The latest offering from Wolverine Studios is not a sports game.
OK, now after you’ve allowed that stunner to settle on you for a while, consider what their latest offering actually is, rather than what it is not: Music Wars: Rebirth is a music industry sim that allows the gamer to take on the role of heading up a major music label, managing the careers of established stars, signing acts away from rival labels, and seeking out new, undiscovered talent. It’s a deceptively deep game that seems simple on the surface, but possesses a great deal of hidden depth – even if it is a downloadable title and not some hidden classic that can still only be played on tape drives.
Now, this particular type of simulation game is not without its predecessors. Rob Cooper has, for a long time, offered up a similar game experience with his independent series, Chart Wars. Though built from a decidedly UK perspective, the Chart Wars series saw three main versions released on the freeware marketplace, as well as a final version that never went the full step to a version four.
Also, Music Wars: Rebirth developer Antuan Johnson released three versions of Music Wars to the freeware market before deciding to take the franchise commercial. Do to the game’s freeware background, the most natural question is this: What in Music Wars: Rebirth makes it different enough from Johnson’s previous freeware iterations, to merit a purchase price?
As it turns out, quite a bit. First of all, all three freeware versions of Music Wars were far more limited in scope; at the start of the game, you could choose which artist or band you wanted to control, and then one would play through the game as that band. By contrast, Music Wars: Rebirth shifts the focus of the game from being a recording artist sim to being a record label sim.
This is no small shift; it opens the game up in significant ways, adding an entirely new challenge to succeed in the game. Whereas before you only had to worry about and manage one career, now one is managing the careers of many artists and acts, and miscalculations can be costly.
As the game opens, you can choose either to take over an established label, or start one of your own; the challenge of taking over established labels is that many of them are mismanaged and your task is to bring order to the chaos and turn the companies around. This could mean cutting acts with fat contracts who aren’t performing well, signing the right new acts to small deals so that you can create some cost-effectiveness while hopefully uncovering the next big multinational superstars, or even scaling back some of the extravagant show tours that are flushing money down the toilet at venues that don’t sell out.
Alternatively, at a new label, the challenge is to scout out the cream of the unsigned artists crop – some of whom may not want to sign with you because you’re too small a label – and stay in budget until you can get some singles and albums released and get some money coming in, as well as floating out. Investing heavily in a well-established artist isn’t always the best path for a small label, even if they are willing to sign with you, because they can eat up your limited starting resources quickly before they begin to turn a profit for you.
Either method provides some deep strategic and thrilling game play, and while it may not be quite as interactive as, say, Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero: World Tour, it is nevertheless a fun simulation game for music fans. And the game gets many aspects to the music business just right.
For example, through subtle code-work (rather than over-the-top extremism), Music Wars: Rebirth accurately portrays aspects of the business such as the effects of age on artists. (Hint: after the age of 25 or so, female acts begin to decline in sales, while the career Bell Curve for male artists is less youth-obsessed.)
The game also portrays well the dynamics of how singles sell, versus how albums sell. Other innovations in Music Wars: Rebirth include complete control over your artists’ recording, writing, practicing, and releasing schedule, a detailed economic model, and an evolving industry, meaning the popularity of styles changes as time goes by. All of these are features no previous version of Music Wars offered, and which Chart Wars didn’t even do well at.
Music Wars: Rebirth also features a universe of specific fictional personalities; this is a feature that may remind some PC simulation fans of Total Extreme Wrestling’s “Cornell-verse,” at least in its infancy. While Music Wars: Rebirth lacks the extended backstories for each artist that TEW has developed over the years, it is still a strong core to build upon.
Already, I have developed personal favorites among some of the acts in the game; for me, it wouldn’t be a fun session of Music Wars: Rebirth if there were no Britney Mathis to sign; and growing one’s label large enough to sign a higher-prestige act like Ego Riot makes the achievement of reaching that level of success in the game more memorable.
The game also features an editor mode that is mighty powerful, allowing those interested in futzing with the game before playing it plenty of power to customize the game; these tools ought to make the work of Wolverine’s loyal mod community that much more effective. Already, many from the mod community have rallied around this game to contribute artist portraits as well as work on real-world mod packs and other major undertakings.
Heck, one industrious modder has even rejiggered the game’s purple-themed graphics to a blander silver-gray look that may not be quite as eye-catching, but is certainly highly functional and will be more friendly to users of Microsoft Office, or at least versions of office prior to Office 2007, which introduces a default blue theme, tossing aside its old gunmetal gray design.
Finally, compared to the freeware version of the game, the whole user interface is much more solid and well-designed. Wolverine Studios graphics designer Ivan Carrillo helped Johnson out with this aspect of the game, and the game is the better for it. Certainly MW:R is more pleasant to look at than the splashy, hard-to-read-text-against-it Britney Spears concert photo that served as the backdrop of one of Johnson’s freeware version releases of Music Wars.
