Hey, how’s it going Undertow? I love video games and I also love music. But surprisingly
enough, I’m not like a huge guitar hero, rock band fan. Maybe that’s not all that
surprisingly really, but I am a big fan of this iPhone app from Smule, it’s Magic Piano!
Magic Piano is an app that allows you to play the piano to the tune of most anything you
can think of. Classical Bach, Chart topping Bruno Marz songs and just about everything
else in between. You choose your song and tap the screen to play the notes, aiming for
little green and yellow dots. Time them right and within close enough proximity, and get
your points. Now the game feature of this app is more recent. Initially, you just play
songs without any points or objectives just for the fun of making some music. You could
share it on Facebook or Twitter, but beyond that, that was about it. I enjoyed the app
so much that had planned on reviewing it before all the new features were even added. Now
it even has a game mode with points, objectives, achievements and levels.
I’m pretty impressed with the music selection available. Practically every taste of music
could be satisfied with Magic Piano. And of course what I’d like to point out to you
guys is a pretty good selection of music from video game titles. Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy,
gaming's most famous and classic scores can be played on the Magic Piano. The arrangements
are well composed, if a little difficult at times... But luckily you can choose your difficulty
setting and switch it out of game mode, back to classic mode which will allow for the perfect-pitch
option which lets you just go crazy and rock out to some Castlevania 3 jams.
Functionality-wise, Magic Piano flows pretty well, but I do experience some hick ups every
now and then. If there’s just too many notes getting hit at once it will lag a bit, not
very often, but every once in a while. So there’s green and yellow dots, green dots
being a single key on the piano, and yellow being chords. Depending on your difficulty
setting and the song you may need to tap with multiple fingers for each chord. I found detection
on this not always the most accurate... or maybe I just suck at it... I don’t know...
The app is free which is always a huge plus for a great game in my opinion. But In order
to get all the songs you want you’ll need to spend smoola, the app’s currency. You
can pay real money for this and it is relatively inexpensive. However, there are a couple of
really nice features, one of which allows for earning free smoola and also they do have
a free song everyday that you can download. So after a week or two you will have a decent
repertoire of songs to pick from without having to spend any moola for some smoola.
So definitely check out Magic Piano, rock out to some Mega Man or Mario or Mozart!
