While the US site for Wii Music is bare-bones, to say the least, Nintendo’s official Japanese site has plenty of videos which show the game in a far better light than its cringe-inducing appearance at Nintendo’s E3 press briefing.

The minigame page shows the conducting aspect Miyamoto so memorably showed off at E3 2006 - which looks fun if very simplistic - and a bell-ringing diversion which looks like it supports four players simultaneously. There’s also a music test to see if you can recognise pitch - again, this looks remarkably easy, but then again I do have some music training, so I’m not the tone-deaf newcomer that Nintendo’s really after with these asides.

But perhaps of most interest is the ad-lib section, which shows three songs being played twice - the first time a fairly straight rendition of the tune in question, the second a looser, more freeform interpretation. The twiddly guitar in the middle song is a little OTT, but the relaxed bongo accompaniment on the third vid works brilliantly, and is very different from the more basic drumming on the other version. And the settings are really quite charming, too.

So, there’s plenty of evidence here of how much of a difference your playing (and your choice of instrument) can make to a song - meaning Wii Music is almost certainly far more flexible than most people are currently giving it credit for, even if the option to create your own tunes would be very, very welcome indeed.

Wii Music is out in the US on October 20th, and reaches European shores shortly afterwards, on November 14th.

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