f13.net

I have never been so wet for a game with big plastic instruments.

Harmonix and MTV announced their magnum opus, with crateloads of original recordings for all the tracks.

But basically, Guitar Hero (guitar/bass) + drums + microphone.

Here's the pressy:

Not gonna work.

They're sticking party game inside of my competitive high score game.

That angers schild.

Edit: By the way, it's not gonna work because most people sound like shit when they're singing. Oh, and they can't keep a beat, as Taiko Drum master showed us.

Give me Drum Hero over this game. Nobody is going to want the singing parts.

It's ok by me if you can shut off the vocals.  No one in my group out here wants to sing.  Dual guitar + drums? Yes please.

Better off adding 'random dancing chick' to it and popping in DDR.

Ironically, even though I like playing guitars, I'd rather sing in this game.  :-P

Guitar Hero introduced me to a love of guitars.

If I can sing, my already preferred musical instrument - well, then it's just that much more awesome.

I happen to hang out with a bunch of musicians who love games (esp. GH2), so I'm not horribly concerned.

I like Karaoke Revolution, I like Guitar Hero, I like Donkey Konga.  This game can't miss.

I can't wait to see the first video of someone doing drums + guitar + singing and getting 5 stars on expert.

I'm not keen on trying to drum with my foot, but I imagine doing guitar+vocals simultaneously will be fun.

I was planning to buy a 360 this week to play GHII. Unfortunately, they haven't dropped at all in price yet, so I may have to wait until holiday 2007 now. If not, at least I will know there is another game coming if I break down and buy one before then  :-D

Another game? Another 30 games. 360 is HOT this year.

I am talking about justifying it to my wife. It might be more palatable if she knows there are more party-type music games (she loved Karaoke Revolution and liked GH when she tried it at Fur's place).

She is probably right though- I spend so much time playing PC games that a 360 just isn't worth the price atm.

Playing PC Games.


RLY? Maybe that's because you don't have a 360.

I find it easier to play real guitar than the guitar hero game.  I think I'm broken. 

Drum hero would be a cool idea.  I'd definately buy the Neal Peart limited edition.

I'm waiting for Accordion Hero.  Lederhosen, beer and polka?  Shit yeah, now that's a party game.

Plus you can get a really good Weird Al vibe going, too!



I bought GH1/2 on an impulse, and thought my wife "might like it a bit". She plays the damn things for about 2 hours every night. She's become a GH catass. Buy it as something "for us". Maybe you'll be as lucky?


This upcoming game sounds potentially quite good, I'd hope it's compatable with the GH guitar though, and also hope that it works just fine with whichever Band members you don't have.

Your wish is my command (http://www.phobe.com/sfi/accordion.html)
(http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/5125/acboxsmcv1.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)(http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/2205/doubleaccsmxf8.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

Heh.  That's what mine said, so I was able to justify a new 22" monitor over a 360.

I don't have to justify to my girlfriend, but she is correct in telling me not to get a 360. I have a pile of games for the pc I haven't finished. Hell, I didn't build my new pc until I went through a pile of games I had for my /old/ pc. Hell, I'll probably cancel my LotRO pre-order, not because I don't like the game (it's a fine diku), but because I don't have the time to play it.

You kids and your free time.

So help me God if the controllers aren't wireless.


All of them.

Rock band sounds sort of cool. Do they have downloadable content in GH2? As in you can download new songs? If not, this band game better have it.

The XBox 360 version of GH2 has downloadable content.  Including all the songs from GH1.

Yep. They're releasing the GH1 songs in packs every week. No doubt, this is to get new songs ready for download immediately after republishing all the GH1 stuff.

Holy fuck. Now I MUST have this. I was bitter that I wouldn't be able to play "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" until my fingers bled on GHII.

Bark at the Moon is slated to be in the first content pack.

Ho ho ho.

Man i am so freaking excited about rockband. only because i have already decided that schild is on my band and that when he is drunk he will sing and we will jam so hard that jesus will cry. I am gonna be the most awesome lead guitarist eva. we need a drummer.

Schild: they can keep the score attack mode totally alive in this. have a mode for individual and team score attack. it will be hot. by the way you are in our band. 

I've already started a fan club for you so you'll have groupies!  These three have already signed on:

(http://wallpapers.3yen.com/wp-content/images/thumb-wallpapers.3yen.com_1055.jpg)(http://badgas.co.uk/moments/moment_104.jpg)

ooooh...man fattys go to schild.

The lead guitarist doesn't jump on grenades depth charges, sorries.

