Nintendo is hung up on the idea of making Wii Music look like a concert hall, when it's more appealing as a remix station.

Unsurprisingly, the bad impressions started with Ravi Drums. In an E3 press conference filled with poor decisions and half-baked strategizing, debuting a new music title with the help of an over-gelled, seemingly uncoordinated player was one of the worst moves of the day. Throughout E3 2008, the profile of Wii Music never improved. Shigeru Miyamoto led a little Vaudeville mime and dance onstage, and in private demos Nintendo never managed to make the game look like a viable alternative to Rock Band and Guitar Hero, much less a credible competitor.

(Did you realize Ravi is in the second Matrix movie, too? He kicks off the ridiculous rave in Zion.)

Crazier concert hall options would add some distraction; the best is a "Rear Window"-like city setup.

Move the timeline forward five months. Like a lot of people, I barely thought about Wii Music during most of that period unless a joke needed a punch line. Having written it off in July (even nominating it as one of the show's most disappointing titles), Wii Music was in the same gutter with all the other games that don't warrant much of a mention.

Nintendo's Media Summit last week started to change my mind. Through a series of demos, I found that the game's ability to remix or even remake songs is deeper than had been previously reported. I experienced how the musical gameplay can follow a song directly, or allow players to do more or less exactly what they want within the basic rhythmic framework. And I saw that, with a little effort, even that framework can be massively altered by determined players.

The drum trainer provides welcome assistance with learning the full kit software.

There's also the fact that the virtual drum set, which sadly but perhaps inescapably requires the Wii Balance Board, is actually responsive and fun. More important, it is flexible in ways that the Rock Band drums aren't, and appears to be easier to work into songs than the drums in Guitar Hero: World Tour's studio mode. And by recording drum parts slowly, then speeding up the tempo (which doesn't affect pitch at all), novices can record speed metal-worthy rhythms.

Granted, there are loads of controls to memorize to make the drums really work: buttons to activate cymbal hits; analog stick rolls to make tom-tom hits register, instead of snare and hi-hat. But with a few minutes' practice, I could play many basic patterns except for traditional rolls across the toms. With a practiced player on the "sticks" (the gent demoing at the Summit was excellent, and a good teacher), there's no question that the Wii Music kit is a neat piece of software.

The clapping animal suit is one of a few whacked instrument options; expect some heat over the "rapper" instrument. It's like "Wild Style" lite.

And yet I can't shake my old prejudice against the game. Part of the problem is the song list, and I expect that'll be an issue for many other gamers as well. The playlist is like your old Aunt Edna's greatest hits, with some game music thrown in. It might well have graced a Nintendo dance game several years ago, before Harmonix changed the landscape. Pop songs and a bunch of featherweight standards make up the bulk of 50 included tracks.

That's not much to hang a game on, and it's not the sort of playlist you drop in the laps of friends who need to be pried away from Guitar Hero. People might be ripping Metallica's new disc from Activision's downloadable content to replace their retail copy, but they're not going to jones to get much of the Wii Music lineup on their iPod.

Want an all-a capella lineup, or an all-drum combo? Easy enough.

But with up to six players -- each of which is allowed to choose between 60 instruments -- those tracks can be wholly manipulated. Choose to play a tango version of "Material Girl" with ukulele and accordion, record the performed track, then add different drums and gradually re-record other instruments (with bizarre options like the Beatboxer and Kung-Fu artists) to make the track as original as possible.

The issue of miming along to the music also remains. Would I cringe if photos of me playing Rock Band instruments ended up on the Internet? Never. (Good thing. Happens all the time.) But a public snapshot of me playing a Wii remote like my very own Ocarina of Time? Ouch. Why is that the case? Shouldn't a fake plastic guitar be just as embarrassing, if not more so, than an air guitar augmented by remote?

There will be six players on-screen no matter how many people you have, but you can record performances and overdub the CPU players later.

Shaking the perception of childishness that pervades the image of Wii Music is going to be tough, and air instruments aren't going to make it easier. In the long run, what could tip the scales in Nintendo's favor is that this is more a platform than a game. As inflated a claim as that may seem, this is a title that offers ways to interact with and manipulate music seen in no other game. Is that enough to win the battle against gut-level resistance? Talk to me in a couple of weeks.

This feature was based on a series of hands-on demos at Nintendo's Media Summit 2008. The game will be released in Japan on Oct. 16, and on Oct. 20 in North America.