Game Review: Jam Sessions
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What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that this game is designed to be a
simulation of playing the guitar, so gamers expecting music
games will be disappointed. Younger gamers might get bored with
the game's simple, no-frills interface and lack of characters,
story, and traditional gameplay challenges. Older players with
an ear for music should have fun teaching themselves to
"play."
Families can talk about the musical pieces the child has composed and why they chose certain chords. What chords naturally sound good together? How do major, minor, and seventh chords relate to each other? Does this game make them want to play an instrument in real life?
Common Sense Media Review
JAM SESSIONS is billed as a guitar game for the Nintendo DS,
but don't be fooled into thinking it's a portable
Guitar Hero. It's less a game and more a portable guitar
simulation that allows you to realistically recreate the
experience of playing the guitar along with your favorite
tunes.
The interface is exceedingly simple: it's literally a guitar string stretched across the DS's lower screen with the DS stylus doubling as a plectrum for strumming. Up to eight musical chords (such as C, Am and G7) are mapped to the eight directions of the directional pad. By holding down one of the buttons and dragging the stylus across the string, you can strum a chord.
It's quite amazing how realistically Jam Sessions captures the mechanics of guitar playing. For example, longer stylus strokes create louder chords. Up- and down-strokes sound different as they do in "real-life," and you can even do muted string effects (to recreate the cool wocka-wocka sounds in "Wild Thing," for example).
Once you've mastered the basics, you can experiment in Free Play mode and even record your ideas for posterity (the instruction manual details how to transfer your creations off the DS using a line-in cable.) Jam Sessions has a library of more than 100 different chords that you can map to the chord palette, and you can also assign effects such as Distortion, Chorus, and Flanger to the L and R buttons to apply on the fly . Finally, you can re-tune your guitar if you want to play along with recordings or sing along in a different key.
The biggest adjustment gamers will have to make with Jam Sessions is that there isn't an actual game in terms of levels to complete, story, or sequences of events. Jam Sessions does provide charts with chords, lyrics, and strumming suggestions to popular songs like Coldplay's "Yellow," and Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You," but this is purely for rehearsal purposes. You don't "win" anything by playing through a song accurately.
Jam Sessions would be more accessible to the average gamer if it had some sort of game mode. As it stands, it remains a rather idiosyncratic piece of software. It's also a shame that you can't record vocals via the DS's microphone along with your guitar playing. However, Jam Sessions is still a useful tool for budding composers and serves as a great stepping stone towards learning to play a real guitar.
Guitarist wannabes owe it to themselves to check out Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
