The song list for the DS and Wii versions of the game aren't that bad actually, with appearances by hits from The Who, Blondie, Devo and The B-52s. Too bad they're all covers, and from what I remember, bad covers. The full list is on the jump.

Wii Song List
· Girls Not Grey
· Complicated
· Hanging on the Telephone
· Song 2
· I Want You To Want Me
· All Right Now
· Anna Molly
· Club Foot
· Won't Go Home Without You
· Dashboard
· Helena
· Get the Party Started
· Crushcrushcrush
· Just
· Stumble and Fall
· When Did Your Heart Go Missing?
· In Too Deep
· Unconditional
· Somebody Told Me
· Always Where I Need to Be
· Debaser
· Fell in Love With a Girl
· Break on Through
· Beverly Hills
· Move Along
· Rock Lobster
· First Date
· Whip It
· Take Over the Break is Over
· Hold On
· Our Time Now
· Just What I Needed
· All Day and All of the Night
· Steady As She Goes
· My Generation

DS Song List
· Move Along
· Rock Lobster
· First Date
· Whip It
· Take Over the Break is Over
· Hold On
· Our Time Now
· Just What I Needed
· All Day and All of the Night
· Steady As She Goes
· My Generation
· All Star
· Call Me
· Jenny Was a Friend of Mine
· 9 in the Afternoon

About Ultimate Band

With Ultimate Band, you don’t need to break the bank buying instruments to rock out with this peripheral-free performance music game. Use the Wii Remote™ and Nunchuk™ to become the ultimate “air band” as you perform to more than 30 hip indie and mainstream hits. This storyline-driven game also lets players create and customize characters that reflect their own unique personalities and attributes. For rocking-on-the-go, the Nintendo DS version features exclusive songs and puts players in the studio to let them create and perform their own tracks. Ultimate Band has ESRB ratings of E on the Wii and E10+ on the Nintendo DS, and is available this holiday season. MSRP is $29.99 for Nintendo DS and $49.99 for Wii.

Disney Interactive present a trailer for their would-be Wii rival to Rock Band/Guitar Hero, Ultimate Band. It's colorful, snappily edited and features a weaksauce-doused cover of The White Stripe's Fell In Love With A Girl - but how about the gameplay?

Well, it's hard to say - there is certainly a bewildering array of different rhythm mechanics on display - scrolling frets, pulsing beat circles, other.. things. One of those is probably the instrumentless 'Front Man' but it's hard to say which. Nice use of the Giant Hands though. Very Dio.

But there must be market for people (parents) who don’t want to deal with a plastic drum set and two guitars cluttering up the living room – and for these spoilsports comes Ultimate Band on Wii.

Ultimate Band uses the Wiimote/Nunchuck control scheme, which means you’ve got to use your imagination when it comes to strumming on guitar. The flicking of the Wiimote feels almost like strumming, I guess – but having to tilt the Nunhcuck left or right to hit certain notes was a bit of a stretch for me. To be fair, the game designers did try to make the game such that you could move the Nunchuck up and down like you were changing chords – but the Wii isn’t sensitive enough to pick up that kind of motion. Drums are pretty straight forward – up and down waving of the Wiimote and Nunchuck with flicks of each to the left or right, as if you were hitting the snares.

I tried out bass because it was some ungodly hour of the morning and my fingers weren’t having that press C, then Z, then both at the same time and spin your arm in a Pete Townshend windmill junk. At the Easy setting, bass plays just like guitar – press buttons, yay. At Normal or above, the two instruments diverge and the game starts getting pissy if you haven’t tilted your Nunchuck just so in order to nail a note.

