Wii Music (Wii)

Wii Music is a 2008 game meant to be a free-form music simulator and minigame collection. The game follows no particular storyline, but rather allows you to play 66 total instruments along with a pre-made band the Tutes (nice name, Nintendo) as well as 3 other people.

Few people have expressed enjoyment of this game, seeing it frankly as being more of an audio experiment than anything, but there's where we disagree, because the game is fantastic. It has huge levels of replay value in the way you can go back to unlock new songs and instruments, as well as new stages to play on. You never quite knew what you were going to get next, so it was really fun seeing what you got and just playing around with it.

Now, you would imagine at first thought that there would be tons of control errors with this game, but not so, my friends. The controls are just about perfect. There are three types of instrument play: percussion (which requires flicking the Remote to play), string (basically just playing the violin), woodwind (holding the Remote bottom-down and using the 1 and 2 buttons to play) and strumming (using the Remote and Nunchuk to simulate playing a guitar). All of the instruments worked really great, and for the complexity of the instruments, they managed to condense it really well, in the way that you could hold down certain buttons and do certain tricks to effect how you play.

The minigames were actually very far away from being lame. There are three in all; the first is Mii Maestro, whereby you can conduct a Mii Orchestra to a certain song (one of which is The Legend of Zelda theme, which is AWESOME) by flicking the Remote to a certain tempo. At the end, you get more points depending on how well you kept to the beat. The second is Handbell Harmony, whereby you would flick handbells to cues throughout a song to get a good score. The third is Pitch Perfect, which is just a surprisingly challenging memory game where you have to select the right tones based on what you hear. All of these worked great, and they were all fun, to the point where I would come back to them more than once.

I enjoyed the selection of songs and stages in this game,a s few of them brought back happy memories. In fact, just for nostalgic reasons, my favorite song was "Please Mister Postman," because it was one of the Beatles songs we would always listen to. There were also some real classics, like "Daydream Believer," "September," and "I'll Be There." Plus, you could change around the instruments used every time, to make the song sound completely different. They took a lot of great steps to ensure that you wouldn't find this game to be boring.

If I had to pick a couple of things that would have made this game better, then first I would say that they should have added a couple more instruments, especially the ocarina. I mean, the ocarina is the most famous instrument in the history of Nintendo, how could they avoid putting it in? Secondly, it kinda would have been nice if there was a way to control what notes you were playing. This would make it not only a fun game, but also a real learning experience, so it would have added a whole new angle to it.

Actually, come to think of it, why on Earth did they not put in a music composer!?! I mean, the last real musical composer made by Nintendo was the one in Mario Paint, and for the era, it was really pretty good! It had a lot of different tones and notes, even tempo functions; now it's the age of the Wii, and they make a musical video game, and yet they just decide against making a better music composer. I think it would have been epic if you could have put together your own music pieces and saved them, like the custom stages in Brawl, so you could show them to friends and family.

However, these are just minor tidbits that I though of only now. This game is extraordinary the way it is, and whether or not you're a musician, you will absolutely love this game for its friendly controls, great instruments, and classic songs. This is an absolute buy.