Dibs on the one with the blue hair.  She looks like she digs drummers.

Ookii can have the downy girl in the middle since he sings like a downy boy.

Man, for the amount of effort it takes to get a bunch of people together and play fake instruments I'd rather just form a real band.

Maybe that's just me but these music games have never appealed to me at all. It seems silly to spend time practicing a fake guitar game when I could be practicing actual guitar.

I hope your FPS philosophy is different, given that I live in the same town as you  :-P

 :-D :-D :-D :-D

Or god forbid someone says GTA is a fun game.

Guitar/Band Hero games are a gateway drug.

If playing fake instruments was good enough for the Monkees...

See I can actually play some real instruments ok though, but I need practice. Rather practice the real thing.

Plus chicks love a rocker.

This is a dirty lie.  Not like they love a gamer nerd either, but having a guitar and being able to play does not get you chicks.  Some sort of artiste mentality and persona has to go along with it.

And I have a hard time investing too much time in the GH games since I don't want to rock the game harder than I can the real thing, but it sure is nice to have drums, bass, and a singer (even if it isn't a good one) to play along with and not have to deal with real musicians...

The thing that's attractive about Guitar Hero is that it's a hell of a lot easier than playing for real with real people.  And a lot more immediately gratifying.  Sort of like playing a kazoo.

Personally, I play Guitar Hero because in real life I play the drums pretty well, but could never get the hang of the guitar.  So rather then spend hundreds of hours getting better, I could rock out on GH after only ten or so.  Oddly enough, I'm better at GH than Tyco Drum Master or Donkey Konga.

That would look funny at an open mic night.

Fender guitar for Rock Band:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/06/19/rock-band-guitar-shown-in-latest-gamestop-newsletter/

I have that exact same style Fender Strat (black body, white pickguard, maple neck/fretboard) as my real guitar.

Heh, bring a projector and you could totally rock out geek-chic.

I want that.

That's the model I went into the store to buy when I ended up with my 61 SG. I just fell in love with the SG's slim taper neck.

WISE FWOM YOUR GWAVE!

More new songs shown at Leipzig GC:
1960s
Rolling Stones "Gimme Shelter"

1970s
The Who "Won't Get Fooled Again"
Mountain "Mississippi Queen"*
David Bowie "Suffragette City"
Black Sabbath "Paranoid"*
Blue Oyster Cult "Don't Fear the Reaper"
The Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop"
Deep Purple "Highway Star"

1980s
Rush "Tom Sawyer"*
Bon Jovi "Wanted Dead or Alive"
The Clash "Should I Stay or Should I Go"
Faith No More "Epic"

1990s
Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly"
Metallica "Enter Sandman"
Nirvana "In Bloom"
Stone Temple Pilots "Vasoline"
Weezer "Say It Ain't So"
Smashing Pumpkins "Cherub Rock"
Radiohead "Creep"
Beastie Boys "Sabotage"

2000s
The Hives "Main Offender"
Queens of the Stone Age "Go With the Flow"
The Strokes "Reptilia"
Jet "Are You Gonna Be My Girl"
OK Go "Here It Goes Again"
Nine Inch Nails "The Hand That Feeds"

They had to pick the absolute worst Metallica song of all time to put in Rock Band. Great. Every time I try to defend Metallica as a somewhat good band, my girlfriend argues that Enter Sandman is perhaps the worst song ever recorded.

I hate to admit that she is right.

Which is just sad because if they stuck Kill em All, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets and Justice For All on Guitar Hero or Rock Band I would drop 80 - 100 bucks for it and Skully (http://www.freewebs.com/montyjay/kirkguitars/Skully/skully1.jpg) without blinking.

ISTR reading somewhere that a deal was struck with Metallica so that key parts of their back catalogue would be in download packs for Rock Band.

Edit: Yup, there we go. (http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/13967/Metallica-Lets-Fans-Dig-Deeper-with-Rock-Band/)

I think something similar is being done with The Who as well.

Yeah, but, Enter Sandman.  I didn't put the Black Album on that list, not that I think those songs suck, they just aren't real Metallica to me.  Sanitarium?  Fuck yeah!  For Whom the Bell Tolls?  Yes, please.  Battery?  I couldn't be so lucky.  Creeping Death, Am I Evil, etc... etc... etc...

But no, watch, we're going to end up with Whiskey in the Jar.

Where is my pink floyd!

