Peripheral-free, douche-simulator Ultimate Band hits store shelves next week. While I found the theory interesting, I wasn’t totally sold on the concept when I got a chance to check out Disney Interactive Studio’s take on Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band. On the plus side, you don’t need yet another set of plastic instruments to pack away in your slowly filling closet. On the negative side, the game when I played it was far too easy to feel satisfying.
The song list for the DS and Wii versions of the game aren’t that bad actually, with appearances by hits from The Who, Blondie, Devo and The B-52s. Too bad they’re all covers, and from what I remember, bad covers. The full list is on the jump.
Saying “peripheral-free” is like saying “castrated” when it comes to music games. Isn’t half the fun of playing Rock Band the plastic instruments?
But there must be market for people (parents) who don’t want to deal with a plastic drum set and two guitars cluttering up the living room – and for these spoilsports comes Ultimate Band on Wii.
I doubt many of you played Hannah Montana: Music Jam on DS and if you did, you probably wouldn’t admit to it here. But if you had, you would recognise the DS version of Ultimate Band right away because it’s pretty much the same game – sans Hannah Montana.
Your guitar/bass fills up both screens of the DS and notes appear as little icons that fall down along the strings from the top screen to the touch screen. When they get there, you have to tap them while pressing the D-pad button specified in the icon. This setup comes with a lefty variation that uses the X, Y, A and B buttons on the right. The drums are a little different this time around – they’ve been tilted on the screen so there’s more surface area for you to tap your stylus.
What determines whether or not a title is a “kids’ game” or not? The simplicity of gameplay? Kid-friendly branding, like licenced TV stars or cartoons? Do you associate kids’ games with low quality?
What got me thinking about this was a stroll through Disney Interactive’s E3 booth, where I peeped Ultimate Band for Wii and DS. In the Wii edition, players can pick one of four band roles – frontman, guitar, drums and bass – and simulate the instrument of choice through what’s essentially air guitar using the Wii remote and Nunchuk. The frontman role focuses more on aerobic performance – think Namco’s new We Cheer or the new Rabbids title, to which I saw a lot of people my age or older joyfully disco-dancing on the show floor.
It looked challenging enough that I’d want to have it if it were more my sort of music – no thanks on the Jonas Brothers, and I’ve had my fill of Weezer’s Beverly Hills. Track list is decent for the tween set, though, and in a cool twist, since players can pick either a male or female vocalist, there are both male and female-voiced versions of the songs, swapping the song’s romantic context appropriately (like “Fell in Love With A Boy” instead of “Fell in Love With A Girl”).
Ultimate Band is Disney Interactive’s answer to those people who want to have the music band game experience without the need for all of those expensive, room-filling peripherals that are required for titles like Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour.
This band game light is both peripheral and original music free, using only cover bands so the developers would be allowed to tweak the music to better fit the game. Those tweaks include the ability to have the lead singer be either a man or a woman, no matter who originally sang it.
The Disney folks told me that they did a number of focus tests during their development of the game. In them they asked potential gamers which of nine versions of the game they would want to play. The options ranged from a peripheral-heavy version of the game with original music, to the game they ended up producing. All of the tests showed, they told me, that gamers wanted a game that didn’t require peripherals.
Included in the flood of leaks that sprung earlier today was a flash video showing gameplay in Ultimate Band, a no-peripheral music game due out from Disney for the Wii by the end of the year. (The video did not address proposed versions for the PS2 or DS.)
Watching through it a couple of times, this is going to be far more casual than the gameplay in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. The instrument actions seem not to have any connection to the soundtrack, which plays throughout, with vocals. The songs in the video were familiar but all were covered (“My Generation” by The Who, “Fell In Love With a Girl” by the White Stripes, and “Our Time Now” by Plain White T’s, all sung by what sounded like the same female vocalist), and the performers were cartoon avatars rather than motion-capped actiors.
