We've been talking about Wii Music lately, and the impression I get is that the audience has a harder time articulating why they don't like it than perhaps we'd all prefer.
The three most common criticisms I'm reading in the comments thread of the first post are these: Wii Music is not competitive compared to Guitar Hero and Rock Band. It's not satisfying to play air instruments as opposed to lifelike peripherals. Finally, it's too childish.
So is it true that all of you only enjoy video games that score you and that have success or failure conditions? Are we saying that this is what we need to have fun? There are plenty of games that depend mechanically on a lack of rules, on experimentation and exploration, so why do they get a pass while Wii Music doesn't?
Second, regarding the peripherals, are we saying that we want simulation and not suggestion? We can play a first-person shooter on PC that uses a mouse instead of a light gun, but we can't play a music game that uses motion suggestion instead of plastic peripherals?
Third, it's childish. Yeah, it is. So is pretty much everything we've ever loved on a Nintendo console. Kirby? Mario? Yoshi? Pokemon? Mario Kart? Those aren't equally cutesy and diminutive?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending Wii Music. I'm completely not interested in it either -- but I can't really articulate a reason that feels truthful, that satisfies me. I get the impression a lot of you are in the same boat. I wanna figure it out, yanno? Oh, so please vote in the poll on the right.
I'm also not saying Iwata is necessarily correct in suggesting that we just don't get it -- or more precisely, that Nintendo's failed to adequately communicate it to us. But the response to Wii Music was more than simple disinterest, at least from the portion of the audience for which I write. It was like we were unsettled by it, like we were trying to will it out of existence.
Did we see Wii Music as a betrayal, the most stark example yet that Nintendo had ceased to be a brand we could relate to?
31 comments:
Honestly, when I played it at the Nintendo World store, next to a handler, it was still not fun. I want to make a joyful noise, not just noise. I think I've got a good sense of rhythm - I played the violin for eleven years - but I could not, for the life of me, shake the Wiimote in time to anything. It was, frankly, incredibly frustrating.
And I note that there is no "failure" condition other than the dissonance in my ears.
I'm convinced that the difficulty of Wii Music comes from the input devices - if I were able to press buttons instead of waggle to the beat, I'm sure that I would have had a much easier time in making music. As any musician can tell you, you need to feel the instrument. The fact that there's no tactile response to swinging a Wiimote in the air is what makes it so difficult. It's really no different than a theremin - you can master it, sure, but it's incredibly difficult to play.
A big drawback for me is the miditunes your forced to listen to while waggling your controller.
I haven't played wii music, but it strikes me as one thing: Second Rate.
This is mainly from a graphics perspective. It looks exactly like Wii Sports, which we all know isn't a 50 dollar title.
When I see screenshots of Wii music I think of two things: 1. This is a "me-too" game, thrown together to grab a piece of the pie, like "Petz" riding on the coattails of "Nintendogs." 2. This is probably a game for beginners, just like wii sports, some interesting range, not at all enough depth.
Now these two things don't have to be true at all. But as a consumer, when I see this game, that is what is communicated to me. Now if this game was shown to me as a bigger and better electroplankton2, with crazy interesting depth and the ability to do more and different things than rock band i would be seriously interested.
As it stands now I have rockband and it is the definitive music simulation game, I don't need a toned version for kids. What I want is a complex, different, music creation game, and Wii Music fails to adequately communicate that tome
If we're talking about The Hardcore Audience, I believe the stark example would rather be Wii Fit, a game very far removed from any escapism at all. But unlike Wii Music, Wii Fit serves a purpose. It is - no matter what you think about the game - a realised concept. The problem with Wii Music is that no one knows what it's for or what its actual purpose is. Like the Eurogamer review noted, it's too complicated to just pick up and play and too shallow to engage in. I doubt that people would have anything against it if it just flaunted simplicity and stupidity (which would go well with the Miis, Nintendos casual style and previous games with Wii in the title). But it tries to do so much more than that and gets lost in the process. I don't think "we" hate it really though, it's just mild confusion since Nintendo this time has failed to sell and communicate a coherent idea.