You used to know that the party was over when Comfortably Numb was playing in a loop on the stereo.  I imagine it will be the same just with one dude playing it over and over again before passing out and drooling all over the guitar. ;-)

The press release did say "key" songs. Whiskey in the Jar isn't a key song. :)

I'd like to see One, Battery, and Master of Puppets specifically and then pretty much anything off the first four albums would be an added bonus.

I think 'One' is on GH3.

All I can find mentioned is "The Memory Remains" off of Reload. :/

I am the anti-Metallica fan, apparently. I didn't like any of their early stuff, but love Whiskey in the Jar and Hero of the Day. Enter Sandman was good at first, but it was incredibly overplayed.

I can't wait to play everything on Who's Next. I am also hoping for some Green Day eventually- lots of fun drumming in their catalog.

I am wondering when a free client like StepMania will be released for the GH/Rockband series. I know this is ultra-nerd, but I am still pretty into DDR/ITG and the free client StepMania lets a person put whatever steps into whatever song in a free client. It also packages every song ever released into one program.

Anyone know if someone is working on one of these? I own all the versions of GH, so pirating isn't an issue (I believe in intellectual property rights!).

I love enter sandman then again I listen to the richard cheese version of it so maybe thats why.

There is one and it was mentioned somewhere here before. It's called Frets on Fire (http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/#) and it supports GH/GH2 controllers. I'm sure it'll incorporate Rock Band once the controllers are released.

Don't fear the Reaper, Tom Sawyer (although better songs exist), Creep, and Epic make this almost a must buy for me--and I don't even own a console, much less Guitar Hero (although I play it at work).

They really failed at a lot of the other song choices though--"The Hand that feeds" as the lead out NIN song? Wtf is that noise?

Epic and Don't Fear the Reaper are what I'm getting it for. Guitar Hero 3 is only about 400 times better at this point.

Fun. I'll definitely check this out.

Been thinking about why--and these two choices really are number freaking awesome if they do it right, for total interaction capability re: Rock Band. Epic especially--a solid "group" doing that song would be something I'd go to a club to see, and DFtR done well is an amazing "show" as well ;)

How much will the cow bell accessory cost?

Can someone explain in small words what exactly hammer ons and pull offs are and how to accomplish them? I hear them referenced all the time but can't quite grasp the concept for some reason.

I'm not particularly adept at actually using them in GH, but a hammer on/off is basically defined as changing the note produced by a particular vibrating string with just the "left" hand--changing the length of the string by pressing or releasing a different fret position, without re-strumming the string itself.

In GH, a hammer off is easy--if you have the "green" and "red" fret buttons pressed, strum, and then let go of the green button without re-strumming, you have hammered off and the red note will be playing. I guess a hammer on is the exact same in reverse, but I suck at them personally.

Just do the tutorial, it walks you through them.

FYI, I may have the colors reversed--I don't have a guitar in front of me. When I say "let go of the green button", I mean the one closest to the strum input control.

Green, Red, Yellow, Blue, Orange.

You'll come across a series of notes like this:


From bottom to top, the first note will have a black top on it, and the other two will have white tops on them.

So, in the example above, you'd hold the Green fret, strum that one note, and then the following two notes (red, and then yellow), you do NOT have to strum for, you simply press the fret for them once they pass the note bar.

The opposite applies to pull-offs - you hold down all the buttons involved (G, R, Y), strum yellow, and then just lift your finger off of yellow when the red note appears, and lift your other finger off of the red note when the green note appears.

It's a simulation of where your fingers would be on a guitar string - further down the neck, higher note.

Can I assume the GH2 guitar will work for Rock Band? Are they even selling it without being bundled with some instrument?

GH is kicking my ass - I've never played before and picked up GH2 last week.. ouch my fingers hurt.

The GH2 controller will work with Rock Band but you'll be missing the lower set of buttons used for freestyle mode.

Who's Next as downloadable content makes Rockband a 100 times better than GH3 for me. That said, I'll likely be getting both. If they add The Bends or OK Computer from Radiohead, and it'll be 1000 times better.

What can I say about F13?  It's really my favorite website in the entire universe!  I love the irreverent banter and sly wit these keyboard jockeys produce.  And I especially love the staff, they're AWESOME.

I just got finished playing Killing In The Name Of on GH2 for 360 and man am I glad they're using original tracks. Worst. Cover. Ever. Y'know, aside from those kids that did Nirvana (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAMyQdBWhUw).

That was a perfect time for a Tay Zonday rickroll. I even was hoping it was and then you let me down.


Cry.

