I'm a self-taught musician and been practicing daily for the past 10 years. I can play three instruments, and have released four albums of, dare I say, very much rhythmical music. Just as I started playing Rhythm Heaven Fever, I was going through an online course on West African polyrhythms.
Imagine the shame I brought on my family, when a monkey in the first level of a Nintendo rhythm game was repeatedly hitting my player character in the nuts with golf balls because I fucked up half of its musical cues.
The music in this game is amazing. I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo's hyper colorful aesthetic, but it works great here, and the mini-games are constantly inventive. But. The difficulty curve is straight up sociopathic. Hidetaka Miyazaki looked at the monkey watch level in the second stack and wept.
To somewhat cover my musician dignity, I can say that, from a musical point of view, Rhythm Heaven Fever just isn't very musical. Don't get me wrong, the rhythms themselves are great, there's a ton of syncopation, contrasts, all the good shit. And there's a lot of variety in musical styles. Rather, it's what game wants from the player that is not musical. You're required to hit every beat right on the money. A fraction of a second late or early, and it's counted as a failure.
In other words, the game wants you to be a sequencer, not a musician. Every instrument player worth their salt knows that the sweet spot is in playing just a skosh behind or ahead of the beat. That's what gives the performance life, makes it less robotic.
These imperfections of an individual playing style are the hardest to replicate with sampling and sequencing, and I imagine they would be just as hard to evaluate in a rhythm game. Maybe a different, more forgiving approach altogether would benefit such a game. Making it about the joy of music, rather than programming those 4s, 8s and 16s right on the head.
Imagine the shame I brought on my family, when a monkey in the first level of a Nintendo rhythm game was repeatedly hitting my player character in the nuts with golf balls because I fucked up half of its musical cues.
The music in this game is amazing. I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo's hyper colorful aesthetic, but it works great here, and the mini-games are constantly inventive. But. The difficulty curve is straight up sociopathic. Hidetaka Miyazaki looked at the monkey watch level in the second stack and wept.
To somewhat cover my musician dignity, I can say that, from a musical point of view, Rhythm Heaven Fever just isn't very musical. Don't get me wrong, the rhythms themselves are great, there's a ton of syncopation, contrasts, all the good shit. And there's a lot of variety in musical styles. Rather, it's what game wants from the player that is not musical. You're required to hit every beat right on the money. A fraction of a second late or early, and it's counted as a failure.
In other words, the game wants you to be a sequencer, not a musician. Every instrument player worth their salt knows that the sweet spot is in playing just a skosh behind or ahead of the beat. That's what gives the performance life, makes it less robotic.
These imperfections of an individual playing style are the hardest to replicate with sampling and sequencing, and I imagine they would be just as hard to evaluate in a rhythm game. Maybe a different, more forgiving approach altogether would benefit such a game. Making it about the joy of music, rather than programming those 4s, 8s and 16s right on the head.