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Review : Battle of the Bands for Wii
For the past week I have had Battle of the Bands in my Nintendo Wii and I have had a pretty fun, stupid good time with it. It was originally called "Band Mashup" in development.
It is a competitive music game by THQ and Planet Moon Studios that is made for the Wiimote. After taking a look at the user interface and art style it would be easy to compare this game to Guitar Hero or Rock Band but the game play has more in common with Parappa The Rapper and Bust a Groove on PSOne.
Rather than using a dedicated controller the game is build around just using the Wiimote. You wave the Wiimote wand like a conductor in time with the arrow pattern on the screen in time with the music. If you do good you score points and charge up attacks to zap the other band. Winning a match requires you to build up an attack and mess up the other player at the right time.
Each match is against two cute exaggerated cartoony bands of competing musical styles and depending how you do it will switch between the dominant music style. You can sort of think of it as Conductor Waggle Hero.
There are thirty songs that were recorded in five different musical styles. There is Rock/Metal, Funk/Hip-Hop, Country Western, Latin, and Marching Band versions of each song and the covers had a pretty good production. I love that it had different musical versions of Blitzkrieg Bop, Jungle Boogie, Man of Constant Sorrow and Whoomp! (There it is).
It was pretty different to see Latin and Country songs in a music game, I freaking loved the fact that one of the bands were Mexican "Day of the Dead" skeletons. It is rated T for Teen for some very mild lyrics but I still think that this game would be perfect for kids.
Before I got this game I almost forgot how much fun a game can be using motion sensitive controls. It involves a bit more coordination and interaction by waving your hand around and it is a lot more fun that just hitting buttons in time and tapping on a gamepad. I would love to see this game ported to the Xbox 360 once the motion sensing "Newton" controller comes out. It is a shame that there is no online game play but there is a lot of in room versus fun.
My cats found the Wiimote strap to be hypnotizing as I tapped the controller to the beat. My game hand was bitten several times much to my surprise.
The game does not take it self too seriously and that is a good thing. It is not a mega-production like other music games you might think of but it is in all a pretty simple but ultimately fun music game. This game is "Full of Wii".
Jake at May 9, 2008 
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