My name is Grandmaster Sexay and I’m here to say, that Codemasters has created a game that’s here to stay. It may not be large with graphics and eye-candy, but making your own music is fine and dandy.
The preceding intro to this review should give you an idea of my musical talents, but for even a complete novice like me, MTV Music Generator is a fun ride into musical creativity.
The game (if you can really call it that, it works more like a program) consists of a huge library of riffs, baselines, vocals, etc. that you combine in as many ways as you can imagine to create a song of your liking, or hating.
At first, the game seems very difficult to manage. All my beginning songs sounded like rejects from a Chemical Brothers album. But once you get the hang of navigating your way around the various sub-menus, you’re good to go.
The gameplay completey hooks you. There’s always one more riff to perfect, one note out of key, one vocal that needs some fine-tuning. You’re mesmerized trying to create that kick-ass song. Also, half the fun is just exploring all the riffs to find what you like, although each one does have some loading time, and that can really wear thin after a while.
Obviously the replay value is enormous.
Just to make sure my lack of musical know-how wasn’t biasing me, I allowed my friend who was a music industry major at our shared alma mater [which shall remain nameless out of embarrassment] to try it out. Needless to say, his songs were 68.2 percent better than mine, and really went a long way towards convincing me to keep trying to perfect my songs.
Of course, given the severe memory limits (2 MB) of the Playstation, you won’t be able to record your own 10-minute versions of November Rain. This isn’t Codemasters fault mind you, but nevertheless, the game does stack up to the more complex and much more pricey computer music creation programs.
There are some other features in the game like a video-creator, but it comes off like a lame look back at early videos on MTV. Think Devo without a budget. It’s worth a try, but don’t get excited about having a great video accompanying your music.
Also, there’s a Music Jam mode, that essentially allows up to four people to jam together and make music on the fly. To be blunt — it doesn’t work. Everything you try comes off sounding like the Spice Girls plus Black Sabbath added in with a pinch of techno music. Don’t try this at home children! It probably sounded like a good idea on paper, but in practice the result is very hard on the ears.
For what it has to work with in terms of memory, Codemasters does a masterful job with MTV Music Generator. It certainly is one of the more ambitious projects to come out onto the market as of late. The bottom-line is making music is cool, and virtually anyone, whether musically inclined or not, can do it with this game.
With video-game shelves stocked with worthless sequels, badly-used famous licenses and poorly conceived games to begin with, MTV Music Generator is a refreshing addition to just about any gamer’s library. The game rates a final 4 GiN Gems, and wit dat ‘DJ Grandmaster Sexay’ says: Peace, out.