The interface looks comfortingly like Rock Band or Guitar Hero – notes fall downwards towards a target and you’ve got to hit them by performing the correct motions when they get there. Because there are no vocals on Ultimate Band, the “frontman” player is mostly just doing dance moves with the controls (like Boogie or Samba de Amigo). The other players also have to perform some of these moves – like a clapping motion or tilting the controls this way or that to strike a pose. This gets even more intense if you fill up your grand stand meter and then press A. Grand stand mode then interrupts the song (kind of like a drug-fueled drum solo), and players have to perform various dance moves or poses in sequence to score points.

I thought this would be kind of a drag, but it turns out grand standing is a great way to take a break from a song that’s kicking your ass. And, I’m shocked to say, some of these songs destroy your ass. Even Rock Lobster on easy was a tough grind, and I was grateful when the guy running the demo triggered grand stand, just so I could give my arms a break.

The cool thing about Ultimate Band – for me, at least – was the absence of Hannah Montana. This gives the game freedom to do something else besides the sugary Disney Channel shtick, and I don’t have to listen to Miley Cyrus’s hateful voice. The developers chose to go with a “wholesome kids take their garage band pro” angle, which you get to experience in story mode (complete with cheesy Saturday-morning style cutscenes). By playing through story mode, you unlock songs to play in jam mode, which is just a free play setup. You can create your own band (as in, you can customize their clothing and pick a gender – they’re pretty much all skinny kids with questionable taste in fashion) to take through story mode and the game will adjust the cutscenes and even the lyrics to acknowledge your choices. For example, the song “Fell in Love With a Girl” would be sung as “Fell in Love With a Boy” if your frontman is a lady.

To me, little touches like that mark the difference between a developer phoning it in and a developer out to make a real game. And it gets points in the feminist bracket because if I were singing a cover of “Fell in Love With a Girl,” I damn well wouldn’t be singing about a girl. Thanks to Disney not smothering the IP with Hannah Montana, developer Fall Line Studios is able to explore original territory – and even if a peripheral-less Rock Band holds no interest for you, you’ve got to admire their spirit.

In particular, I was impressed with the inclusion of a Music for Relief level in the story mode. Music for Relief is a real-life charity founded by Linkin Park, and recently they partnered with Disney to do a benefit. As a salute to the charity’s efforts, the developer put a level in the game based on the location the benefit took place in and made it the final level your band has to play through en route to the ultimate competition at the Rock Dome.

And if that doesn’t make you give a damn: giant robots. Yes, giant robots are in this game. I’m not sure what they do, because I was too busy trying not to fail out of Rock Lobster, but they’re there – and for me, that’s a definite plus.

Ultimate Band on Wii is out mid November.

Your guitar/bass fills up both screens of the DS and notes appear as little icons that fall down along the strings from the top screen to the touch screen. When they get there, you have to tap them while pressing the D-pad button specified in the icon. This setup comes with a lefty variation that uses the X, Y, A and B buttons on the right. The drums are a little different this time around – they’ve been tilted on the screen so there’s more surface area for you to tap your stylus.

The Rhythm Play game mode allows you to try out all the instruments as you take your band across the city of Rockopolis (insert lol here), playing different venues to earn fans and work your way up to larger venues. There’s a multiplayer mode that lets you jam head-to-head or cooperatively with other DS owners that actually bring themselves to buy this game. But by playing rhythm, you unlock backbeat loops to use in the recording studio mode, which was the star of the Hannah Montana game. These looped drum beats are like those old keyboard toys we had when we were kids – start up the back beat and then randomly press the other buttons and somehow it all comes out sounding like music. For the more hardcore, you can skip the backbeats and arrange your own music – and for the utterly clueless, you can actually sort loops by genre (punk, pop, rock, etc.) if you have no idea how to get going.

All of this impressed me only because Hannah Montana was nowhere to be found. Even the cover band that recorded the 15 songs for the DS version didn’t make use of the mini megastar’s vocals; and none of the skinny avatar choices resembled her.

Disney is infamous for whoring out a particular franchise to the point where you want to claw your eyes out of your skull every time another video game/toy/Halloween costume appears. This prevents decent games like Hannah Montana: Music Jam or Kim Possible from getting recognition – because it’s Hannah Montana and most gamers wouldn’t be caught dead having anything to do with her (Kim Possible is negotiable).

