“Band Hero” is Activision’s attempt to bring the experience (and profitability!) of full-band plastic instrument games to the Nintendo DS.

“Band Hero” is also a bad idea for a game to its very core.

Upon first inserting your “Band Hero” cart, you are prompted to create a truly heroic band and character. The default state for your new rock hero is standing around in his or her underpants, instead of something generic like, say, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. After choosing from face types like “anime” and “elven” (nothing says RAWK like elves), you are prompted to choose the skin color. Activision are very progressive, so among the reality-based colors like “brown” and “lighter brown” are colors like “cyan,” “magenta” and “jet black.” The path of least resistance involves being green skinned and flaunting it in those hilarious heart undies, so that’s what I did.

After creating my rocker, “Formerly Bruce Banner,” I instruct him to play every instrument in my band simultaneously and head off to pick a song. The interface is geared for creating playlists, so you basically check off songs you want to play and then push a check mark. It’s easy to not realize what’s going on here and select and deselect a bunch of songs while just trying to get to the game, but it’s an understandable design choice. After all, when you’re playing a portable game, you’re going to play it for long periods of time, and not quickly while waiting in line somewhere.

Sarcasm aside, it’s a terrible interface and terrible default choice, especially when you consider that “Band Hero’s” target audience is supposed to be the tech-challenged mass market. Even if this was a game for power users, a group that puts up with bad interfaces, it’s impossible to sort the song list by difficulty or artist — it’s just alphabetic by song, with no artist alongside it. Additionally, the entire song selection interface only displays about four songs at a time, and it has a huge amount of wasted space that could be used for artist, difficulty, the entire song title instead of “Crazy Little Thing….”

But if the gameplay is good you can put up with all these problems, right? Well, it’s bad. I have never played a DS “Guitar Hero” title, so this is my introduction to the guitar grip peripheral. It is the most difficult thing to hold ever, for no good reason. It doesn’t make you feel like you are playing a guitar, and it makes the game a literal pain to play. Strumming the touch screen does not feel like using the strum bar on a proper guitar controller, and the frets are just hard to press while holding the system steady in your hands.

Drums are okay. They are controlled with a rubber drum condom that fits over the system and pressed the face buttons for you. There is no strumming here, though. Just hit the drum when the gem crosses the hit zone, like “Dance Dance Revolution.” Unfortunately, the silly drum skin is arranged with the drums in two vertical stacks, which is counterintuitive when the game arranges them in the traditional horizontal row on-screen. It’s technically possible to play without it using just the face buttons, but the game’s UI doesn’t change to show button names to make up for the lack of colored pads. Once you get used to it, it’s better than guitar, but that’s not saying much.

The instrument play is broken up by silly minigames that have you doing touch screen crowd surfing, stage diving, and T-shirt tossing while the song still plays without you. These really make me feel like I’m playing an instrument and not a video game that felt its core gameplay wasn’t adequate enough to stand alone! Thankfully, these can be ignored entirely, if you never accidentally press that part of the touch screen while strumming.

Here is the core problem, though: Even if you like the guitar and drum play in Band Hero, do you really want to lug around a bunch of instrument peripherals for your portable system? This was a bad idea with “Guitar Hero: On Tour,” and the addition of the drum face just exacerbates the problem. Here is another problem: These peripherals are for the DS Lite only. That guitar peripheral you see above will only work with a GBA slot, and the rubber drum condom fits the Lite perfectly, though it might also function on the DSi. “Band Hero” was a chance to rethink the guitar game and start over now that the DSi is out, but that apparently would’ve been too much effort, as the box brags: “Exclusively for the Nintendo DS Lite!”

Singing, a peripheral-free activity, is the most functional part of the game. It works pretty similarly to singing in “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero,” but it’s definitely not as difficult — I was able to pass a Queen song on my first try. I imagine they had to lower the sensitivity of the singing because of the DS’ lower quality microphone. It’s great that the DS now has a singing game worth playing, and I look forward to seeing it played in the public places where people enjoy playing portable games, because that is certainly a thing that will happen, and making a singing game for a portable system is not an inherently flawed concept conceptually.

Overall, Band Hero is a really bad game. It’s a shitty implementation of an even worse idea. I guess if you were able to tolerate past DS “Guitar Hero” games, then it might be worth checking out, but I can’t recommend it at all. Look to “Elite Beat Agents,” “Rock Band” for iPhone or “Rock Band Unplugged” for a rhythm gaming experience that remembers it’s on a portable platform, and is designed accordingly.

Here are two Wii games, both by Activision, who get Wii controls perfectly right and perfectly wrong. This can even occur in the same game. It’s fascinating to look at this in what is the Wii’s formative period, as developers that are not Nintendo, and even Nintendo itself, figure out how to wring the best performance out of the little console’s scary new controls. (The same thing happened with the DS.)

The two games, “Marvel: Ultimate Alliance” and “Call of Duty 3″ are both essentially their Gamecube versions with Wii controls strapped to the top, like many Wii games today.

“Marvel” is a top-down Gauntlet-esque game that continues the “X-men Legends” line of games, only now with all kinds of Marvel characters. The standard controls are nothing special, but they get the job done and don’t get in the way. Let me make this clear – this game is all about pushing buttons. Pushing buttons a lot. This is, spiritually, Diablo with superheroes and on a console. It’s great fun with a couple friends – a spiritual successor to old school co-op arcade beat-’em-ups.

On the Wii, though, the controls are all motion-based. So, every time you need to do a basic punch, you have to move your wrist. Anything. This game is far too combat-intensive for this. Your arm is tired in five minutes. Additionally, ridiculously precise motions are required to do special moves.

This is an example of why Wii controls cannot be adapted to certain game designs created with standard controllers in mind. Developers and publishers of certain titles will need to realize that they pretty much cannot be adapted to motion control. The Gamecube controller and the classic controller exist, and developers will need to learn to require them, or at the least, allow their use so Wii owners who encounter terrible motion controls can at least run back to what they know works.

Not all games have terrible controls, however. Activision’s own Call of Duty 3 is slightly flawed due to its relatively uninspired single player and lack of multiplayer. It’s a decent game, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing special, aside from the controls, which adapt extremely well.

Obviously, the Wii’s remote is used to aim by pointing at the screen. Various other motions are mapped to the remote and the nunchuck. My favorite would have to be tilting the remote to lean around corners. It feels so right.

I have a few issues with the controls. One is the silly motion scripted fights that have me pumping the remote and nunchuck asynchronously to fight off a Nazi. They’re just tiring and don’t really work. Essentially, the motion control equivalent of button mashing. The driving controls also leave a bit to be desired, but they’re a rather tiny portion of the whole game.

Overall, though, these are two examples that should caution developers. You don’t have to make everything in the game motion based, and if the motion controls you develop suck, don’t be afraid to ditch them. We’ll all thank you in the end.