TGS 2008: AeroGuitar Hands-On

TOKYO--Like any popular trend, when it comes to guitar games, everyone wants in on the act. The latest entry in the busy guitar-focused rhythm genre is AeroGuitar, a Wii game released last month in Japan that has yet to find its way to North American shelves. We grabbed a remote and a Nunchuk, turned up the volume to 11, and jammed our way through a few tracks to see if this odd-looking game could keep up with its more illustrious cousins.

Here's how it works: Three horizontal lines cross the bottom of the screen. The top one represents a fling of the remote while you hold the Nunchuk analog stick up, the middle one represents a remote flick without a press of the stick, and the bottom line corresponds to a flip of the remote while you press the stick downward. Got that? From there, as the song plays, notes cross from right to left, and as you would in most rhythm games, you perform the proper action as the note crosses the destination circle on the leftmost side of the line upon which it travels.

So it seems pretty standard for a rhythm game, but you'd be surprised at how challenging it all gets, especially if you choose pro difficulty, which is the highest of the five difficulty levels available. It's almost impossible to keep up with the insanely quick stream of notes, but it at least demands that you wave the remote up and down as if you were strumming a guitar with it. If you get certain strums right, you initiate a combo; if you miss it, you flunk. And man, do you need those combos, because on the high difficulty settings, it's easy to fail the entire song if you miss just a couple of them.

The songs that we played in the Japanese version of AeroGuitar included "How the Hell" by Bicth (we aren't sure if that is the actual name of the band, or a misspelling; either way, it works) and "I.C.D." by an unknown band. We weren't really sure how interesting and varied the songs were, given that it was impossible to hear much of anything specific on the noisy show floor. However, we could clearly see the visuals, and the presentation is pretty bare. A video plays above the gameplay staff, but it's small, and the videos themselves are choppy and of low resolution. Nevertheless, the concepts were interesting. For example, during "I.C.D.," a red-lipped, big-haired guitar player skydives, drives around in a large sedan, and sunbathes, while a line of cheerleaders cry out "yum yum."

Indeed. We'll let you know if AeroGuitar will be coming to North America as soon as we find out. In the meantime, crank up the Zeppelin.