A unique music creation tool that tries a little too hard to cash in on Guitar Hero.
So Activision has pretty much had the market cornered on music / rhythm games on the Nintendo DS with their Guitar Hero (and now Band Hero) titles, marking the handheld as one of the few places that EA's Rock Band hasn't managed to tread just yet, opting for the PSP instead. That said, Guitar Hero isn't the only game in town, but is this title, Ubisoft's Jam Sessions 2, able to take a little bit of the market share away from that music juggernaut?
If you're at all familiar with the original Jam Sessions, it was a out of left field kind of game that surprised quite a few people as being a decent guitar simulator on the DS. Transforming the touch screen into a virtual fret-board, it offered up all six strings, chord variations, and a pretty cool free play option that allowed players to create their own music, and learn a little bit about actual guitar playing at the same time. The follow-up tries to build on that in a couple interesting ways, but it also gets a little too bogged down by an identity crisis of sorts, giving players a single player game that adheres a little too closely to the Guitar Hero formula, and losing some of what made the original Jam Sessions such a unique game to begin with.
The single player mode is simply called Song Book, offering up a number of popular songs, which seem to range from 90's on up for the most part. All the songs sound like covers, no original master tracks here, which is already a mark against the mode for me. Once you select one of the songs available, you can then choose difficulty and note style, but there's only one difficulty available at the start (the easiest) and you need to unlock the other two by playing through the song at least once, which seems like a particularly dumb option and an artificial way of giving the game some type of replay value. Once you've selected that, you hop into the game, and the bottom screen looks suspiciously like an extended version of the Guitar Hero set-up. That's mostly because it is, it takes that same note falling down the length of the screen method of playing the notes, but offering up directional presses along with the strings to represent different notes. You use the D-Pad along with the touch screen, holding down left, right, up or down and strumming the strings as they hit the bar at the bottom. Advanced difficulties will keep track of the direction you strum in, along with offering up alt notes by pressing the L button along with the D-Pad, which is pretty cumbersome and awkward.
Of course, you don't have to mess with the sub par single player experience at all, and can hop into what makes the game worth owning, which is the music creator / recorder stuff. It is a little disappointing that some of the creator stuff is only unlocked by the single player game, so certain effects and background chords are tied directly into that. It's not as big of a drawback as you might think though, the default stuff you get is pretty meaty, there's a lot you can toy around with right off the bat, and of course you can lay down completely original arrangements by just strumming and coming up with your own stuff. The editor is a little unwieldy though, I had trouble trimming up specific sections (it kept wanting to make groups instead of letting me place pointers), but it's something that you'll need to spend a little time with to really get the hang of. Still, it's a really unique tool on the DS, and certainly something that music fans should check out. I wish that the developers had spent more time just blowing this aspect of the title out instead of messing around with a Guitar Hero-light single player game, but hopefully that can be changed around for a third entry down the line.
The presentation of the game isn't too hot either, and while the tutorial explains how to play the guitar in game well enough, there's not enough of a tutorial present in the music creation process to give you a good starting point or idea of how to get the ball rolling. It helps tremendously to have toyed around with something similar either through the original Jam Sessions or a PC program or two, but outside of that I think newcomers might be easily frustrated with the current set-up and menus. Touching the icons on the menu as you sort things through will give you little explanations via the touch screen, but there's not much in the way of telling you how bits interact with others and how to lay down an entire track start to finish. There is a steep learning curve involved, and that's something that could be improved upon too.
Besides that though, I do think Jam Sessions 2 is worth seeking it out. It has it's fair share of problems, sure, but I think if you're willing to put some time into you can come up with some interesting things from the title. It's a unique music creation tool on the DS, and while the system does have interesting things already like the Korg program, this is the only one I can think of that has a heavy guitar focus, and actually uses a real six string set-up to help teach you the basics. It's not going to replace a guitar instructor, but at the same time it's a great way to get introduced to the basics of guitar playing. I look forward to seeing what Ubisoft does with another title, if one is in the works, and I hope to see the series live up to it's potential in the near future.