I thought about it. But.. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

Wait, are you saying there is a visual cue as to which notes can be hammered on and pulled off?  I never noticed that but I'm just starting to do Hard and still try and strum almost every note.

edit:  wrong kyū

Not so much a queue.  Just if the note has a black ring in it, you gotta strum.  If it has a white ring, you can strum, but it's easier to just hit the button.

Well, that should make life easier.

Wow. I never knew that ><

Might've made playing through half of expert a shitton easier. Why do I know nothing about guitars? :P

Ok, I went through the tutorial, but I ain't too good at them yet. Are there any situations on Easy where you can use them, or is it Medium/Hard and above?

Medium is where they really start to show up.  Best example early on that I can think of would be War Pigs.

ETA:  Scratch that, I think Shout at the Devil is before War Pigs, and that's got quite a few hammer ons.

OK cool. Got Shout At The Devil as an encore, so I can practice them there. I gotta get to shredder status before Rock Band comes out, even though I am more interesting in playing drums in that.

Looks like I'm a bit late, but that song lineup looks quite solid on the whole.

I just played Rock Band at PAX earlier today (posting from the PAX freeplay area).

I sang, and I did Stone Temple Pilot's Vaseline. It's pretty much Karaoke Revolution.

It is... fucking cool. I wanna try drums tomorrow.

The way they do the visual effects on the player models and stuff, makes it look like a music video, along with the introductions of the players.

I'll also try guitar tomorrow, so I have some point of reference.

You owe us at least a YouTube vid of you playing, you bastard!

I wanna know how the drums work/feel- post when you get a chance.

I didn't get a chance to play again, due to the fact that the lines just got retarded long after the first day.

I have some pictures at home of me rocking out though, so I'll find those.

Regardless - I saw a lot of people using the drums, and it looked good to play if you weren't absolutely rhythm-deficient.

Lots of videos at Gametrailers.com.

The drums look hard. Which is good.

However, what struck me as odd - and I hope they aren't the final product, though I fear they are - the guitars have gone down a notch in quality. While, somehow, it seems like the Guitar Hero 3 guitars have gone up a notch.

I wish I had a chance to use the guitar, but I'm starting to see this.

One thing I will hand to Red Octane in that respect, and that is they know how to make quality peripherals.

Their DDR pads are a fucking joke. Just thought I'd throw that out there. I definitely wondered if my guitar for GH was going to be unplayable in two weeks when I purchased the game.

The whammy bar on my GH2 (360) guitar broke.  I wasn't even rockin out that hard :) 

Sucks too, cause the second guitar for the house, is still rigid.  The buttons were all loose on the broken one.

I heard good things about the Red Octane pads.  No good?

Huh? The Ignition pads are the industry standard for soft pads and the metal pads are quite goddamn good. Now I know there are better pads out there and I know people are making custom pads. But then, this is a lot like joysticks, isn't it? Sure you can spend $300 and get a custom made byrdo or you can import a HRAP 3 and replace all the buttons with Sanwa parts. But really, you're approaching fantatic level at light speed rather than making the game better. The Red Octane Ignition DDR pad is fine (for a soft pad). And their hard pad is fine as well. For 99.9% of the people out there.

Maybe it is because I am 6'2" 215, but I tear the soft pads to shreds doing anything close to expert. They don't last two weeks with me. Granted I play more at the arcade, but still :)


Edit: And yes, I am probably in the "fanatic crowd." Too bad I can't be a catass in a rhythm dance game. What the hell would you call it?

My latest track requests: Possum Kingdom by Toadies, and Stinkfist by Tool (although that will never fly due to the theme of the song I imagine).

I don't see that one happening; it's already on GH2.

Is it? Is that one of the ones hidden under the expert mode which 90% of the people never see?

Yah seriously? never seen it.

My guess is it is one of the 360 only songs.

Fake Edit: My google-fu hath prevailed. http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/753/753668p1.html (http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/753/753668p1.html)

They are indeed 360 only, my guess is you have the ps2 version.

Possum Kingdom was the first song I played on GH2 - I love that song.

The Trogdor song kicked my ass for a bit until I played it 10 times (on medium, no less) but that's a good one too. :)

I can't get past set list six on expert yet, but Trogdor is pretty fun on hard. :)

Got to play some 2 guitar GH II over the weekend- very fun. Coop and standoff (faceoff? whatever they call it) are both a lot of fun. Really made me pine for Rock Band even more.

Man, I want my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul so badly.

schild, I know I was thinking of getting the PS3 version, but I want my second 360 guitar - I might just end up getting this for 360. I think my hands have (gasp) gotten used to the 360 Xplorer guitar.