The first problem with Wii music was after E3 Wii Music became a symbol of Nintendo abandoning the core gamers.
The Midi files is another problem but I read a games developer say that the game was only possible with Midi files because of how the game works by manipulating the music.
A major problem is unlike Wii Sports, Play and Fit it is not simple to pick up and play but is in fact really difficult with a lot of depth combined with very colourful kiddy graphics that could be off putting for core and casual gamers.
I had typed up a response to the previous blog entry, but trashed it when my thoughts lacked direction. Seems that most people were all over the place too.
Anyway, I don't think a score is what's important to Rock band/Guitar Hero so much as they engage and challenge you to whatever degree you set them to. It's one of the reasons you don't get bored because it is forcing you to pay attention and succeed or fail as a band. You know, you actually have to play.
But Rock Band is just as fun with people on no fail mode. Why? Cause the music is great and people like it. The song selection in Wii Music is terrible. Who the hell comes over to your house and goes "Oh, you've got Wii Music, I've Tree on the trumpet!"
Sure, people may be interested in playing the Mario theme, but most lay people in the world probably don't know the theme to Animal Crossing or even Zelda. But damned if they don't know Livin on a Prayer or Don't Fear The Reaper (who doesn't want more cowbell?). And those songs are fun to play.
Oh, and yes, the midi files sound atrocious.
the problem with wii music I think is it takes itself too lightly, and the gameplay is somewhat not easily accessible either. Guitar hero and rockband though not really similar to actually playing an instrument except in actions reward players by a simple combo of buttons into songs they like or are aware of. Wii music doesn't motivate for a reward, people know that given an instrument they can make noise and that's not music nor is it rewarding and only the patient and enthusiastic persevere. The other games give the emulate your artist and song reward which in the long run gives more satisfaction atleast IMO
As previous commenters have said, it's the music. For me, I just couldn't be entertained by playing what's little more than a set of jingles and nursery rhymes.
Even if the tracklists of the rock bands and guitar heroes don't entice you, there's a good chance you'll hear a song that you either recognise or like.
If a games built around music, technology aside, you have to make sure the music isn't terrible. It feels like Wii music is just one step too far down the cutesy line. Previously, it was cutsey in the way that adults and children could both appreciate (the Pixar effect), but Wii music is just childish and nothing more.
"Did we see Wii Music as a betrayal, the most stark example yet that Nintendo had ceased to be a brand we could relate to?"
Does one relate to a multinational corporation on such a personal level as to feel betrayed by its product line?
You know, I *liked* Wii Music when I played it - with my kids. These are kids who *can* pass easy songs on Rock Band and Guitar Hero, so it's not like they don't have alternatives; maybe it's that they're more given to the illusion that they're actually conducting the orchestra, or maybe the idea of actually seeing our little Miis, that we made, play in a band was just enough to prompt the giggles and the smiles that allowed for a positive impression of the game, but I thought it was a blast. Heck, I handed the thing to my two-year-old, and she had fun playing some seriously out-of-whack drums.
The only problem that I could see with it, and it's been addressed before, is the fact that so much of it must be unlocked. I found myself forcing my way through some of the challenges simply so that I could play more songs with the kids. Normally, I have no problem with unlockable content, but when you're going to make the game so accessible to a young audience, maybe making more of it accessible right away would have been a good idea.
Personally, I think it's because it misses the point of why we play Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or even something like Singstar. These things are fantasies being realised; you're the rock legend, the frontman, or the pop star. Wii Music just lets you play some unknown music while watching your cartoonish Mii's dance and play to it.
So obviously Wii Music is less about living out your fantasies, and instead much more about actually playing music. The problem with that is that you aren't playing the music, you're just waving your hands around in a movement vaguely reminiscent of how musical instruments are played. There's a reason people spend so much money downloading tracks for Rock Band; there has to be that recognition there or it's just not fun. It's also the reason you're allowed to pick between different songs when you're playing it; you don't want to have to play something by the Killers if you hate the band. When the whole thing is stuff you've never heard before, it's just not the same.
