Wii Music (Wii)

Nintendo hits a sour note with its musical extravaganza.
10/20/2008 4:09 PM | 4 Comments | Page 2 of 4

The most glaring issue with the game is the synchronization between the Wii controller, the television and what you hear. The metronome clicking away on your controller doesn't happen to match up with the sounds coming out of the speakers or match the bopping "Be Bop" notes on the screen. Sure, it's close. But to anyone who has listened to more than a couple of songs, or managed to learn to play "Louie Louie" on the guitar, or tried to assassinate a Third World dictator from 500 yards with a sniper rifle can tell you, close isn't good enough.

Next up is the music itself. The fact that the songs range from "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" to "Every Breath You Take" by the Police doesn't bode well for what's going to happen. By the time you hit "Turkey in the Straw" and "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," you can only chuckle at what you hope to be a dark, dark joke. You could give Nintendo props for pushing the notion of eclectic to the extreme. Or you could call this what it is, a peculiar musical vomit made of barely recognizable parts of the musical world all chopped up and splattered out in an unrecognizable mess.

This isn't musical irony, it's just a weird sort of being out of touch.

It gets worse. Whatever slight smile of amusement that creeps across your face when you hear the Muzak version of "Material Girl" withers into a grimace after hearing it loop over and over and over and over and over and over and over while you try to master a tricky pattern on the drum kit. It's like being trapped in a Twilight Zone mall, and you just hope some zombie will eat your brain so you can get the Muzak out of your head.

Which isn't fair to Muzak, since comparing Wii Music to Muzak is like putting Milli Vanilli on the same bill as the circa-1973 Zeppelin. Wii Music is the devil's own version of elevator music hell.

Even the drum trainer, the last hope for salvaging this mess, turns out to be nothing more than a shrug-of-the-shoulders reason to pull the Wii Balance Board out from under the couch. In principle, this sounds like fun -- sit in a chair with your feet on the board and your hands in the air, with the Wii remote and Nunchuk poised like drumsticks. Throbbing away with your feet and wailing with your hands in the air, you were going to pound out your own "Moby Dick," John Bonham smiling on you from rock heaven. Instead, you feel more like you are having an epileptic fit with a hardboiled egg in one hard and a curling iron in the other, frantically stabbing at buttons on the controllers to get your invisible on-screen hands to move across the drum kit. It just doesn't work. And it certainly isn't any fun. Featuring the same laggy feedback as previously mentioned, this is like playing drums on Dramamine underwater, in a time warp.

Swing your hand now, hear the sound later.

If there is one thing in the world that makes playing the drums fun, it is the feeling of hitting something and hearing it respond -- just ask Ultimate Fighters and gamers who love Rock Band.