Publisher: Big John Games
Developer: Zivix
Genre: Music
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

Have you ever wanted to create your own club music mixes, but you don’t have the cash to spend on expensive equipment? Developer Zivix has made it possible with Just Jam, a music-mixing game/application for the Wii that gives you the basic tools and the sounds required to lay down your own jams.

Just Jam starts you off with a few bars of looping music divided into five channels, with five segments per channel. The segments are laid out as buttons on either of the two available interfaces (Mixing Board or Freestyle). You select the segments either by individually clicking on each button or clicking the row or column labels to select all of the segments in the row or column (Mixing Board only). Play begins when you use the A button to select your first fragment, but you can also use the + and – buttons to select multiple segments, then wave the Wiimote to begin. The game includes 16 songs, with more available from the Wii Shop Channel for 100 Wii Points each. You can record up to five minutes of your jam and save it to the Wiimote, so you can share your work with friends who also own the game. You can also set your jam to continuously loop, but this mode can’t be recorded.

Just Jam is more of a music application than it is a game, but there are a few gaming elements. Twelve of the 16 songs have to be unlocked by earning XP, which you gain by making changes to the mix as you record. The same is true for five of the six background animations that display during your jams. There is a set of well written tutorials that gives you everything you need to know to get started. The program is very forgiving when it comes to adding tracks; you don’t have to click on a new segment exactly on a downbeat for it line up with the rest of the music, which could’ve resulted in a cacophonous mess. The basic controls are easy to learn, although they become more and more complex when you attempt more involved changes to your project, using every button available on the Wiimote and the Nunchuk. But like most games for the Wii, Just Jam is handicapped by the limitations of the hardware. You can’t preview the segments before you start recording so that you can plan how your jam will sound. The background graphics are decidedly low-res. Also, descriptions of the source music don’t display long enough for you to read them, and you can’t use your own music to create a jam.

Anyone who lacks the scratch for the Wheels of Steel or a 24-channel mixing board will appreciate the effort Zivix has put into creating Just Jam. It’s simple enough that you can be laying down tracks and mixing up fragments in minutes after you first start it up, and the animated backgrounds give you a freaky display that you can use to liven up a party room. The game aspect of Just Jam could’ve been easily left out; you’d have to mix and remix for a very long time to finally earn enough XP to unlock all of its assets. And not being able to hear each of the available fragments before you record creates a trial-and-error element that prevents advance planning. But you do get quite a rush when you play back your jams, making the effort totally worthwhile.

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