will admit, when I first learned the concept behind Ultimate Band, I was a bit skeptical as to the level of control it would deliver. Sure, I appreciated an attempt to stop flooding our homes with more music related peripherals, but I was unsure how air-drumming and air-strumming would compare to using tangible instruments.
Ultimate Band is Disney Interactive’s new performance/rhythm game for the Nintendo Wii and DS. The game encompasses the rock show experience in its entirety, and as you would expect encourages you to work your way to the top of the charts as a performer. The Disney crew immediately boasted that the game is accessible to both gamers and non-gamers, which became pretty obvious during my first few moments of play. Ultimate Band allows you to mimic performing on a guitar, drums, and bass, or take on the role of a band’s frontman. Because Disney did not want a required peripheral for the title, all you need to play is your Wii remote with Nunchuck attachment.
When playing guitar, I was instructed to hold the Nunchuck near my shoulder with my left arm, and the Wii remote towards my waist on my right. The basic concept is to press combination of buttons on the Nunchuck to change frets, and strum with the Wii remote to hit timed notes. I only began with two frets till I got a hang of the instrument, and the number of frets expand with difficulty, requiring more complicated button combos to change the selected fret.
The bass was similar in that you continued to strum with the Wii remote in your right hand, but instead of pressing buttons to change frets, you simply changed the orientation of the Nunchuck attachment from up to down. The motion is supposed to mimic sliding the fingers down the neck of the bass, and felt natural once I got a hang of it.
Drums were the easiest for me to pick up, as the motion was pretty intuitive. I air drummed to the notes with my Wii remote and Nunchuck, and flicked each controller sideways when I wanted to hit a cymbal note. Drum rolls, claps and other elements came into play to keep me on my toes in-between regular hits.
The frontman replaces vocals in Ultimate Band, and s/he is in charge of keeping the audience pumped up through actions on stage. The frontman will clap, dance, run around stage and do crazy tricks to keep the audience entertained, all which are performed by timed motions with both remotes. I played all of the positions on a medium difficulty, and even on that level it took some work to keep up. Disney assures us that the harder difficulty levels will challenge even the most hardcore gamers, and I believe them after giving the game a go.
Ultimate Band features a wide range of music, spanning from classic to contemporary hits. All of the songs in Ultimate Band are covers, but not because Disney was unable to acquire licensing agreements. With Ultimate Band, Disney wants you to be the rock star in the game. For this reason, the vocals in each song change from male to female to fit the gender of the band’s frontman.
We had a brief moment to look at the DS version, where strumming, drumming and headman actions were done with the stylus. This version of the game is more of a rhythm based experienced than a performance one, and has a totally different story, taking place in Rockopolis. In this version you try to win over all of the fans in the city by tapping their heads to see what they want to hear. Ultimate Band DS features a rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass guitar and drums, and features the same exclusive songs. The DS version also includes a Creative Play option, where you are able to make and mix your own tunes.
In the end, Ultimate Band is pretty entertaining, and sits at a great price point if you want to get into the music game genre without taking up space with expensive peripherals. Expect Ultimate Band to hit shelves this holiday season.