Yeah I really need to find a balanced length--although I certainly want to post some of our creations. Maybe a few from me, Wario, Chicken, that one guy on Youtube who's super amazing, and any other great creations I have in my ridiculously expansive Wii Music Video library. Also, @Wario, I might use that point you made about the Japanese Rythm game market and how it differs from the American one.

I know somebody has an emulator here...don't remember who. But whoever it is, could I send you some Wii Music vids to put on youtube? That way I could embed them in this article I'm writing.

This post is not at all helpful, sorry, but unless things have changed since last I heard, there's no such thing as a fully-functional Wii emulator, and even if there were, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to send videos to it, no? Not that you'd need to for the sake of posting a video since you could much more easily get an adapter for your Wii to plug into a PC for video capture. If that's what you meant, I'm not trying to split hairs, just wondering if someone does actually have an emulator out of curiosity (not that I'd want one, what with my already owning a real Wii and all).

I think the problem was that I'm an idiot and didn't know what I was talking about
I was talking about a video capture thing.

Also, I'm finishing this article up. I need to know if I'm missing anything, though. In this one section, I'm debunking myths about the game. The one's I have so far is, That it's Shallow, That it's Nintendo's attempt at Guitar Hero or Rock Band, That it Suffers from a lack of providing the players with goals and a sense of accomplishment, and that everything you do in Wii Music sounds like crap thanks to Nintendo using MIDI sound. Anything else I should cover? Keep in mind that this is just one of the many sections.

I'm pretty sure someone in this thread has a vidcap setup...possibly warioswoods?

That's what I thought. This is unfortunate because he doesn't come around here much any more. It's times like this when I really wish you could send other Nintendo Life users personal messages...

Hey there - I've been out of town and am still out of town this week, but this upcoming weekend I could take any Wii Music video you've sent me and put it up on YouTube for you, maybe by mid-Sunday. I'm not sure if that's fast enough for the article you're putting together, though.

EDIT: Dazran also has the necessary equipment I believe, if he's around.

Hey WariosWoods. Well I've been incredibly busy with school so I haven't got a chance to finish up this Wii Music thing (I've written a few reviews and an editorial for that site, but I want this Wii Music thing to be perfect so I haven't touched it in awhile). I'm currently writing a novel, actually, and I really need to finish it up before I do any thing else with this thing. But I'll send you a Wii Message when I need videos youtube'd.

Sounds good; either a Wii message or an update in this thread will work just fine.

Wow, I got to this party laaaaaate....
I know most of y'all might have Wii Music fatigue by now (seeing as how this thread's been going on since last May) but I got the game a few months ago and it's wicked fantastic. If anyone needs any motivation to fire it up again, or just wants to show off their vids to a new set of eyes and ears, let me know.
Kid_A: Where are your priorities? A novel gets preferential treatment over your WiiMusic article? For shame. I look forward to the finished product.
ChickenBrutus, Warioswoods, Sean Aaron: I've enjoyed your stuff on here for awhile (as I creepily lurk) so kudos, and again, if you wish to send a vid or whatnot, I'm game.
FC# 1134 6733 6423 3945

Great, I've been meaning to get back to Wii Music for so long now (and even to complete my own side project related to it, that just keeps getting put off due to other things). My FC: 8378 9716 1696 8633. It can take a couple days sometimes for the game to register the new friends, but I'll do my part to add your code tonight.

Very nice work on your latest with the two handbells, Outrunner.

WW: Cool, thanks for the add, and whenever I get a chance I'll try and throw some of my sophomoric efforts at'cha. Mostly working within the confines of the song itself; still haven't successfully unfolded a song into something completely new, like that stellar Happy Birthday jam, but it's quite satisfying regardless. I look forward to seeing the Woods-y magic. (And anyone else out there looking to re-WiiMusic-ify their lives, let me know.)

I'll add you as well Irves -- register the PAL code at a minimum.

Very nice videos, LittleIrves. As you said, they don't completely change the underlying song, but I enjoy a well-composed arrangement as much as something radically new anyway.

So, I felt like capturing and posting some videos last night, and I took my favorite one from you, along with one from Kid A. First, Ode to Joy from LittleIrves:

Next, Kid A's Wii Sports Theme:

I also threw online another of mine from a while back:

(All the videos are unfortunately a little dark this time, since I forgot to up the gamma on the capture device the way I usually do. Oh well.)

As usual, if anyone doesn't want their video online, I'll take it down. In other news, I finally put some real work this past weekend into building the Wii Music site that I've spoken of here before, and it's actually getting pretty far along in development now. If I have just a couple more weekends as productive as that one, I'll be able to officially announce and link the site here, with many of the features I originally planned.

Here's part one of my editorial: http://www.gameobserver.com/features/inside/all-platforms/the...

Response so far has been quite good! There's no way to comment on the article but a few staff members have emailed me and told me they like what they've read, and I've actually gotten some of them interested. Part two will be coming out as soon as I can compile a list of good Wii Music Videos.
@warioswoods: tomorrow (or possibly thursday) I'll go through my library and send you a few vids that I want online. Thanks in advance and I hope you all enjoy the article

Hey Kid A, very good read there, I enjoyed it greatly. I'll look forward to part 2. What you're doing in this series connects nicely with what I'm trying to do with the Wii Music site I'm building, which, as I mentioned, is actually taking shape now. The primary purpose of the site will be a hub for aggregating all the best Wii Music videos out there, and making them fun and easy to browse through or search by various criteria, instead of the crap-shoot that you get when you just type Wii Music into YouTube. But certainly, send me the ones you need put online. I'm guessing a Wassi video will find its way into your post as well, yes?

