Wii Music Hands-on Preview

It’s rare that a videogame leaves me completely speechless. But Wii Music, Nintendo’s latest gaming assault on non-gamers, has done exactly that.

I’m standing in front of a widescreen television in a down town LA hotel playing a virtual tambourine with a Wii Remote and a Nunchuck. The song? Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

An in-game metronome helps me with my rhythm – a rhythm a post-lobotomy chipmunk would turn its nose up at. I hold the Nunchuck up with my left hand and move the Wii Remote towards it with my right… now…. now… now… now. This, my Nintendo-loving ‘hardcore’ friends, is the end.

I can mix things up by adding beats where they’re not marked in-game. I can play two beats instead of one, or off beats, or anything I like. This, you might wonder, would suggest players will be able to break the game by jamming complete nonsense to songs included on the disc. Not so. There is no performance grade at the end. There is no way of failing a song. There is nothing slapping you on the wrist for being completely crap. The game works out the notes you play and on what instrument and fits them in with the song according to your play style automatically. So you can go nuts on the Wii Remote while playing the trumpet, and the game will interpret it and make it fit. Want to jazz up Mario’s famous music? Knock yourself out. Wii Music isn’t about skill. It’s about having fun or, as Nintendo puts it, “the joy of playing”.

This brief hands-on probably isn’t the best way of showing me what Wii Music’s got. I should be playing it with three other human beings in Jam mode, trying to add flair to the mix, trying to stand out while not causing an awful racket. Playing it on my own, however, much like many of Nintendo’s casual oriented games, is a complete bore. An extremely easy, laborious bore.

I finish my Twinkle Twinkle Little Star percussion role. Matt Wilson, a demonstrator from Nintendo of America tells me I can play four of the six parts of a song and then combine them, creating a replayable video of my performances. I can even share those with my Wii Music-owning friends, who can then listen and play over them, messing with the mix. And send them back.

A virtual drum kit appears on screen. I spy a Wii Balance Board – surely to be used as a bass pedal and trap set. The Nunchuck and the Wii Remote are to be used as drumsticks. Matt runs through the controls – each drum and cymbal can only be hit by pressing the corresponding button and then moving the Nunchuck and Wii Remote forward.

What this means is Wii Music’s drums do not work like we’d like them to. You can’t move a virtual drumstick around a 3D space as if it were mimicking your actions. The Wii doesn’t work like this. You have to tell it what you want to hit by pressing a button and then move the Wii Remote – the console picking up the speed of movement only. The new Wii Motion Plus Technology, announced the day before Nintendo’s E3 2008 press conference, would allow this. As a result what Nintendo has here is perhaps the hardest mini-game the Wii has ever seen in among some of the easiest gaming we’ve ever experienced. Perhaps this is why the drum kit has been sectioned off on its own in a standalone mode.

And so I’m left speechless. Up to this point my feeling on the whole ‘Nintendo is ignoring us’ furore has been one of admiration rather than genuine concern. After all, we know the Japanese company is working on new Zelda games and new Mario games. Nintendo’s conference at E3 was disappointing, yes, but not entirely soul destroying. Now, having actually played Wii Music, I’m speechless, not through disappointment. It’s more through shock.

Clearly we haven’t seen everything Wii Music has to offer. There will be over 60 instruments to play in the final game. And it will, of course, have multiplayer components, four players on the same console in fact. And Twinkle Twinkle Little Star won’t be the only heart-pumping ditty to play along with. Confirmed so far are the Super Mario Bros Theme, demonstrated during Nintendo’s conference (shudder) and, wait for it, Yankee Doodle.

Many questioned Nintendo’s judgement when it first announced the Wii. Many said it would fail, that its complete rejection of the graphical arms race was commercial suicide. Indeed now many say it’s still only a fad, despite its phenomenal success. So we’ll keep the faith. We can’t see Wii Music appealing to trendy twenty-something casuals. And we can’t see it appealing to Nintendo’s hardcore, Super Smash Bros. Brawl-loving fans either. But, somehow, we can see it selling truckloads when it’s released. And that’s because some fathers and mothers do have very young children. Very young children indeed. And post-lobotomy chipmunks as pets.

Wii Music is due out exclusively for the Nintendo Wii this Christmas.