The problem with Wii Music is that it's really HARD to make music that's any good. I played it for several hours with a group of people with mixed gaming backgrounds for review purposes and we never made anything that sounded better than a cacophony of random noises.
Wii Music is actually much much harder than RB or GH. Imagine if Mario Kart looked the exact same way it does, but it was actually tougher to control the car than in Project Gotham Racing. That gives you a good approximation of the Wii Music experience.
There's also the weak music selection and midi soundtrack, but that's all secondary to the fact that it's really tough to do what the game is supposed to let you do. Which means it lacks the defining factor of most Nintendo games.
I'm just not interested. Rhythm games feel overdone, rock band and guitar hero make me wanna throw up. The Wii was fun when I first got it, but since the intial shock response I've gotten kinda bored with it. I don't think the Wii has the capability for great games like the SNES had. Sometimes it feels like all Nintendo wants to do is get 80 year old people to play their games. Do you think a great game like Earthbound would be able to come out on the Wii? Probably not. I mean, No More Heroes is great, but as for RPGs? Anyway, back to Wii music, like I said, it holds no interest with me.
Wii Music's lack of popularity is a tricky one to pin down, but I think there's a few reasons. But the biggest one is that they simply weren't first.
All the real breakout oddity hits Nintendo have had recently haven't had any peers. You couldn't really say Brain Training or Wii Fit weren't as good as X because there was no X, there literally was no comparison. Not so Wii music, Rock Band and Guitar Hero are so popular even the casual market is familiar with them.
All the criticisms we've heard, like lack of competitiveness or precision, only exist because someone else made a competitive or precise game first. Had Guitar Hero never existed, no-one would have criticised this, because we would not necessarily assumed one could make a competitive music game, much as we assume no-one could make a competitive brain training game. We would not complain so much about the generic waggling, because we would not have used the precise guitars or the Harmonix games.
This, of course, raises a question. Are we being harsh on Wii music unfairly because it's less original, or has every other eccentric niche game by Nintendo been riding on a wave of novelty that has glossed over their faults?
Yeah, I don't play any music games. Thats why I don't have it. That being said, its on my radar, and I find it interesting. What would make me buy it? DLC maybe. Mic support. Like that bit in starfox Command where the different voices were a mish mash of your responses to certain questions. I got a kick out of that. I would buy a $50 game centered around that alone. OK, maybe $30.
Ultimately, what it comes down to for me is this:
I just don't get the same feeling playing Wii Music as I do when playing Guitar Hero. The ethos of the games are fundamentally different.
While playing GH, I feel a little bit like a rockstar. The music quality is high, and many of the songs are performed by the original bands. There is a certain authenticity about it that is quite satisfying.
Wii Music, however, feels more like tinkering around on a child's toy, like a xylophone or kazoo. The quality of the music tracks is oh so poor, and it's tough to feel like a rockstar with a wiimote waggling all over the place.
I suppose we're hoping for something that's more than a feeling, but that's basically what it is for me.
@ brgulker
More than a feeling :D
brgulker gets it right with the phrase "child's toy." Wii Music is more than "childish" in the sense of cutesy; it's simplified to the point where only a child could find it stimulating, like one of those brightly colored toys with spinning shapes and farm animal noises.
The mechanics are a joke. So what else is there to draw the player? As others have said: bad sound quality, bad song selection, bad graphics, waggle, etc. The Wiimote's imprecision means you end up pretending that your movements matter.
So, uh, yeah. More poll options please. Though really the question should be, "What's to like?"
Here are my problems with the game:
1) The catalog of songs is not well developed to cater to music listeners, and Nintendo's weak online capability makes this hard to fix.
2) It's kinda all over the map... cheerleaders, dogs. You're shooting yourself in the foot with the, ahem, educational market if you're doing this and shooting yourself in the foot with gamers with the barebones rest of the game. Who is this for, then?
3) The lack of score and the cutesiness don't bother me one bit, but it seems better suited to wiiware; like a downloadable extension of WiiPlay or something.