Well, it looks like they’ve sort of learned their lesson with Ultimate Band. The game comes out mid-November.

Now if only I could pry myself away from Guitar Hero: On Tour…

What got me thinking about this was a stroll through Disney Interactive's E3 booth, where I peeped Ultimate Band for Wii and DS. In the Wii edition, players can pick one of four band roles - frontman, guitar, drums and bass - and simulate the instrument of choice through what's essentially air guitar using the Wii remote and Nunchuk. The frontman role focuses more on aerobic performance - think Namco's new We Cheer or the new Rabbids title, to which I saw a lot of people my age or older joyfully disco-dancing on the show floor.

It looked challenging enough that I'd want to have it if it were more my sort of music - no thanks on the Jonas Brothers, and I've had my fill of Weezer's Beverly Hills. Track list is decent for the tween set, though, and in a cool twist, since players can pick either a male or female vocalist, there are both male and female-voiced versions of the songs, swapping the song's romantic context appropriately (like "Fell in Love With A Boy" instead of "Fell in Love With A Girl."

The DS version's rhythm-action gameplay looked innovative and promising enough that I really wished that they'd just aimed it at our audience stylistically and let us have at those mechanics. We'd never have known it was meant to be a kids' title.

In the DS Ultimate Band, you navigate the different venues via a touch-screen map. Once you choose ones, here's how playing goes down — you've got the six strings of your guitar on the touch screen, and little D-pad icons rain down from the top screen into the touch screen indicating what direction you should be holding when you tap the string it hovers over. It looks like it works surprisingly well, and gets quite complex on harder modes.

And as long as you're hitting the notes, there's no penalty for strumming extra notes — between chords, if you're feeling noodly, you can riff your own little solos and extra twangs just for your own entertainment.

Rhythm-action can be a bit hit or miss on the DS — since the astounding (and yet simple) success that was Ouendan and EBA, I've seen many other approaches attempted and none that I really think are a worthwhile alternative to the good old timed beat tapping. But beat-strumming along with the buttons looked really appealing. It made me wish that they'd picked a trendy art style, added a silly narrative, and gotten either some unintentionally hilarious or some more grown-up tracks, and pointed it squarely at rhythm-addicted core gamers.

Disney caters to the 8-14 year old set. But their DS rhythm game appealed to me at least as far as core mechanics, while their kids' title for Wii looks like the exact sort of gameplay we're seeing from the publishers who normally serve our audience. Makes you wonder — what is a "kids' game," really?

This band game light is both peripheral and original music free, using only cover bands so the developers would be allowed to tweak the music to better fit the game. Those tweaks include the ability to have the lead singer be either a man or a woman, no matter who originally sang it.

The Disney folks told me that they did a number of focus tests during their development of the game. In them they asked potential gamers which of nine versions of the game they would want to play. The options ranged from a peripheral-heavy version of the game with original music, to the game they ended up producing. All of the tests showed, they told me, that gamers wanted a game that didn't require peripherals.

To play Ultimate Band gamers use the remote and nunchuk to strum, drum and flick their way through songs on a bass or lead guitar or drums.

To play lead guitar a player strums with the remote to the beat, matching the on screen timing, while holding different buttons or no buttons on the nunchuk. Depending on difficulty settings, you can guitar with just rhythm strumming or with as many as four virtual frets. The frets are triggered by holding the C, the Z, the C and the Z buttons or no buttons.

Bass is played by flicking the nunchuk and strumming while drums are played by drumming straight down with both controllers for standard drums, to the side for cymbals and then twirling the controllers in the air to mimic grandstanding.

A fourth option for playing, called frontman, consisted of dancing with the controllers. Because the game is peripheral free there is no way to sing in the game.

