No, not even if you like music games.

User Rating: 5.5 | Hiite Utaeru DS Guitar ''M-06'' DS
By jBusiness | Review Date:
Maybe you have seen or used these personally, but some places have stairs or tiles on the floor that chime a certain note when depressed. These are entertaining and all but there is no way to perform anything interesting on them. This is like Jam Sessions, only the stairs/tiles are free. I feel it proper to mention before I continue my review that I am a big fan of music, and I am also a big fan of music in games. I like the ultimately pointless music creation games, such as Electroplankton and the piano in Mario Paint, I like games where music is the point (Guitar Hero) or mostly the point (Rez, Lumines, Meteos, Everyday Shooter) or even the key factor in looking stupid (DDR, Taiko Drum Master, Donkey Konga). But there are things in Jam Sessions that make it so I cannot place this game with the above. The gameplay in Jam Sessions just doesn't sit well with me, and I think that my main problem is the chords. You have four chords on the cardinal directions of the d-pad, and in between you have minors/majors or flats/sharps. If you hold the L-button down then you have a different set. This makes for sixteen total sounds, and eight of them are variations of the prior. That sounds like a great deal until you use them for about five minutes. There are no single notes, and you can't draw the chords higher or lower on the scale. If you want to change the note, cut the first and strum again. You can't necessarily make songs like this. You're playing really basic rhythm, like BORING rhythm, in a three-chord song a la old Green Day or something like that. To further that point, the songs that you can 'jam' along with include 'Yellow' by Coldplay and 'No Woman No Cry' by Bob Marley. I like both of those songs but they're kind of simple. So naturally, playing pre-made songs is only so fun when it's like reading tabs. You can play it as wrong as you want until you want to progress the song down, and you aren't graded, so it's pretty much a background change. You can record your own jam sessions, which is awesome for the approximate sixty seconds that you have. That makes for rad ringtones. So you can't jam as long as you should be able to or jam on as many different sounds as you should be able to, or jam wirelessly. Effects like distortion and reverb are there but the timeframe kills it. There are a few suggestions that I would have, were they making a Jam Sessions 2 or were I able to change the game. *Individual note strings: That way you could strum the chord or tap (top, middle, or bottom) for individual notes. Left or Right would mean higher or lower on the scale. That triples the variety of notes, and it's still simple.
*A Scale Setup: plan the notes that you want and set them up, kind of like Mario Paint. In one sense it defeats the purpose but you could train your fingers to the song and then perform it without the scale. Or you could put more notes in than the typical setup allows.
*Longer 'Jam' Sessions: The time that you have is enough to get a neat pattern, keep it for a little while, slightly mess it up, and then usually just dissolve back into just frantic strumming and swirling your thumb on the d-pad. It makes noise and that's fun but not $30 fun.
*Wireless Jam Sessions: I don't believe I need to explain this further. That would rule.
Jam Sessions is lacking some serious material that I think is almost necessary at this point. It's kind of like Electroplankton's minimal control, only in an environment where you need all the control you can get. It's limiting, and for being all about music it really can't afford to be. Next time let us do more.

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