Ultimate Band is designed to be played without the need for peripherals. The game is instead played using both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck. This means no extra charge other than the purchase of the game and no room taken up in your gaming area by bulky accessories. No extra charge, that is, unless you don't have enough controller sets for all players. Both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck are necessary for every person playing, so if you don't already own a few of these controller sets, get ready to shell out some serious cash if you want multiplayer action.

Similar to Rock Band, you can have up to four players playing Ultimate Band at the simultaneously. Each of the four players has the option of playing the guitar, drums, bass guitar and being a "front man", there can only be one of each. Similar to just about every other current rhythm game the player follows scrolling notes, for lack of a better more general term, and performs some action with the right timing for maximum points. The reason I am being so general when describing notes and players performing some action is because the game tries to vary the user's actions in an attempt to keep the game fresh and interesting. The notes and actions that need to be performed change depending on the difficulty and instrument selected.

For instance, while playing the guitar on the easy setting the player will need to strum (move the Wii Remote down as if playing a real guitar) and clap (move the Nunchuck and Wii Remote together as if clapping). On the normal setting the scrolling bar is split into two and the player has to press, or not press, the c and z buttons together on the Nunchuck while strumming depending on which scrolling bar the notes are on. On the hard setting the scrolling bar is split into four and the player has to press a combination of the c and z buttons (no buttons, just the c button, both the c and z buttons or just the z button) while strumming.

The bass and drums are similar; however, the front man position is a little unique. It is also different than the singer in Rock Band. This is due to the fact that there is no singing involved at all. That's right; there is no singing involved at all. Instead, you will be punching, waving, clapping, posing and making your character move to different parts of the stage. I say posing, but really it's just turning the Wii Remote in the position indicated on screen.

In a similar fashion to Rock Band there is a "Crowd Meter". This shows how well you are doing. The more you miss notes the more the Crowd Meter will go down. Once it hits bottom you are thrown out of the performance and have to start again. This is pretty much impossible on the easy setting. On the normal and hard settings it is easier to get thrown out of a performance but it is still pretty difficult to do in comparison to Rock Band's or Guitar Hero's hard setting.

There is an online capability but it involves manually posting your scores or looking at score boards. This feature seems weak and tacked on at the end just to stake the claim that the game has online functionality. To prove this point, there is only a warning about privacy and a reference to the End Users License Agreement (EULA) in the section concerning the online content in the game manual. One important thing to note about online connectivity: there is no downloadable content. This means that the songs that come on the disc are it; there is no way to add new songs. This is a problem only because the songs, what few there are, are just alright. There are some good ones but they are certainly not as good as I would have expected from a game centered on music.

The learning curve in Ultimate Band is pretty mild. I had people come over for a party and they were picking it up and playing on the easy setting with no trouble and the Rock Band owners were able to play on the hard setting with just a couple of attempts. To give you some perspective on the difficulty of the game, my four and a half year old son got over ninety percent playing the guitar on easy just by shaking the Wii Remote and Nunchuck controllers around.

The game has a story line but I was not much into it, even though the voice acting was great and the cut scenes were entertaining. The problem with the story is that this is a Disney game and the E 10+ rating really shows in the story line. This may be great for a pre teen but would bore anyone over twelve. To progress in the story and unlock other areas and songs (there are only eight songs unlocked by default) the player has to perform a song and receive a positive rating to get a trophy. Each area has a certain number of trophies to unlock it. Usually this forces you to play through some of the songs multiple times using different instruments.

The game does have a couple of quirks. First, when you finish playing a song there is always some video displayed depending on how well you performed and it gets old really fast. Second, is that if you play a song on the hard setting it locks the easy and normal settings out as far as getting trophies is concerned. This means that if you play a song on easy then normal then hard you will get three trophies but if you play the reverse, hard then normal then easy, you will only receive one trophy when you played on hard. Third, every time you finish with a song you are brought out of multiple level deep menus. This forces you to select "Perform" on the menu then cycle over to the area you are currently playing. This may seem nitpicky, but the game has to load the menu every time; so its annoyance adds up over time. And fourth, the trophies you earn in one area do not translate to any of the other levels. This gives me no desire to go back and play any of the songs on a different difficulty setting.

While these quirks can be a bit irksome they, don't undermine the most important aspect of the game, to have fun. And it is fun. A game that can help me unwind and that I am able to play in front of my kids is a winner in my book. That is why my suggestion is that if you are short on cash and/or room and want to purchase an entertaining rhythm game that can be played at parties; I recommend Ultimate Band for the Wii.