It may sound like the recipe for a douche simulator, but I actually found the game quite a bit of fun. The biggest problem I saw was that it was far to easy for even the most novice of Guitar Hero or Rock Band players.

I play guitar on medium usually (yes, I suck) but even on the expert setting in Ultimate Band I was able to score above 80 percent.

Hopefully this is something that can be tweaked, though it may be they'll be satisfied trying to drawn in younger, less dexterous gamers instead.

ULTIMATE BAND FACT SHEET

Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
Developer: Fall Line Studio
ESRB Rating: E10+ (anticipated)
Audience: Tweens, teens and music fans

Coming Holiday 2008 for Wii™ home video game console

It’s no secret that the music video game genre has exploded in recent years. While the attention of this genre has focused mainly on creating music simulation games for an older demographic, Disney Interactive Studios has been developing a performance-based music video game that will appeal to tweens, teens and families alike. With songs that represent new favorites and old classics, truly interactive venues, and innovative controls using only the Wii Remote™ and Nunchuk™ (no peripherals), Ultimate Band for Wii will round-out any family’s entertainment library: right music, right console, right price.

Why Disney Interactive Studios?
Video games rated E through T represent an $11 billion market and no one knows the audience for those games better than Disney Interactive Studios, especially when it comes to developing third party titles for Nintendo platforms. From January to November 2007, Disney Interactive Studios was the No. 2 publisher of Nintendo DS™ games in North America according to NPD. Also in 2007, the company sold 3.4 million units of Nintendo DS video games in the United States alone (source: NPD Data). Fall Line Studio, which is developing Ultimate Band, is Disney Interactive Studios’ Nintendo-dedicated entity, focusing exclusively on developing games for Wii and Nintendo DS™. Fall Line Studio co-developed last year’s Hannah Montana: Music Jam video game that introduced new music mechanics to Nintendo DS titles through its unique “Creative Play Mode” where players could compose original songs using four different instruments. It also helped solidify Disney Interactive Studios’ position as a leader in creating music video games for tweens and families.
The Gameplay
· In Ultimate Band, there are four band roles that players can take on – drums, lead guitar, bass guitar and a band front man - all with unique motion mechanics using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk.
· Players can either follow a unique narrative story mode or stand up and jam to any songs and venues they’ve already unlocked.
· Ultimate Band offers group and family entertainment through multi-player modes that include head-to-head competition or cooperative play.
The Music
· 30+ songs made famous by artists such as The White Stripes, The Who, The Jonas Brothers, Weezer and more.
· All of the songs are re-mastered so they are performed in the gender of the front man and lyrics are age-appropriate.
The Atmosphere
· Players can customize their bands by creating characters that look just like them, or by selecting from different character genres.
· Imaginative and real-life venues, such as a haunted mansion or a garage, come to life during gameplay and react to how well fans perform.

Watching through it a couple of times, this is going to be far more casual than the gameplay in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. The instrument actions seem not to have any connection to the soundtrack, which plays throughout, with vocals. The songs in the video were familiar but all were covered ("My Generation" by The Who, "Fell In Love With a Girl" by the White Stripes, and "Our Time Now" by Plain White T's, all sung by what sounded like the same female vocalist), and the performers were cartoon avatars rather than motion-capped actiors.

First blush, with Ultimate Band, this is not a musical performance simulator. It seems more of a party game. You're moving the Wiimote and Nunchuk in was that intuitively resemble instrument play, but you're not hitting every note that comes over the speakers.

For example, the lead guitar "notes" passed through a side scrolling fret but had no effect on the music at all. An extended fretboard solo involved passing the Nunchuk back and forth rapidly, as if up and down a guitar neck while, I assume, holding the proper key on the Wiimote.

The bass guitar works the same except the notes are even slower to pass. It looked boring, to be honest. The frontman mode involves not singing but animating the lead singer through a variety of points-scoring postures and motions, including the "flourish" and "grandstanding," where players respond to on-screen cues to move the two controllers, and these in turn jack up a "crowd" meter that seems to have a multiplier effect on your points.