Where the hell is all of this stuff supposed to plug in? How many USB ports are on a 360? I know there are at least 2, but are there others that I am missing? I guess the mike can plug into a controller, so they would just need a 3rd USB port for a 2nd guitar.

I think the drum kit is supposed to incorporate a USB hub for the other stuff.

And if you don't have the drum kit?  "USB hub sold separately.  Only $299.99"?

Well the drums come with the rock band bundle. So if you have rock band you have the drums. Or you could in theory just buy the game and play solo with your existing guitar. Either way your fine. (Assuming the drums are infact a USB hub of some sort.) Only problem is if it's not a hub, or for some reason you got 2 guitars and a mic, but no drums. Or something. I suppose they could expect you to get a wireless second guitar but that would be crap of them.

Edit: Don't worry. Be happy. Rock on.

Edit Again. Kotaku says "Guitar Hero X-plorer Will Work With Rock Band 360, USB Hub Packed In" (http://kotaku.com/gaming/cocks-out/guitar-hero-x+plorer-will-work-with-rock-band-360-usb-hub-packed-in-297770.php)

3 new songs:
# Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" [master track]
# Red Hot Chilli Pepper's "Dani California" [master track]
# KISS' "Detroit Rock City" [master track]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

BLACK HOLE SUN.


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I CAN'T AVOID IT NOW

I think I must be the last person on earth who hasn't played some form of Guitar Hero.  And since I saw this kid on YouTube bust out a perfect rendition of YYZ, I'm fighting the urge to go out and buy it.  If it gets the kids listening to Rush, I'm all for it.

And SoundGarden?  I didn't think that Thayil translated to sheet music, much less a video game.

Eh? Boring song with a video that gave me nightmares.   :x

I'm going to be so terrible at this game.

Thayil is one of my favorite guitarists ever, and it's a master track so it's a Thayil/Soundgarden Recording.

Yea, I'm fairly good at YYZ. One of my favorite songs on there.

So, um, yeah - apparently I was the last person on earth to get GHII.  When I walked into Best Buy, the single remaining box literally had my name on it.  They popped a bottle of champagne and balloons dropped from the ceiling when I ran my debit card.

I have never had so much fun with a video game.  Evar.  I've been playing for a week and I have forearms like Popeye on an HGH-laced Spinach bender.  I have dreams about colored circles.  I find myself unconsciously hitting notes with my fingers on the steering wheel.  I don't change the radio station when Cheap Trick comes on anymore.  I can now name a band from this century.  Avenged Sevenfold.  See.

Maybe I've been stuck in MMOs for too long, because I'm playing a video game and enjoying it.  Wow.  GH3 and Rock Band will be my excuse for getting the PS3.

I SAY THIS AS BLOOD POURS FROM MY EYES AND MOUTH ONTO MY KEYBOARD.

JAPAN IS GETTING A VERSION OF GUITAR HERO.

DAY 1 IMPORT FOR PS3, GET.

Song list announced?

No. Will post when it appears.

Grats! Now you too can play air guitar with some level of expertise like the rest of us  :-D

Rock Band Pricing Info (http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2007/09/28/rock-band-ps3xbox360-price-set-ps2-release-moved-up-to-2007/)

To sum up:

PS3 & 360 - November 23rd for $169.99 (Black Friday, now to be known as Rock Friday)
PS2 - December 10th for $159.99

Kit comes with guitar, drum kit, microphone and game.

PS2 and PS3 get wireless guitar, 360 is wired.

That is actually cheaper than I had hoped, so yay!

5 Starred my first Medium song on GHII last night. My e-peen grew this much- |    |. Ph3@r.

wtf ps2 gets wireless and 360 doesn't? Does not compute.

I thought Microsoft was guarding their wireless technology very carefully, but... Guitar Hero II has it, so who knows.

What? Guitar Hero 2 has wires.

Am I missing something here?  I've never seen a wireless guitar controller for the 360, until the ones for GH III are released.

You said, and I quoted it, that GHII had wireless controllers on the 360. Obviously, you thought you said something else.

I just don't care all that much about the wires.  I'll already have to move my couch and coffee table to make room for rockin', so a few wires aren't a big deal, especially when the drum kit is the USB hub for this beast.  I've never really had a problem with the wires in GH2, and don't anticipate having problems in the future.  Besides, isn't it more authentic to have a bunch of wires snaking all over the place?

Also, quite happy that it's substantially cheaper than the $200 I was anticipating.

