THQ Gamer Day 2008 - Battle of the Bands

One of the games for the Wii that looked really interesting at the THQ Gamer Day was the rhythm game Battle of the Bands. While from the screenshots this game may look like a Guitar Hero clone, it actually has very little in common with the peripheral wielding counter part, other than the fact that you use both to play music. I actually got some hands-on time with the game, and it felt more like an Elite Beat Agents game using motion sensing instead of a touch screen, and being a huge fan of the Elite Beat Agents game, that's a big compliment.

The game bevies a track listing of over 30 songs, each song available in the five possible 'music styles' in the game (rock, hip-hop, country, latin, and marching band), for a total of 150 song variations. When talking to the developers on hand, they told me just how selective they had to be in choosing songs that would allow for the music to easily be recorded in each of the five styles without too many changes to the beats. Having similar beats was very important too, so that when the style changes, the beats that you have to hit shouldn't change too much either.

The actually gameplay was fantastic. At first I was missing about one-third of the notes, as would be expected, but then my toe-tapping, beat-loving ways started to come out in full force. Which is a good thing, since in order to launch attacks at the other band, you need to hit a certain number of beats in a row. Your arsenal of attacks include a fast attack; a slow, high-damage attack; and a special attack. Each of the 15 bands (3 bands per music type) has different attacks to choose from, which really adds a level of strategy to the battle. I, of course, was playing against one of the developers, and so my tush was handed to me on a silver platter each time we played. The first two times on easy were a lot of fun, and the last time on Hard was difficult, yet doable.

On top of the gameplay was the whimsical and creative characters that made up each of the different bands. Each of the three bands for each music type has unique characters and unique attacks that I can definitely see catering to many different audiences. The characters are a nice and tasty frosting on top of the unique cake that Battle of the Bands is shaping up to be, making it the perfect cake to bring to the Wii party. Let's face it, the Wii is turning out to be quite the 'party' system and I can easily see this game as one that will have all the party goers rocking out with our wii-motes out, latin-rock-hip-hop style.