Presumably spawned from Harmonix’s decision to leave Wii owners out of the initial release of Rock Band, THQ’s interesting music game has been on our proverbial radar for some time. But only now we’ve seen the Wii exclusive in action do we really understand what its angle is, and it seems to be far more original than we’d first thought.
The concept at the core of Band Mashups is to create a true battle of the bands, offering players five distinctly different groups from diverse musical genres to pit against one another. You got an ensemble representing rock, latin, rap, country and… um, a marching band to choose from, with each taking the song and putting their own twist on it as they outperform their opponents. This is a wonderfully ingenious concept, not least for its ability to totally circumvent the issue of using cover versions of songs – you’re not going to care that it might not be the original version of Whoomp, There It Is when you’ve got some crazy bluegrass version jangling away in front of you. And trust us, it’s every bit as amazing as it sounds.
Quite how the battle mechanics themselves play out is still a bit of a mystery. It appears that certain notes charge various special attacks (just as the Star Power notes in Guitar Hero lend their power to those dextrous enough to nail the lot) which can then be used to hinder opponents and rack up more points. At times, songs will also break down into ‘solo’ sections, where one band throws attacks at the other, who in turn must defend against them before getting a chance to return the punishment. This smacks of Gitaroo Man – which is never a bad thing – and adding that to the other obvious comparisons like Amplitude and Boogie, you start to see the foundations of what is a very interesting amalgamate indeed.
Rather than rely on additional peripherals as is in vogue these days, Band Mashups stick with just the bare bones Wii setup. Like in EA’s curiously entertaining Boogie, it’s a simply matter of giving the controller a shake in the indicated direction. On top of simple directional commands, there are a few more advanced moves too, such as using the remote to follow a ‘scratching’ pattern of sorts and we’re sure there’ll be some more commands tucked away in the harder difficulties as well. When it comes to the face-off sections, the defending player can hit the trigger to block incoming attacks while the attacker attempts to riff all over them, bringing their chosen style to the fore for a little while longer.
But as wonderful as the concept may be, it does come at a price. Where each song has had to be recorded five times (once in the style of each genre), the overall track list is capped at a mere thirty songs. With recent GH titles throwing in the region of seventy tunes about (plus the potential for downloaded tracks) and even Boogie falling closer to forty songs, this does seem a little disappointing at first. But when you consider the ever-changing nature of each track here, even several successive plays of the same tune in succession have the potential to turn out very differently. Give the rap group control of a large part of a song and you’ll be in for a very different sonic treat than if the latin group is getting all continental on your ass. The final track list is yet to be revealed but promises to span both recent and classic songs, all playable in styles both familiar and entirely unheard of, ranging from pretty solid covers to alternative versions on a scale that we’d never have called.
While it may not have the empowerment or serious rock vibe of Harmonix’s effort, Band Mashups is walking a very different line. Everything from style to attitude seems to have been tailored to both put distance between this and its rivals, with only the more quirky likes of Technic Beat and Gitaroo Man coming even vaguely close to THQ’s incredibly literal version of a battle of the bands in this respect. Aside from some kind of story mode where you’re 99 per cent sure to not care what’s going on and the usual array of training and challenges, expect versus play to be a key aspect of Band Mashups and while it hasn’t been announced yet, we’d love to see the game take a leaf out of Guitar Hero’s book and make the leap into the online world. It really does make all the difference.
With one hand pushing the competition angle while the other settles for the simple comedy value of hearing rock or rap classics get countrified, this is a far cry from your usual Bemani clone. Accuracy is one issue we currently harbour, mainly since so many Wii releases can easily slip into the domain of the vague if the Remote use isn’t tight enough. In a genre where accuracy and scores are everything, failure here can be of the critical variety so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that THQ nails it with its first notable foray into the rhythm action market in some time. So while April should bring with it Rock Band for two-thirds of the next-gen massive, Wii owners have a very different proposition on their hands – one for which we’ve found a new-found excitement just at the prospect of hearing a banjo player pick away during a Cypress Hill song. We’re easily swayed like that.
Yee-freaking-haw.