I actually fear the price point.

You get what you pay for.

True.  I worry about the drums.  Not so much that I'll destroy them, but the guy who'll be playing drums (because he's horrible with a guitar.  Horrible.) has a habit of going all "Hulk Smash!" on shit.

Ah, that was a typo.  I see it now.  My bad.

Anyone have any idea what it's going to cost up here in Canadia? Despite the dollar being high it hasn't changed the fact that we're being consistently gouged. I'm assuming it'll be something like 189 or 199, but I want to find a solid price tag.

Can't you order it from the US Amazon site and pay US $$ for it? Just wondering, never done that myself ..

It depends. Most places just won't ship across the border for some odd reason. It could be to avoid having to do conversion or maybe it's harder for companies to ship across without a problem. I'll check, but last time I tried I'm pretty sure they told me to go elsewhere.

Edit: They do ship, but at 1.99/LB and the game weighing in at 20LBs... yeeeaahhhh.

Rock Band full track list (http://www.megatonik.com/2007/10/26/full-list-of-rock-bands-licensed-songs-45-songs-plus-13-unlockable/) has been posted at IGN although 12 unlockable, unrevealed tracks still remain. For the freewheeling hippie in all of us there's also 18 Grateful Dead tracks that can be purchased as downloadable content.

1960s

    * Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”

1970s

    * Aerosmith “Train Kept a Rollin’”*
    * The Who “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
    * Boston “Foreplay/Long Time”
    * Mountain “Mississippi Queen” (cover)
    * The Police “Next to You”
    * David Bowie “Suffragette City”
    * Black Sabbath “Paranoid” (cover)
    * Blue Oyster Cult “Don’t Fear the Reaper”
    * The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”
    * Deep Purple “Highway Star”
    * KISS “Detroit Rock City”
    * Molly Hatchet “Flirtin’ With Disaster”
    * The Outlaws “Green Grass & High Tides” (cover)
    * Sweet “Ballroom Blitz” (cover)

1980s

    * Rush “Tom Sawyer”*
    * Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive”
    * The Clash “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
    * Faith No More “Epic”
    * R.E.M. “Orange Crush”
    * Iron Maiden “Run to the Hills” (cover)

1990s

    * Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
    * Metallica “Enter Sandman”
    * Nirvana “In Bloom”
    * Stone Temple Pilots “Vasoline”
    * Weezer “Say It Ain’t So”
    * Smashing Pumpkins “Cherub Rock”
    * Radiohead “Creep”
    * Beastie Boys “Sabotage”
    * Hole “Celebrity Skin”
    * Garbage “I Think I’m Paranoid”
    * Soundgarden “Black Hole Sun”

2000s

    * The Hives “Main Offender”
    * Queens of the Stone Age “Go With the Flow”
    * The Strokes “Reptilia”
    * Jet “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”
    * OK Go “Here It Goes Again”
    * Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds”
    * Pixies “Wave of Mutilation”
    * Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Maps”
    * Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dani California”
    * Coheed & Cambria “Welcome Home”
    * Fallout Boy “Dead on Arrival”
    * The Killers “When You Were Young”
    * New Pornographers “Electric Version”

Unlockable Tracks

    * Bang Camaro “Pleasure (Pleasure)”

Edit: Added full list

Is it just Uncle John's Band 18 times since that's really the only song people will play after the first 2 times through that list? ^_^

I dunno. That 90's selection looks nice, and the 80's set is also quite respectable.

Bang Camaro is sweet

You neglect to remember people born in the mid 80s, like me, who will play the shit out of everything in the 90s and 2000s.

My problem is that there aren't enough songs where singing will be fun.

The fact Rock Band and GH3 share the same Strokes and Killers songs is completely pitiful. Every Killers song would be great. There's like 4 good strokes songs. Reptilia isn't one of them. Shit, it shares the same Smashing Pumpkins song also. COMEON MOTHERFUCKERS, TONIGHT TONIGHT OR 1979. GET THE FUCK ON IT. In fact, make the entire Melancholy set a downloadable. Pronto.

Edit: Fuck, Beastie Boys too?

Too much crossover.

