’ve chosen now to stop. Sony and Microsoft are not stupid, and they will fight back in the eighth generation. Nintendo will not be able to release stuff like this and hold onto the console lead. But as they close out 2008 with nothing left on the table and barely any blockbusters scheduled for the first half of 2009, you have to wonder if they simply decided that after Super Smash Bros Brawl released last March that they would take an extended vacation.
The fanboy in me says “Shut up, you know Kid Icarus is on the way.”
Ah yes… all is forgiven.
Last edited by a moderator:
up!