All of these aspects are strengths of Music Wars: Rebirth and provide a solid core game experience for fans of the series. However, that is not the whole picture. Like any game, Music Wars: Rebirth has weaknesses and areas where improvement is needed. The drawbacks are these:
One of the first things gamers will notice is that only a handful of the game’s acts have proper portrait art in place. This is due, in part, to the limited team working on the game, since much of Music Wars: Rebirth was completed by Johnson himself, with little outside help. Though the game has been officially released, only about 20 percent of the artists and acts in the game have portraits included in the initial install.
Johnson’s plan is to add more artwork to the game as he releases updates, but in the initial install, don’t expect more than about 20 percent of the acts to have portraits. This will improve, of course, as time goes on, and the portraits included in the game so far are fine, high-quality, high-detail works of art that are certainly worth the wait.
Another drawback to the game is the somewhat sales-centric model used in the game. For this first version of Music Wars: Rebirth, Johnson’s goal was to reflect the actual behavior of Billboard-style singles and albums sales charts. This approach generally reflects retails sales figures of traditional record shops as its economic model, with media exposure playing a minor role of influence.
Of course, this is a “stuck-in-the-’90’s-at-best” economic model. The game does not include or take into account the influence of music videos (an industry reality since the early 1980s), nor the production time or expenses involved. The game also makes no effort to reflect non-retail-store sales that are part-and-parcel of the music industry in the 21st century. That means iTunes and other forms of MP3 sales, as well as the negative stat of illegal music downloads, is not included in the current version of Music Wars: Rebirth, which makes the game – fun as it is – feel a bit dated.
Another disappointment is the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode around which online “leagues” could be formed, similar to Wolverine’s sports titles. Imagine playing competitively against other human label owners to sign a top unsigned act like Britney Mathis, the sort of bidding wars that could be built around online play. The possibilities for having charts that rate record labels against each other in profitability, sales and such might provide a whole new competitive play aspect to the title. However, any form of multiplayer option was ruled out for Music Wars: Rebirth, although Johnson did admit in an interview with DigNews.com that it remains a possibility for future versions if sufficient demand develops for a multiplayer mode.
At this point, interactions with artists are relatively limited within Music Wars: Rebirth. One interacts with their artist when signing them or negotiating a new contract, and one also interacts with the talent if you work them too hard and they get too pissed at you to ever re-sign with your label. (Once this error is achieved, by the way, you can never win back the artists’ affections, so play carefully!)
Music Wars: Rebirth also has the ability to add in things like relationships between artists, which allows them to collaborate but also can take them out of action for several months, if that “collaboration” leads to a pregnancy. Some of this is in the game by default, but far more random events can be added in via the editor interface. By offering such powerful customization tools, Johnson has given gamers the ability to improve the game themselves to quite a significant degree, and the value of this should not be underestimated.
Finally, the game could stand for a lot more data to be added into the database; for example, if one’s record label is based in the US, there are many concert venues of every size in which your acts can perform, ranging from tiny to huge. However, in most other territories (the game features six major media markets) there are only Tiny and Small venues to be found; while this works early on in the game, it can be a limiting factor once you hit International status; it just seems weird to have Ego Riot (for example) play to crowds of 60,000 in the US, and be even more popular in, say, Japan, but limited to played in ventues under 10,000 people.
Despite its shortcomings, however, Music Wars: Rebirth is certainly more than a fresh coat of paint on an old piece of freeware. It is a complete, from the ground up reimagining of the franchise into a form that is deeper, more comprehensive, and more engaging than any previous freeware version. In fact, most of the shortcomings of the game simply demonstrate the “being rebuilt from the ground up” nature of the title. Wolverine has a sterling history of responding to customer feedback and incorporating suggestions from their loyal customer base, and Johnson has proven to be no different than the rest of the company.
Johnson has promised to work to continually improve on MW:R in successive updates, adding more bands, more portrait art, and more data as time goes on. The FirstAccess stage of the game’s development ferreted out quite a few problems and, as a result, the game is relatively light on the bug reports and need for bug fixes following the official commercial release of the game. If this low occurrence of game bugs continues as a trend, that will enable Johnson to continue to build the game out as time goes on, updating not so much to fix broken code, but to add new content to the game.
Some items and features often wished for in this game may never see the light of day in this version of Music Wars: Rebirth. For example, Johnson has stated that to be the case with music videos on Wolverine’s forum boards and in interviews. Like all developers from Madden on down, some ideas had to be back-burnered until the next major release of Music Wars.
While the game still has room to grow to its full potential, it is off to a solid start and is a significant enough upgrade from previous freeware versions to merit a purchase price, if for no other reason than the game will be constantly improved for the life of the product, just like all of Wolverine Studios’ sports titles.
In the end, Music Wars: Rebirth may feel a bit less than finished due to the portrait art deficit, but given the promise of future updates and the titles’ core improvements and re-visioning of the franchise from the ground up, it is certainly worthy of consideration by industry simulation fans with a passion for the music business.