I've played the Rock Band demo the few times it's come around these parts. As someone born in the (oy vey) late 70s, I really enjoy most of the library in Rock Band from a musicial appreciation standpoint. I'd also point out that there's a minor overlap between the GH3 and Rock Band libraries (off the top of my head):

* Mountian "Mississippi Queen"
* Black Sabbath "Paranoid"
* Smashing Pumpkins "Cherub Rock"
* Beastie Boys "Sabotage"
* The Strokes "Reptilia"
* The Killers "When you were young"

I've also noticed that Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band appeal to very different segments of the population. Generally when people talk up what's great specifically about Guitar Hero 3, they reference virtuostic, fairly technical songs that demonstrate the abilities of the person playing the song (The Fire and the Flames, One, Raining Blood, etc). Rock Band on the other hand, tends to appeal to people who want to get a bunch of friends together and rock out (compare how robust Rock Band's offline multiplay is, compared to Guitar Hero 3's).

I'll admit, I'm mildly worried about wear and tear issues on Rock Band instruments.  The few times I've played on Rock Band instruments, the drums seem to invite people just trying to put their fist through the drumpad. Kinda evokes how early on, people would over-exaggerate their motions when playing on the Wii.



My roommates and I went to PAX, and after some serious cajoling/threatening, I got one of my roommates to sing Jet's "Are you gonna be my girl".  When it was over, he confessed that it was really fun to sing.  The one thing that surprises me is the lack of songs with female lead singers.  In mixed company, I found whenever Rock Band comes up, the only way the non-gaming females would only remotely think about playing the game would be in a singing capacity. The only songs on that list with predominantly female vocals are Hole  :cry: Garbage  :awesome_for_real: and Rush  :wink:

The fact that either of those pumpkins songs weren't picked made me cry. And I think most of the Hot Fuss album would be a great download.

I find it more amusing that you consider Courtney Love to be female  :wink:

I played Rock Band yesterday. It was pretty damn neat. The characters kinda lack any life, but the game was fun. The new guitar is awesome as hell.  :inluv:

People are worried that the Rock Band Guitar won't work with GH3.

:|

Dude seriously that guitar was nice. The tab in the 4 or 5 songs I played were kinda muh. Whatever. I actually think that I am kinda losing interest in Guitar Hero style games, and Rock Band right now just seems less interesting to me. Maybe I need to play with people who actually want to make it sound good, but man Schild it is exactly what we talked about on Friday, it feels like we are trying to make that game fun before we even get it out of the box. I realized I am more excited about acting stupid in our fake band than actually playing that game.

I don't see why they would be compatable at all... they're by different companies.

Guitar Hero controller works with Rock Band. Rock Band controller doesn't work with Guitar Hero. Though I would not be shocked if a patch fixes this.

The old 360 Guitar works with Guitar Hero 3. Those were by different companies.

yeah but they were for the same franchise. NS would have shot themselves in the foot if they disallowed use of the GH2 guitars in GH3. That would be retarded.

Aren't the guitar controllers just gamepads with a funny shape?  As long as they don't do something stupid like change the button mapping I don't see why they wouldn't all be compatible.

Unless you went out of your way to make them incompatible.  Which Red Octane has an incentive to do, but Harmonix doesn't.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Rock Band guitar doesn't work in Guitar Hero.

I've been told by someone that developers that make their own hardware (can) assign IDs to the hardware which can determine if it works or not with other games. No idea if this is true or not.

That isn't really a new idea for the entertainment industry -- don't many HD-DVDs have coded dealies in them now that bar the upscaling unless you have some sort of decoder? I remember reading something about it a few months back.


This post kinda sucks.  :crying_panda:

Yeah, I'm bummed about all the probable lack of compatability between the two guitar games.

While I'm way more interested in Rock Band than Guitar Hero 3 at this point (I have people to play with locally), I would think that the Red Octate guitars will be a bit more reliable, since their experience with peripherals will give them an edge.

That being said, Harmonix has some pretty neat things in play with their guitar. There's a switch on their guitar that can provide one of five different effects when you engage Overdrive (Star Power) in Rock Band.  These effects are things like wah-wah. The guitar also looks... more like a guitar, which I think will appeal to people just getting into the genre.

Rockband's guitar is better than Guitar Hero's, at least in feel. Performance is comparable, although there is a little learning curve because of fret button spacing issues. But it just feels right in your hands. The drums are going to cause a mini-"Wii have a problem" effect with the kit falling into/onto small pets, childre, coffee tables.

Even at the tour event, they used a sandbag to keep the kit in place (which worked well).

What can I say about F13?  It's really my favorite website in the entire universe!  I love the irreverent banter and sly wit these keyboard jockeys produce.  And I especially love the staff, they're AWESOME.

You know what does suck? I can't put my GH2 in PS3 and have the GH3 guitar work with it. I want to throw away my ps2 already, but they simply won't let me!

