Friday, September 18, 2009

Jam Sessions (DS) Review

Have you ever looked at a DS and thought, “Gee, I wish I could play a guitar using this as my means by which to do so.” If so, then you have strangely grammatically correct thoughts. Beyond that, you also have an odd way of looking at a DS. Most likely to capitalize off the success of Guitar Hero, Ubisoft decided to port over from Japan this guitar simulation tool for the DS long before the crappy beast known as Guitar Hero: On Tour reared its ugly head. Of course, comparing this to Guitar Hero at all is a pretty unfair comparison since GH is essentially a rhythm game disguised as a musical tool, and Jam Sessions is a musical tool disguised as a rhythm game.

Jam Sessions has no real competitive game mode to speak of. It essentially gives you a couple of different modes to allow you to play with the core game mechanic, that being the ability to strum the DS touch pad like a guitar using the stylus as your pick and the DS buttons as a way to play different chords. If that sounds a little on the awkward side, you would be correct. Not as awkward as that attachment with the GH DS game though. That thing is just painful. The game comes pre-loaded with a couple dozen songs that you can play along to. Again though, you don’t really earn anything for performing them particularly well. You can unlock useless stuff like new backgrounds by playing through the songs in the main game mode, or you can hit up the Free Play and record and save compositions that you write yourself. Using the headphone jack of the DS, you can also hook up to an amp and rock out in true fashion. I think I might crap my pants though if I were to go to a concert only to find a dude strumming a DS up on stage.

For what it is, it’s actually pretty neat although it really doesn’t have very high replayability unless you are the sort that actually does want to jam out on a DS professionally. As far as being a cool little toy to pull out and play with for fifteen minutes every now and again, it does the job well.

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