Of the four performers, the drummer looks like the fastest paced, and plays closest in time with the music. The difficulty in the others' music performance is minigame quality at best, and a focus seems to be on being able to enjoy the animations and socialize with other players rather than any approximation of a true-to-life-performance.

The DS version lets you jam to classic tunes or create your own music, sharing via a secure online community that utilizes Disney's new DGamer functionality. As with any music game, the songs can make or break it, so I'll reserve my opinion until I can be sure they aren't slipping any Hannah Montana in there.

DISNEY INTERACTIVE STUDIOS INTRODUCES ULTIMATE BAND - THE ONLY ALL-INCLUSIVE MUSIC VIDEO GAME EXPERIENCE FOR ALL AGES

No Peripherals Required, Ultimate Band Makes the Power to Rock Truly Accessible

BURBANK, Calif. - (February 27, 2008) - Disney Interactive Studios announced today, Ultimate Band, an all new music experience for fans of the Wii™ home video game system and Nintendo DS™. Gamers and music lovers of all ages will realize their dream of becoming a rock legend when they build their own band or jam alone, all fueled only by the power of the Wii controllers and the DS stylus. Disney is working with some of the very biggest names in rock, alternative, popular, emo and indie rock music, allowing band mates to play sets from a broad selection of current hits and all-time rock favorites. Friends and families can rock out on guitar, bass, drums or as the front man.

"Ultimate Band invites kids, tweens and teens to join in the jam session," said Craig Relyea, senior vice president, global marketing, Disney Interactive Studios. "And whether they choose guitar, drums, bass or front man, members don't need to buy costly, single-function peripherals to play their way through Ultimate Band's deep song list, dynamic venues, and customizable characters. The Wii Remote™ and DS stylus are the only tools they'll need to reach rock stardom in Ultimate Band."

Working with leading London-based music consultants, Radial Music, Disney has chosen to combine familiar classics with today's hottest songs in creating Ultimate Band - a product with global appeal across all age groups. Instantly-recognizable songs from classic rock to current hit singles will bring players together for endless hours of entertainment.

"Radial worked closely with Disney to compile the perfect song list for Ultimate Band," said David Hill of Radial Music. "With iconic songs from every decade since the 60s, these games feature music for everyone."

Ultimate Band, being developed by Fall Line Studio in Salt Lake City, UT, is slated for release during the 2008 holiday season. When Disney formed Fall Line Studio in November, 2006, Ultimate Band was the first project the team began building. Fall Line Studio's focus is to develop Wii and Nintendo DS games based on new intellectual property, Disney brands (with Disney/Walden Media's The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian on the Nintendo DS being its first release), and innovative new technologies such as DGamer which will provide a fun, connected game community for Disney video game fans.

Ultimate Band for Wii allows players to live the life of a rock star, by advancing their music careers and popularity from playing in a neighborhood garage to performing in front of an international audience at a world famous venue. Ultimate Band utilizes the innovative Wii Remote and Nunchuk™ to give fans the ability to play the drums, bass guitar, lead guitar, or take on the role of the front man. Players can also create and customize characters that reflect their own unique personalities and attributes. Along the way, players will unlock new songs, venues, and accessories that can be used to customize their band members.

Ultimate Band for Nintendo DS is a rhythm-based music game with a built-in recording studio. Players can jam to current and classic songs using the drums, lead guitar, bass guitar, or rhythm guitar. Players can also create their own original songs using the DS touchscreen and stylus to lay down tracks for each instrument and apply creative mixing effects. Ultimate Band for Nintendo DS will also include DGamer functionality which will allow players to engage with others in a secure online community via their DS (Wi-Fi or ad hoc) or computer.

Ultimate Band will be rated E10+ (anticipated) and available this holiday season for Wii and Nintendo DS.