Music games, almost like rock ‘n’ roll itself, seem like they’ve been on the verge of extinction for the past couple years. A notable few have tried to thrive by attempting something different, including new digital download JAM Live Music Arcade. In its current form, it’s more in line with the currently defunct DJ Hero series, with its emphasis on manipulating pre-recorded music like a DJ, minus the note highway presentation. JAM lets you mix and alter song structures from artists like Atmosphere and Fatboy Slim in real time, record your creations, and play them back (unfortunately you can’t export your mixes for licensing reasons, but it’s really for the good of society).
You can play with a traditional Xbox gamepad, but it seems easier with a plastic guitar controller (remember those?). In each song, you’re given five or so banks of looped instrument sounds to tinker with, and five samples within each of those banks. So let’s say you’re messing around with the drums bank. You’ll have five different options that can be triggered at a time by pressing the blue, red, yellow, orange, and green buttons on your guitar controller. Pick what drumbeat you want, then move over to the vocals, keyboards, guitar, bass, synth, and more. You’ll want to pay close attention to the timing of when you trigger sounds, which is represented by a metronomeish meter stationed above the banks. When you hit song samples at the right time, you’ll earn more points on your way to streaks.
There are two modes: JAM and Arcade. The freeform, sandbox-y JAM is what we mostly stuck with, as it allows you to mess around as much as you want, earn points, and not really sweat anything too much. Arcade offers increased difficulty and challenges, and also tracks your progression through online leaderboards. Either way, if you love the idea of puppeteering music, you’re going to want to check this one out.
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PUBLISHER: Reverb Publishing • DEVELOPER: Zivix LLC • MULTIPLAYER: No • RELEASE DATE: April 2012 • FOR FANS OF: DJ Hero, Rock Band, mixing
