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Old 01-10-2018, 11:44 PM   #780
BigV
Goon Squad Leader
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Seattle
Posts: 27,063
I got a game/toy/???? for myself for Christmas.

It's called Dropmix. It's a technological tour-de-force. It'a music "game", not unlike Rock Band or Guitar Hero. In fact, it's produced by Harmonix, the same people that made Rock Band, but it's marketed by Hasbro. It doesn't come with little plastic toy instruments, but it does come with a "board" and some cards.

The board has five spaces for the cards to be placed, and a "Dropmix" button. Also, there's a little notch to hold your smartphone. The computer is your phone. You download the app to your phone and it does all the computer and music playing. If you like can you can send the output to a speaker for better sound. The cards, there are a few hundred, all have unique artwork and have the name of a song and artist and a specific subset of the given song, say the vocals or the drums, etc. Inside each card is an NFC/magic token that is picked up by the reader in the space on the board, it sends the code to the phone and the phone plays that track of that song.

I said there are five spaces on the board, yellow/red, red, red/blue, blue, blue/green. Yellow cards are lead vocals, red cards are melody, blue cards are and rhythms, and green cards are bass and harmonies. There are also special cards (wild cards of all/any colors) that can be played in any slot and black and white special effects cards, also playable in any slot.

Now add magic.

When you place a card on the board it starts to play that track of that song. When you place another card, it blends the second card's track with the first card (and so on for third and fourth and fifth cards). It matches the beat and the key *flawlessly*. I mean, it's just math, right? And math is a computer's specialty. Really though, it's magic. Let's check out a video.


Thanks to 21st century witchcraft...

or a couple playing straight out of the box....

Here's the first review I watched/read after seeing the title on a Gizmodo gadget gift list.

I don't know how to explain it to you. I'll say that I brought it out for the young adult children and their friends over the holidays and it was a SMASH HIT! It's portable, so when you run out of room at the kitchen table, you can just carry the whole fuckin party to the living room (thank you battery powered toy!). I suggest you check out the videos -- there's a zillion of them -- and look at the mixes. You can change the tempo and the key and the relative volume of each card/track. And it *never* misses a step.

*MAGIC!*
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