One point I might make about the article, although I realize it's too much to cover, is that Nintendo did try to present what the game actually does; it simply did so too late, and no one payed much attention once the false image of the game had taken such hold.

JC was their one-man PR engine for the game, doing some musically impressive work on the Nintendo channel, walking through the features and how to truly be musically creative by breaking the game's bounds a little. He also did a much more relevant presentation for Google not long after the lousy E3 presentation; once again, however, it was just ignored in favor of the corny video footage of Miyamoto & crew on stage. You've probably seen this before, but here's that Google presentation for those who haven't (skip about 5 minutes in).

You may also recall that Nintendo posted weekly music videos -- some of which were highly creative -- and featured a whole page full of excellent "staff videos" from the creators along with an Iwata Asks article. They even invited various professional musicians to play with the game on a number of occasions and posted the videos on the Nintendo Channel (that jazz drummer you may recall, and a couple of others).

So, that's all just to point out that Nintendo gave the game a big media push that really showed off its capabilities, but only for those who wanted to listen. Aside from the intial E3 miscalculation, I blame the gaming press more than anyone, for they had too much fun just lambasting of the game and (surprise) never did anything closely resembling real journalism, which would have meant actually investigating the game's merits in detail.

It's a bit like the world of politics, where a bill or policy can be negatively branded in one swoop and, regardless of all the detailed analysis in its favor by experts in the relevant fields, will never gain popular support again, because people are too lazy to look into things, and journalists are all out for sensationalism rather than facts.
/end rant

I might quote you on that, buddy. In part 2 I'll try to bring out some of those points you mentioned--it may actually make the argument stronger if I mention that, hell, I'm a fan of the game who was avidly searching for information about it and I didn't even know Nintendo did something to combat the criticism.

And as for posting a Wassi video, you'd better believe it. But everything the guy does is so darn good that I'm having trouble picking just one. So I've narrowed it down to two.

Okay, I'm confused. I admit, after all the horrible reviews Wii Music received, I was turned off to the idea of buying it. But now, I see this huge thread full of enthusiasts, and I feel like I'm missing something. I get that you press different buttons and move the Wiimote to play instruments, but how does it recognize notes you want to play? It may seem like a dumb question, but nothing I've read about the game actually tells how to play it, so I wouldn't know. Is it really as bad as it was made out to be?

It picks the notes for you - if you play outside the normal rhythm of the song it fills in with notes which fit in, down to sixteenth notes. You also have influence over how the notes are played - depending on the instrument type, you can control vibrato, muting, alter pitch, play a run of notes instead of a single note, trill the notes etc. It also depends which section of the track you're playing - if you're playing the chord section, you can play arpeggios instead of full chords by holding down a certain button, for example.

I think Wii Music was a very difficult game to market. You can show what you do with it, but the problem is that it is genuinely difficult to express why what you're showing is fun without putting a controller in someone's hand. I wasn't sure exactly what I was getting when I bought it, but I was grinning like a lunatic by the end of the introductory tutorial. After that came the composition tutorials, which are genuinely mind-expanding if you're in any way interested in music, as they show you how to take a familiar track and apply different musical styles and your own improvisations to it to turn it into something else entirely. That is the core of the game - you pick a track, which has 6 different individual constituent pieces (bass, chord, harmony, melody, percussion x 2), which you're free to perform how you like with a large variety of instruments. Each track has a load of preset combinations of instruments and ways of playing them to achieve a certain style, but the fun and challenge is in making your own and making it sound good.

Then you decide how you want to compose it, which is the fun (and difficult) bit - for me, I end up asking myself questions like "What would the Mute City theme sound like if you gave it a cl..." or "What would Every Breath You Take sound like if it had a rocko.... Then you go at it, performing each piece of the track one at a time, building the song up into what you want it to be.

Is it really as bad as it was made out to be?

"Wii Music is a terrible game/is the death of gaming" is something of an internet meme, and one mostly founded on anything but what the game itself actually is. The frankly embarrassing outing at E3 and the widespread misunderstanding of what the game is about have contributed much to it - if you've read reviews which mention Guitar Hero for any reason other than to point out how it represents one type of music game which Wii Music is nothing like, or you've read reviews which make fun of the tracklist and bemoan the lack of the kinds of songs you get in Guitar Hero-type games, you're reading the opinion of someone who has spectacularly missed the point.

Most people now recognise music games as being Simon Says style tests of skill and dexterity, but Wii Music is largely about composition. There is a performance/challenge element to it when you're trying to nail down a track to be just so, but it's you who decides what's right and wrong based on what you're trying to acheive. I dread to think how many times I've had to re-do a drum track from scratch because I wasn't quite happy with a certain section.

The fact that Wii Music is often held up by self-professed "hardcore" gamers as an example of a bad game, or even a game that's taking gaming in an undesirable direction, is a genuine pity and their loss - in my opinion, it's the most innovative music game of the decade.