4) as someone else said, the game became a terrible symbol of Nintendo's E3 PR disaster last year and was destined to be hated even if it wasn't fraught with problems. Nintendo didn't make it better, either, by swearing up and down that gamers would enjoy it. When you do that, you're just daring people to hate the game. Begging for it, really. It's almost as bad as the mormon missionaries who try to argue with me.
Reading all the comments above... There are two things that would bother me...
The graphics: we know the Wii can make better, please upgrade the Mii's at least for this game.
The music selection: this is the key factor if Iwata wants to make the second WiiMusic the succes the first isn't (even with 2 million copies sold).
PS: Also... when playing WiiSports and WiiPlay I really missed having more scenarios and challenges. The game mechanics were already there, why didn't they just add some levels for us, the "old-players"?!
I don't have Wii Music, so I can't comment on it, but I found the following quote to be interesting:
"There are plenty of games that depend mechanically on a lack of rules, on experimentation and exploration, so why do they get a pass while Wii Music doesn't?"
I could think of a few indie Flash games that fit that description. I guess you could count some adventure games, but most of them have a very linear story. Yeah, you can pick up any object in the game, but only one will unlock the next area where you can make use of it to get the next clue.
I found Areas to be interesting along the lines of lack of rules or even controls. So what would you say is a good example of a game that does this? I couldn't think of any mainstream console games that fit this description.
I have no problem articulating why I do not like Wii Music. I am a drummer. Not just a drum set player, I player rudimental snare drum, xylophones, marimbas, the whole gambit. My time with Wii music has shown me that the idea was far ahead of the available technology. I could be tearing up a difficult snare drum solo, but since the wii motion sensor requires very large and deliberate motions, but all that registered on the game was a series of arrhythmic taps. The keyboards were also clunky to use. I can play four mallet solos, but marry had a little lamb on that game was damn near impossible. The mechanics of the game were poorly implemented due to technological limitations. The thing just didn't work.
I like Wii Music. I know it would be better with mp3 quality music with lyrics, but I don't think any record company or big time band is going to let "little old me" remix their music. That is ultimately what Wii Music is. It allows me to experiment with different instruments on familiar songs. I have no music training and I find music hard to learn. Wii music makes it easier for me to try making music and understand what I'm doing. The problem is that ultimately music is very complex and you have to commit yourself to it. That is something the Wii sports/play/fit motif doesn't seem to suggest. As anybody with Wii Fit will attest, you have to commit yourself to the exercise to get any value out of it (or fun), Wii Music is the same way.
I screwed around with remixing "I'm A Believer" with a variety of instruments and found myself frustrated because I couldn't get the sound in my head to transfer to the screen. It was my fault, not the game's. You can hit the 'minus' button and get a note track like Guitar Hero for every part of a song (harmony, rhythm, etc). You can add/remove instruments at will. In addition, working with other people can work against you because they might be on a different wavelength than you. It makes you respect real life bands that much more!
Comparing it to Guitar Hero and Rock Band is unfair. I predict that you'll be seeing more modes and features in those games that mimic Wii Music than the other way around.
In the end, I hope they continue the game brand. They should have left it open to download more MIDI files or create your own from scratch. Going on Youtube you can see some amazing remixes of songs. The next set of games (if there is one), should focus on movie scores. I think that will be easier to get into and more unique for the genre.
I have nothing against wii music. The first time I saw it I knew I wouldn't be buying it and had no problem with that. Now I would hate it if I'd actually have bought it.
Personally I lump it together with gta 4, I just have no interest in either.
Alex said: "What's to like?"
What's to like is a much more appropriate question here I think. The problem doesn't seem to be that there is really much wrong with the game, but that traditional gamers cannot see what there is to like about Wii Music. This is not through short-sightedness, but because the game's ideals appeal to a different - and I'm sure much younger, whatever Nintendo may have said - audience; one who doesn't think 'I'm going to play a game, I want it to entertain me' but 'I want to be entertained, I'll play this game'. The completely free-form natre of Wii Music seems to fit this idea well, offering (initially) a limited but flexible scope of instruments and mechanics that allow experimentation, and sharing of experiences, and progressive rewards that continue to open up the game.
