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We Rock Drum King Nintendo Wii

Format:
Nintendo Wii

Genre:
Rhythmaction

Buy/Support:
Support Clare, click to buy via us...

In this household we're big fans of rhythm/music games like this; we started with dance mats on the PS2 years ago, loved the bongo drums on the Gamecube (in fact we still play them regularly), and enjoyed Guitar Hero which we've played on a couple of different consoles.

We restrained ourselves from buying Guitar Hero with the full band add ons, because we didn't want to have extra periphery cluttering up the living room, so when we got this game which simply uses the Wii remote and nunchuck as virtual drumsticks I thought it would be an ideal compromise.

The game is very reminiscent of Guitar Hero in both look and feel; you drum your way through tracks earning accessories and unlocking new songs. I thought there was a good selection of well-known tracks and didn't really mind that they were obvious copies of the originals. Graphics aren't anything amazing, but then you don't really expect or need stunning visuals in order to enjoy this sort of game.

You start off by creating your avatar and joining a band, then the hard work begins. The controls are relatively easy to pick up at the beginning of the game, although the bass drum is played by pressing the A button, which we didn't find very easy. Also it didn't really make sense, when 'air-drumming' with the remotes, to have to press a button for another sound, but I guess otherwise the game would have limited itself too much. However, direction buttons on the remote come into play in the harder levels, and that just makes things all the more awkward when trying to combine this with moving the remote and nunchuck to the beat as well.

The game seemed to get difficult quite quickly, so the younger and less co-ordinated members of the family lost interest after a short while, leaving the rest of us to test the game properly. In fact we decided to sit back and let the drummer in the household have a go and give us his opinion, and unfortunately this wasn't too good. Air drumming just doesn't cut the mustard for a real drummer who's used to actually hitting things!

As we got to the harder tracks it became impossible to keep up and co-ordinate button pressing with remote tapping, so we gave up, and were left feeling disappointed. It was a good idea for a game but was let down by the frustrating control system.

To be honest, we all agreed that we'd rather play the old Gamecube bongo drums - the game is more accessible, sounds better, looks better - and you get to actually bang a drum in order to play the game, so it is simply more fun. Nothing beats real drumming, and we think that it's worth having a little bit of clutter around the house in order to really enjoy a rhythm game.

Written by Clare Sharpe

You can support Clare by buying We Rock Drum King



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Clare Sharpe writes the Eclectic Gamer column.

"I think it's probably true that most of us have grown up with computer games - I have a dark and distant memory of some sort of black box with two controllers that allowed us to play an extremely primitive and pixelated game of tennis."

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