Everything you need to know about Wii Music you can figure out within 30 seconds of getting four people together for an in-game jam session.

Don't let the beautiful music fool you, we are just making one hell of a racket.

Amidst a clanging clash of guitar, bass drums, cat meows, dog barks and glockenspiel, there's a sense of something interesting and innovative going on. But damned if you can figure out what it is through all the noise.


I hate Wii Music because I love Nintendo and I want to love Wii Music.


If you took the classic turning point from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" and played it in reverse, you'd get my general feeling of playing Wii Music -- a heart shrinking 10 sizes as I played the game in time to some screwed-up, backward, masked Dr. Seuss music.


This was supposed to be the music game for the rest of us. This was supposed to be the game that gene-spliced the gentle soul of Nintendo fun with music appreciation. This was supposed to be the game that sailed up the charts past Rock Band and Guitar Hero with a bullet. This was supposed to be an AAA Nintendo blockbuster.


Instead we get something like the Kiss solo albums -- watered-down rip-offs, derivative, pointless and dumb.

OK, the mini-games are the one thing that is pretty cool.

The basic idea behind Wii Music, like most of what Nintendo cooks up, is intriguing. Waggling Wii remotes around in the air like guitars and drumsticks, cow bells and clarinets, anyone can make music. By pretending to play some 60 different instruments, including such unlikely orchestral voices as the galactic drum kit and dude in a dog costume, Wii Music promised to turn your expressive joy and boundless musical mimicry into dulcet music. We'd seen the beaming Shigeru Miyamoto at E3 in tux and tails conducting an orchestra of Miis, and we thought we could do it, too.


Unfortunately, like those "learn to draw in 30 days" ads, or promises of losing weight while you eat all you want, only the most gullible or desperate are drawn in. You'd have to be a rube to fall for that snake oil. So, what the hell, Shigeru? Why did you play with our blind faith that Nintendo could hammer our tin ears into silver strings of song? Even worse, it wasn't a bait and switch. Nintendo's not so craven as to steal dollars from suckers who hope they'll be the next American Idol after a few weeks with the latest Nintendo trainer game. Nope -- I sincerely think that this time, Nintendo was so high with whatever egomaniacal drugs success has encouraged it to cut into its usual mix of pixie dust that it actually thought this game was the next Wii Sports, the next Brain Age, the next DS, the next big "F-U" to the world of games that keeps telling the Nintendo mothership in Kyoto that it is out of touch with gamers.


And this time it should have listened to the naysayers.


What's wrong with Wii Music is basically a design cancer that runs through the entire body of the project. Every good idea, every bit of genius, is riddled with a fun rot that makes even the best parts feel queasy.


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.

Do I look foolish? I feel like a dolt.

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.

Since you can record videos of each musical performance, you can preserve the sonic horror and share it with your friends.

Sure, anyone who got the Wii as a summer birthday present or picked one up at Costco in hopes that they might be able to resell it for a profit on eBay this Christmas might wonder what all the complaining is about. They might find a Muppet-like charm in the tutorial antics of Sebastian Tute (yes, to add preschool insult to injury, Nintendo actually named the characters in this game after farting sounds). It's within the realm of possibility that someone might marvel at the novelty of music game that actually could teach you a thing about pitch or tempo. On some off chance, someone might enjoy the ability to save musical performances as videos that you can slip into a virtual case of your own design and share with -- well, let's be honest, who really cares about your pre-packed Wii Music performance? But, hey! You can do it, and that must mean something.


To make any sense out of this, you only have to look back to FantaVision. Long forgotten, and for good reason, this game was a PlayStation 2 launch title that combined pattern matching with fireworks. Pretty dull, but pretty. A tech demo whored up for the public, and everyone was happy to treat it as such. FantaVision was a novelty as much as Wii Music was when the Wii launched. At E3 in 2006, we all ooh'ed and aah'ed at the idea of a game in which waving a Wii controller around would conduct an orchestra. At the time, Miyamoto's dramatic gesticulation in front of the E3 crowd had "demo" written all over it, and it was cool, spectacular -- like fireworks. Because demos are supposed to promise the moon, it was a flawless performance. And if Wii Music had launched early, we would have forgiven its many flaws as the result of dreaming too big, of optimism inflated to the degree that it popped the bubble of possibility. If Wii Music would have launched anywhere near the release of the Wii, we would have happily FantaVisioned out on its lameness.

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Welcome to the frustration machine, where you will learn to drum
without a sense of rhythm.

Instead, Nintendo had to wait. And like that perfect first date where nothing matters, not the stain on his shirt or her annoying laugh, the threat of venereal disease or lifetime of domestic abuse, where you can get away on promise and not expect anyone to think things through, Nintendo could have looked into our eyes and made Music something special. Rather, in that rare twilight of a relationship where everything is perfect, the first days when impressions are made, Nintendo chose not to release its half-baked music talent. No, instead of accepting Wii Music as a neat idea that wouldn't carry a full game, the big N really thought it had bottled magic and held it out 'til after the honeymoon. And, boy, did that look ugly in the morning.


I know, some people will say that this game was not meant to appeal to the hardcore and that kids will enjoy the hell out of it. To which I say this: I am not a hardcore gamer, it wasn't fun, and I tried it out on a quartet of kids. My experience was that what you can expect with kids is: eight minutes of curious enjoyment, followed by eight minutes of bitter argument over who gets to play what instrument, followed by three minutes of godawful noise, followed by a mutual agreement to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl.


Kids aren't stupid.


This is all hard to say, coming from a guy who has basically liked everything Nintendo has done since it started making videogames. I'm one of those people who still feels guilty for thinking that the name "Wii" was a stupid idea. I think I let Nintendo down on that one, and still hope it forgives me.


I won't admit it most of the time, but I am a Nintendo fanboy. From Super Mario 64 to WarioWare to Animal Crossing, Nintendo has hit the game of the year for me more times than any other publisher. I still think "Wii Bowling" is the most perfect game ever created. So when it comes to taking the rabid Wii Music out behind the shed to put it out of its misery, I have to shed a tear, and I shiver a little as I look into its eyes. But I steel myself as I pull the trigger. I just can't let this dog bite anyone else.


This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.


Get the first hour in Kyle Orland's Games for Lunch: Wii Music.