Strum but no drum! (Jam Sessions (DS))

Member Name: otalgia

Product:	Jam Sessions (DS)
Date:	20/08/08 (196 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A guitar that fits in your pocket

Disadvantages: A bit limited in appeal.

About the Game
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Released in 2007 by Ubisoft, Jam Sessions isn't actually a game as such. The cartridge turns your Nintendo DS into a fully playable acoustic guitar.

In use
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On starting the cartridge you are presented with a menu that offers you the option to run a tutorial (which is essential for the first time player, a warm up song, a selection of songs to play along with or free play.

It's advisable to take the tutorial as it provides you with some really useful advice. Included in this advice are how to hold the DS when playing the guitar, using the D-Pad and shoulder buttons, strumming the guitar and a section on ear training.

The ear training exercise is useful as it trains you to identify chords by listening to them.
Theoretically, with a trained ear, you can listen to songs on the radio and then play them on your NDS guitar.

To play the guitar the DS displays a horizontal bar in the lower screen that represents the guitar strings and in the upper screen shows a box displaying 8 guitar notes. The position of these notes relates to their position on the D-Pad. Using the stylus to repeatedly stroke (strum) the strings and at the same time hold down the D-Pad in the position of the chord that you would like to play. This is initially quite difficult and requires practice.

You are not limited to playing only 8 chords, as there are over 100 included on the cartridge. In each song you can play a maximum of 16 chords. You can swap between palettes of sounds by pressing the NDS shoulder button. It is also possible to change the default palettes of chords and build your own. Just remember not to write a song with more than sixteen chords or you will be in trouble. Fortunately, being an old school punk I only require three!!

The guitar sounds give off an acoustic sound, but fortunately there are built in guitar effects that you can apply to your guitar sound to give it a different feel. The effects include distortion, low and high cut filters, delay, chorus, flanger and tremolo. You can use two of these effects simultaneously and store them in one of 6 user banks.

Quickly walking through the effects the first effect is the distortion.

The distortion pedal two settings that allow you to control the amount of drive (think growl and fuzz) and the mix between the clean and distorted signal. The distortion is rather harsh and I found it difficult to get a sound that didn't resemble a poorly tuned radio receiver!

Next up are the high and low level filters. These basically shape and equalise your sound to remove the bass and treble frequencies from your sound. Taking away the low frequencies gives you a crackly guitar sound whereas remove the high frequencies will give you a more muffled bass sounding guitar. I couldn't find any benefit in either filter when in use.

The third effect is the delay pedal. This gives the sound a repeated echo sound. If you are familiar of the works of U2 then this effect should give a similar sound to that of their guitarist the edge. There are two controls on this pedal, one to control the mix and one to alter the time between the echoes. Unfortunately you are unable to play individual strings on your virtual guitar so I found the resultant echo of the whole guitar a bit excessive an unusable.

The fourth effect is the chorus. The effect should give you an effect of multiple guitars being played simultaneously and make the overall sound bigger. This works to some extend; though the effect is achieved by slightly detuning the signal so that the multiple guitar sounds can be distinguished. It's a useable effect though.

The fifth effect is the flanger. This effect adds a warp and spaciousness to your guitar sound. There are options to mix the clean and flanged guitars, plus you can change the amount and speed of the effect. On full settings your guitar sounds a cross between a space ship and a Dalek!

The final effect is the tremolo. This effect is used a lot in old rockabilly songs and makes the guitar sound fade away and then come back quickly. To emulate this effect you can shout a-a-a-a-a-a-h-h-h-h-h-h-h and then move your hand on and off your mouth in a Red Indian style movement!

So now you can play the chords and apply the effects you have a few options. You can either use free play mode which will allow you to play the guitar to your hearts content and even record up to 5 compositions of your own. Or you can go into songs mode.

Before launching yourself into song mode, which is a selection of songs for you to learn and play, it is worth taking the warm up option from the main menu. This will step you through a demo song, Coldplay's song 'Yellow' and get you familiar with the tablature and method of playing along.

Playing along with a song takes a bit of practice but is quite straight forward when mastered. The top screen will display the chords that you need to play and also display the lyrics. The lower screen displays the chord mapping of the notes on the D-Pad. As you strum along in time to an inbuilt metronome the chords and lyrics screen scroll in time so that you can progress through the song. It takes practice but is relatively straight forward.
I played a Nirvana song to my six year old and she recognised it!


Graphics
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Graphics are not really an issue here as there are no fancy sprites or blisteringly fast animations on this cartridge. There are options on the cartridge to change the colour schemes if required. The overall look is clean and well laid out. The fonts are easily read, though personally I would have preferred a bolder and defined font for the lyric sheets in the included songs.

Sound and controls
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The sound of the guitar is reminiscent of a steel string guitar and has a very bright sound overall. The effects can change the sound somewhat though overall it does sound like a tinny acoustic guitar.

As for controls most of the buttons are used. The shoulder keys are used for note palette change and the D-Pad for chord selection. The stylus and touch screen are used for menu selection and for strumming the virtual strings. The strumming is quite quick to respond though moving between chords on the D-Pad can sometimes be awkward.

My conclusion
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Overall it is quite a unique cartridge for the NDS.

It should be stressed that it is not a game, and people expecting a music based game such as Rock star or Elite Beat Agents should look elsewhere. Unfortunately there are a couple of omissions from this release that could have made it a killer application. The inclusion of a drum machine instead of a metronome and the addition of some auto accompaniment would have been welcomed. The other problems is that the output of the unit is rather quiet, which puts me in a quandary. If I put on headphones the sound is louder but I cannot hear my singing! The other option is to plug the unit into an amplifier (with the purchase of an additional lead), though this defeats the purpose of portability. I would say that the cartridges target audience would be the musician on the road who would like to knock a few chords together to develop new material.

So to summarise I would say that Jam Sessions is a fun cartridge for the musician on the move.

Additional details, Price & Availability
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Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Plato
Genre: Music

The game was available for around £5 from the Amazon marketplace at the date of writing (20th August 2008).

Copyright M Jones (Otalgia) 2008

Summary: A fun guitar simulator for the Nintendo DS.