First off, know that I'm a seasoned piano player. I've been playing for over 25 years now, and I still play almost daily. I play part-time in a band or two, record often, and have even taught a few people to play piano. But Easy Piano for the Nintendo DS kind of tripped me up. That's not necessarily a knock against the game, though.
For whatever reason, I didn't do well in my demo time, as evidenced by the above audio clip. How embarrassing!
In the Easy Piano box, for $39.99, you'll get the game cart and a little one-octave (13 key) mini piano to snap into the bottom side of your DS, via the GBA slot. We had a chance to try it out during GDC this weekend. Hit the jump to read our impressions.
Easy Piano is a cross between a rhythm game and an instructional title. It does teach you a bit, but you won't come away knowing how to play the piano properly. What you will get is a pretty solid grasp on music theory. Lessons show you scales and train you on finding notes on both the staves.
In one example, I used the touchscreen and stylus to locate notes on a staff by dragging and dropping. For me? No problem. But later when a game aspect was introduced, I fudged up. This was more of a timing game: Notes come across the screen horizontally, and I had to tap them out on the keyboard as they passed a certain point. I was laughably bad at this for some reason. I was missing the timing and keying in the wrong notes! Again, this is nothing against the game. It was probably because I was thinking too much like a musician and less like a gamer.
An in-game composer tool lets you record songs up to 32 bars long to share with your friends and family. You'll be able to both play and manually drop in notes with the stylus in this mode. The composer mode comes with a metronome, tempo control, copy and paste functions, and five instruments. I wouldn't call it robust, but it gets the job done.
The play-along song mode is more like a music game. You'll use the keyboard controller to play notes according to on-screen cues in 36 songs. There's three levels of difficulty. On the easiest, you only use a few of the keyboard's keys to help the song along. On the hardest you're basically playing the melody yourself.
I thought I had this in the bag. I did not. I was fumbling all over myself. Maybe being cocky and requesting expert mode wasn't the best idea. Sure, they keys are small, but I was equally at fault, hitting the wrong notes at the wrong times. My rendition of "Oh, Canada" on easy was pretty bad, but "Oh, Susana" on Virtuoso mode was just embarrassing. Everyone in the room was laughing at me. The PR person was laughing at me. Even the on-screen piano player looked distressed. You can hear my session in the above audio clip.
Easy Piano will be released on March 30th. It's more music lessons than piano lessons, and it's more game than either. Look for our review soon.
Contest:
2:40 PM on 03.16.2010
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So I picked up Guitar Hero and it kicked my ass. I've since gotten a bit better but it's a testament to these games and their players that they can provide such difficulty on higher levels that even if you play said instrument you'll still have trouble with it.
;)
It's an interesting phenomenon.
I think atleast for guitarists it has alot to do with the formation of chords as apposed to pressing a single button. When you play a guitar and you use one finger to hold down a note, it's a entirely different thing than chording, so playing Guitar Hero and hearing chorded parts done by pressing a single button can kind of screw you up I guess, since most of the time guitarists are used to strumming while holding their hands in a certain position with several fingers on the fretboard as apposed to one finger on a button. Just a thought anyways.
I've been playing guitar for over 10 years, I find that the worst part about games like GH is that the guitar is so damn small it is really uncomfortable, trying to press the buttons and strum at the same time is akward and can hurt your wrists especially if your used to playing a real guitar. Another problem I find is that you really have to apply a lot of pressure with your fingers to hit the notes which is completely opposite of how you should do it on a real fretboard. I guess the upside would be coordination, but I always end up trying to hit the keys like you would actually play the song (higher and lower notes being higher and lower on the keys) and it fucks me up. I guess the main advantage is coordination but I think it's way easier to play a real guitar than Guitar Hero. They should make a scale guitar hero guitar with touchscreen buttons instead of those clunky plastic ones and maybe an infra-red sensor instead of a bar for strumming that would be way better.
I do better on the drums, but then, being a drummer requires no skill or talent.