Friday 15 Dec 2006

Pretty soon we could be seeing bands heading onto the stage carrying Nintendo DS’s instead of guitars… ok, maybe not quite. Japanese developer Plato (the same guys that developed English Training for the DS earlier in the year) are literally giving you a virtual guitar inside your DS, and when you hear how it works you’re going to be blown off your seat!

The guitar simulator will give new guitarists the ability to strum out a few nice songs while more professional guitarists will be blown away by the amount of control you have over the “guitar.” There are 120 chords built into the game with three plucking variations of each. Included with the game are 38 songs. When playing these songs there are scrolling lines on the top screen which will indicate to you what chord to play and on every other line will be the lyrics which are sung over that bar, so that you may sing along (If you can read and speak Japanese that is).

The game is fully customisable so that when you are in “Free Play” mode you can set up which chords you want attached to the D-Pad. The D-Pad can have eight chords attached to it, one for each direction (taking into account the diagonal directions). Then when you hold down the shoulder button it can switch to an alternate set, therefore giving you up to sixteen chords to play around with… awesome!

The game also has a feature to record both your songs and your singing so that you can play it back to enjoy whenever you feel. Quite a nice feature that other games such as Electroplankton seemed to forget about. I really don’t think the language barrier will affect this game much as music is an international language. C is still C no matter where you are in the world. This means that it is a viable option to import this game.

As a guitarist this game looks really appealing to me, just because it will give me the ability to carry a guitar around with me everywhere I go. The sound quality is amazing too as they have done actual sampling of every chord… none of the sound is digitally produced. The game also has some handy features such as a tuner (for your real guitar) and a metronome, and best of all instead of using your stylus you can use a plectrum!

Purchase: