There Is No Rock Band For Wii
Written by Ryan Hewson   
Monday, 24 March 2008 18:51
This is a public service announcement:

Rock Band for Wii

The box is a lie. You may encounter a product that looks like Rock Band for Wii, sometime in June. It is a thoroughly convincing doppleganger. However, do not be fooled: this is not Rock Band, but rather some sort of cruel and unusual hoax, as reported in several sources. This particular version, if you can even use that term, is missing a few key things. Like:

  • online play

  • downloadable songs

  • customizable characters

  • any realtime 3d going on in the background (digitized video instead)

  • Band World Tour mode

  • compatibility with Guitar Hero 3 controllers (for Wii)

Now, at a certain point, you just aren't even looking at the same game. It's a twisted shadow of it's former self, like Calibos from Clash of the Titans; unrecognizable, monstrous, scaly, little horns, bad frizzy monster 'fro. The sort of thing you tell children about to frighten them into being good. It's obvious this is a port of the PS2 game, which was an outsourced, gimpy affair to begin with.

A lot of people have been quick to point the finger at EA for doing a "lazy port". EA certainly can be blamed for trying to shoehorn a game that clearly was designed for new-gen hardware onto a machine it wasn't designed for – without online content and play, this version breaks the concept of the game as a platform unto itself, rather than the lamentable sequel/versioned marathon we're seeing with Activision's Guitar Hero and it's fortnightly Colon:Sellout editions. But that is not the whole story here.

The epic failure for this sort of implementation is basically a function Nintendo's console design and philosophy. No online infrastructure, no officially documented or supported mass storage means for protected downloadable content, no 5.1 surround sound. I mean, what the hell are developers supposed to do? Nor has the Wii ever really tried to excel at these things, since it does cost much less than the competitors after all, and was supposed to occupy a new casual niche. But we expect modern game features of it since it is part of the new console generation. And that means harddrives and a significant online presence.

As much as we like to blame EA for shitty ports, and they certainly happen, there's no way they'd want to walk away from the easy money of Rock Band's DLC unless they absofuckinglutely had to. They've sold over 6 million songs to date. Rock Band DLC is a disgustingly lucrative firehose of cash. I'd bet anything that the online/downloadable features simply weren't technically feasible on Wii. Harmonix cannot be thrilled with the end result of the Wii edition, but they're in bed with EA and MTV on this thing.

Anyways. Don't let your Wii-owning friends blow $170 on this abomination. Rock Band is a game for 360 or PS3. That's it.

(Cross-posted from Citizen Game)


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Comments (6)Add Comment
...
written by Jim Squires, March 25, 2008
waitaminnit. there's no Band World Tour mode? What the hell is this thing??
...
written by Dan Zuccarelli, March 25, 2008
It is almost laughable how gimped this version is, I mean for the same price you get SO MUCH LESS of a game.

However, this is the same feature set as the PS2 version... which also lacks a ton of features.
...
written by Xerxes3rd, March 25, 2008
Indeed, the same company who ported Rock Band to PS2 is working on this version as well; Harmoix has said that the PS2 (and obviously the Wii) lacks the horsepower to drive many of the extra features, which means they must dumb it down in order to achieve a stable framerate. After all, nobody wants a fully-featured, yet at the same time, laggy, rhythm game. I think they did the best they could with what they have.
...
written by Dan Zuccarelli, March 25, 2008
I remember being surprised that the character creation was missing from the PS2 version, and I still can't understand that here... is it just a matter of storage space?

I mean DLC is obvious since there's just nowhere to store it on the PS2 or Wii, but the lack of some of the other stuff really makes it less of a game.
...
written by Xerxes3rd, March 25, 2008
I believe the characters are all pre-rendered in the PS2 version, which inherently disallows character creation. Even with the pre-renderings, I think they should still have World Tour mode, as it is really the apex of the game, IMO.
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written by Mike "The Birdman" Dodd, March 26, 2008
What kind of a monkey punch in the nads is that?
Seriously, WTF!

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