Battle of the Bands: bad controls and stereotyped characters on the wrong system

THQ's new music/rhythm entrant "Battle of the Bands" is out and Variety critic Leigh Alexander doesn't have too many nice things to say about it. She likes the core idea: "A competition between two genres of the same song... players can be privy to a disco 'Blitzkrieg Bop' or even a surprisingly lovely Spanish-language mariachi version of Def Leppard's 'Photograph,'  only to hear the genre flip again when the other team, controlled by a friend or the computer, has its moment in the sun."

But the controls aren't up to par, the graphics are "terrible, even for the underpowered Wii," and the characters designs "aim for edgy but land squarely on obnoxious."

Leigh makes two particularly important points I wanted to highlight. One is that if you define your characters entirely by the musical genre they play, well, you're not going to get the most racially sensitive characters. So we end up with "some questionable portrayals of redneck country singers and bling-bling black rappers." Maybe "Resident Evil 5" isn't the only game that could use a little more racial sensitivity in a diverse world.

Also: It's understandable that developers want to make more games for the Wii given how well it's playing and given the relative lack of quality games for the console. But as Leigh says, "only certain types of games make solid Wii titles." And a game that requires precise timing and movement detection isn't one of them, since we all know the Wii's motion sensor more gets the gist of what you're doing then exactly what you're doing. "This one," Leigh concludes, "probably would have worked better as a timed tapper on the DS, along the lines of "Elite Beat Agents."

Read the whole review right here.

Comments

[Jenna Webb]

I think the game has a good concept. I think it is fun, and let me ask you something. DO you see any african americans singing or playing country or hick music? White rocker chicks singing spanish? Exactly. The game is amazing, and a lot of time effort and thought was put into it. It's Nintendo. Hello.