Wii Music touches most cloesly on some of the most central concepts in making music. Harmony, timing, and instrumentation. As a purely conceptual design its impressively nuanced and realistic.
But who really wants to simulate being a musician? I think that's the core. We enjoy music, but few people wish they could simulate what it's like to play music. Guitar Hero and Rock Band are about role playing not musicianship. Wii Music is, at its core, a band geek simulator. It's the best band geek simulator in the world, but who really wants to play a band geek simulation?
Never playing it, I find it hard to hate. Sure it jars some of my gaming sensibilities - a seeming lack of challenge, sense of depth, and accuracy between player inputs and the game's responses. BUT, I really haven't played it, so that's all guesswork based on reviews and such.
Still it's hard to passionately dislike something just because I have no interest in it. If I were younger, maybe I'd be more of a fanboy. Heaven knows when the PSOne came out my kind of people were up in arms. That our hobby was being co-opted by jocks, jerks, and cool kids...
So again we get the knee-jerk reaction with games like Wii-Music. We along with the PSOne camp can't fathom playing a game that's simple, without competitive elements, or lacking in some ill-defined sense of substance. It irks us to no end that our hobby is being co-opted by kids, moms, and old people.
Honestly though, it's like coming full circle. In the history of gaming, everything started as being geared to a younger audience, being simple to understand and play, as well as being inviting to "newcomers" to the field. There's real little to fault Wii Music with when taken in by that context.
I actually enjoyed Wii Music, but I can understand why others don't. For one thing, it's not so much a game as it is a creativity tool. That is, in the sense that a game like Mario Paint might also be called a creativity tool. And the problem with Mario Paint, as with Wii Music, is that if you have the skill and dedication to get something nice out of it, then you would probably get more satisfaction out of a more fully-featured toolset.
So it seems to me that Wii Music, and Mario Paint before it, are generally only going to appeal to the narrow, I imagine, demographic of people who could take advantage of more robust programs, but who are drawn nonetheless to the overall aesthetic of the game. Which is the case with me. I've worked with professional-level music sequencers and samplers, and I have had composition training at the university level, but even so I found Wii Music to be an endearing and enjoyable experience despite its limitations.
Dear Leigh,
A while back you wrote about Spore, and said that "I have noticed lately that the primary reason some major titles -- Spore, for example -- have suffered in reviews is because they lack complexity in certain areas of the design; 'complexity' is often substituted for 'depth.'"
When I got to thinking about Wii Music recently, that notion came back to me as I think it also applies in this case. While I do understand the points of criticism made against it, I feel that the game is much better than most people make it out to be.
This all got me to make a longer post about it. If you like, feel free to read the rest. I just didn't want to clutter your comments with such a lengthy response here...
Michal
"The problem with Wii Music is that it's really HARD to make music that's any good. I played it for several hours with a group of people with mixed gaming backgrounds for review purposes and we never made anything that sounded better than a cacophony of random noises."
But that's exactly what music is.
This is much like watching people walk into the Guitar Center at the Mall of America's Best Buy, as they bash around on the drums or play the keyboards. Hardly any of them are any good, but that's to be expected. It takes hard work and discipline to learn how to play music.
I think Shigeru Miyamoto is aiming to share that experience of playing music, and especially playing with others. There is an unspoken joy that comes from people playing songs together, and all the various parts gel perfectly. Miyamoto wants you to experience that lost folk music tradition, regardless of skill.
It's a difficult challenge, when you think about it. This isn't a game where you press buttons and pretend to create music. You really are creating music, and that offers tremendous freedom. You can screw it up, you can play the music precisely as written, or you can go off the page and create something new.
The trick is to create such a game that all people, regardless of musical skill, can enjoy. You need that accessibility, that ease of play. And yet you also need depth, the necessary space to allow for improvisation and experimentation. I think Wii Music succeeds at this.
If you're skeptical, that's fine. I think most of us were skeptical at first. Here's what advice: go watch the Tirelat videos on Youtube. Tirelat is the Wii Music master - improvisations, complex rhythms, alternate time signatures.
Go, watch, see what that does for you.
http://www.youtube.com/user/tirelat
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