Why the Wii Remote makes for a decent glockenspiel
Wii Music (2008)
Wii Music (2008)
Never one to miss a bragging opportunity, I can tell you that I was once a well-respected member of a band. But ladies, hold onto your undergarments: this wasn't the type of band where four good-looking lads come together, pretending we could play guitar, secretly hoping to impress a bohemian girl or two.
No, mine was the school band, and I wouldn't have had a choice in the matter anyway - I was conscripted. The band leader was also my class teacher, a regimented Kerryman who could never accept you giving it less than 100% for the band.
I mean it. If you weren't giving it your all when you put your lips behind the tin whistle, he sussed you out straight away. He then got all ruddy-faced and shouty, and asked you what the hell was going on. The man never missed a beat, quite literally.
Because I was very much the swottish, finger-on-your-lip sort of boy, I graduated from the peasant tin whistle to the bourgeois glockenspiel. I got a real bang out of calling it a glockenspiel because, I don't know, it just looked like a regular old xylophone to me. But a special name makes it a special instrument, right?
Anyway, playing the glockenspiel was a far easier job for me, and everyone always wanted to have a go on it. A lot easier on my back as well; the other main instruments of that school band were full-sized accordions, and just you try lifting and playing one of those beasts when you're 10 years old.
Despite being a fledgling musician, I didn’t exactly rush to buy Wii Music when it came out. In fact, I wasn’t even on speaking terms with it for several years. The problem was with its global reveal, the infamously bad Nintendo E3 2008 conference. We were in the height of the Wii casual era then, or the vaguely unsettling Touch Generations, as Nintendo dubbed it.
Instead of having the fan-favourite, now departed Reggie Fils-Aimé (not dead, just departed) up there doing the talking, Nintendo changed it up. And they ensured that legions of 12-year-old Nintendo gamers were sent into meltdown, by having an alien creature known as a “woman” lead the keynote speech instead.
But Mick Jagger, James Brown, Elvis and Sinatra couldn’t have saved the show and made it cool - it was an abomination from start to finish. It confirmed all Nintendo fans’ worst doubts about the direction the Wii was going in. Indeed, we began to think that the Wii was going out. The bit that made my teeth itch the most, and this is probably absolutely unique to me, was the show’s final reveal.
See, I watch Nintendo Directs and other game conferences for one reason only, and that’s because I still live in hope that a new F-Zero is revealed. It used to be Star Fox as well as F-Zero, but then they finally did Star Fox - only to mess it up anyway. And we did get F-Zero 99, but that’s not the same. I’m talking about a proper, fully-fledged, brand-spanking new installment in the series.
The E3 2008 show was drawing to a close with a badass electric guitar riff and a load of smoke, and there it was - F-Zero, it just had to be! Alas, it’s the hope that kills you. An overexcited drummer, with the imaginative name Ravi Drums, began banging a Wii Remote and Nunchuk on thin air like his life depended on it.
What happened next was destined to end up top of the list of several hundred Top 10 E3 Cringe videos: four Nintendo personnel, including Miyamoto himself, took to the stage and used the newly revealed Wii Music game to play a horrendously out of step version of the Mario Theme in front of a bewildered audience.
I don't care that it was four fully grown men onstage, waving their remotes around. That was always going to be embarrassing, but if done well, I could get behind it. If someone had gone up there and flawlessly shredded Through the Fire and Flames on a Wiimote, then that would have been incredible.
But no, the whole performance was an ordeal, painful to watch. The show finally ended, I had a stiff drink, and we all immediately took to the internet to register our displeasure. And crucially for me, at the end of it all, no F-Zero.
Well, hell if I didn’t use my Wii for throwing practice and as a horseback archery target that night. I was livid. I hated the console. I hated myself. Most of all, I hoped Wii Music would fail and get wretched reviews. Well, I doubt any game on the Wii sold poorly; this is the same console that had a market for a game called M&M's Beach Party.
But thankfully I wasn’t the one going insane, because heaps of other people were critically trashing Wii Music - even the paid-off media outlets and the Nintendo fanboys were fully sick of Miis getting shovelled down their throats, with their silly little animations.
Still, fifteen years is probably too long to hold a grudge against some software. So when I saw the game going for €3 last year, I thought, why not? It cost less than my lunch, though I was worried the game might make me barf my lunch back up. But in spite of myself, I must say that the game is actually pretty funny to play. I have to begrudgingly admit that.
You’re just holding on to a Wii Remote and making approximate movements along with the music, so you won’t exactly learn how to play the trumpet off the back of it. To play the instrument, you have to move the remote and press some buttons with the correct timing, although most of the time you’ll miss the beat completely, even despite your best efforts.
And you have to laugh, because the end result really is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen and heard. When they did it onstage at the E3 show, it was objectionable. You just wanted to look away, your internet to cut out, a timely meteor to strike Los Angeles maybe. Anything to stop the cringe. But when you’re at home, and hopefully playing with a sympathetic pal or your confused lover, you’ll have a great old giggle together.
But what stops you going any further is the fact that you'll only begin the game with five tracks, from the game's 52 songs total. And the starting tracks aren't what you’d call classic bangers - you'll be sick of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before very long, and from the popular songs list, you've only got a shortened instrumental version of Daydream Believer to keep you going.
Everything else has to be unlocked by going through tedious lessons, with mountains of dialogue. And if you quit halfway through the lessons, you’ve got to start them right from the beginning. I’m thinking this is possibly an attempt at realism, like how if you don’t pick up that hateful guitar and smash calluses into your fingers each and every day, you’ll lose all of your musical ability in the blink of the eye.
Anyway, I looked up the remainder of the tracklist and I wasn't surprised. Nothing from Slayer's Reign in Blood is on there, nor are there any songs about popping caps in policemen. This is typical of Nintendo music games, so to pad out the tracklist and to give the game a few songs that were composed after 1978, Nintendo throws in a few of their own tunes.
But the idea of listening to the annoying instructor for hours on end before I’d finally get to play F-Zero Mute City and Material Girl didn't give me much cause to go on, I'm afraid. And that meant Wii Music was quickly left to gather dust, a lot like my old acoustic guitar.
31 May 2024