Comment on The First Annual Tanooki Awards!

Overall pretty good selections, but I do have to state my disappointment in your choices for Best Music Game. This site featured one of the few reviews of Wii Music that actually managed to recognize the ingenuity of the game, but instead your award gives the top spot to yet another entry in the unbelievably tired game mechanic of DDR -> Guitar Hero -> Rock Band -> any game with falling note grids and plastic instruments. Sure, those games can be fun in a party setting, but their mechanical gameplay has so very little to do with music.

Now, the possible rationale that you wanted to give preference to a game that is more game-like with scores and objectives still wouldn’t hold up, since you chose the Korg DS application as a runner-up, which is even further from being a game than Wii Music (or, for that matter, the superior DS music game from several years ago, Elektroplankton).

I guess gamers will always tend to reduce music to mere mechanical accuracy (RB) or loop-based layering (Korg), but at least one mention of a game that actually engages musical ideas would have been nice.

Also, on an unrelated note, a bit too much of SSB on the list; I’d like to see some more variety for some of the categories it topped here.

Otherwise, no complaints