That's a nifty stealth edit..? I didn't write the last section, though it may or may not be true.

What can I say about F13?  It's really my favorite website in the entire universe!  I love the irreverent banter and sly wit these keyboard jockeys produce.  And I especially love the staff, they're AWESOME.

 :oh_i_see:

Yeah, yeah. Figured it out. Oh the f13 crew and their passive-aggressive shenanigans!

 :awesome_for_real:

What can I say.

f13.net: We're pretty awesome.

Annnnnnnnnd it's now gone gold.

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/puzzle/rockband/news.html?sid=6182315&om_act=convert&om_clk=gsupdates&tag=updates;title;1   :awesome_for_real:

The more I read about the reviews from people who are new to the whole Guitar Hero/Rock Band scene, the more excited I get about the game. While I think the game won't test people on the guitar side as much as Guitar Hero 3 did, the whole social scene of getting a bunch of people together to rock out could lead to some really amazing fun. I think on the flip side, people who plan to only play the game single player will be horribly dissapointed.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/11/gamelife-rock-b.html

Shelby (7:54 PM): Guitar Hero is dead.  :hello_thar:

Kinda bummed with the current list of released bonus songs; was hoping for songs with a bit more mainstream cachet.  Oh well, I guess I'll be opening the wallet for DLC...

It's already amazing fun to rock out in guitar hero with friends. Here's the problem: I think Rock Band is going to stay in the lap of mostly unskilled ninnnies. The track list just doesn't touch GH3 or 2 for that matter and finding singers is going to be harder than digging diamonds out of the arizona desert.

Tracklist on GH3 is great. Too bad that when there's a bunch of people over and we want to play co-op quickplay like we did in GH2, they completely and totally fucking ruined it. It's exactly what it seems like, a patched on addition to a game.

No ratings, no scores, no percentage breakdown for each player, no Paint it Black, no reason for the next couple of people to try and break a high score... because there isn't one. BOO.

And now release is delayed just long enough that I won't be in town in time to pick up my preorder.  Hooray!

I'd much rather be singing the majority of the GH3 track list to be honest ("Through the Fire and Flames" ~= "Blitzkrieg Bop" though). That, said, I don't know how well tuned the vocals are since the last thing I heard was that the artists themselves were having difficulties on Expert :uhrr:.

I guess I'm not seeing a problem, especially with the "first title", about having the game being in the lap of unskilled ninnies.  You don't think that between Enter Sandman, Green Grass & High Tides, Flirting with Disaster, and Run for the Hills, you don't have at least a decent starting base of difficult songs for three instrument-based people to work on?  I'm honestly curious to know if in the more competative community, if that's enough.  From an outside observation, it seems like in most of the Guitar Hero games, there was a very narrow band of songs that higher tiered players would constant gauge themselves on anyways. In addition, you could argue that down the road, they can fill in more super-difficult songs via the DLC, assuming that Harmonix is more prompt with DLC than the Guitar Hero series...

Unskilled ninny here. That is the real reason I want Rock Band- I can suck at 3 different aspects!

I'm hoping I can rig something up to be able to play the drums with my feet while I play the guitar and sing.  I'll be a one-man (rock) band!

I've come to grips with my mediocrity in rhythm games.  To be honest, I think any level above medium just stops being fun and becomes more about frantic fretwork.  I can half ass my way through the first few set lists of the GH games on hard (barely squeaking out a 3 star), but I never enjoy it.  I'd rather relax and feel like I'm rocking out.  Of course, I'm also not into gaming for the challenge of it.  If a game actively becomes a pain in the ass to play that doesn't spur me on to improving my game; it just makes me stop playing.

lol, no.1 on youtube for 3 weeks imo.

Some people are trying at least 2 instruments at once.  Chris at the Wired liveblog has a video of himself trying to do so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltSREu_n2g&eurl=http://blog.wired.com/games/rock_band/index.html  No clue how good he did though. The smart money, if what you care more about is getting as far as possible, is to just do singing/bass guitar.

After reading accounts about the demo, and from my own experiences playing Rock Band, the one thing I'm worried about the most is the sturdiness of the Rock Band peripherals. It sounds like a lot of the demos at Best Buy are getting thrashed.  I'm interested in seeing how they hold up, compared to the Guitar Hero 3 controllers.  In addition, there's been talk on the 1up blog that due to the way they've recessed the keys, there's a bit of a learning curve to playing with the Rock Band Stratocaster; either you like it, or you don't.

And finally, http://RockBand.com has some videos out, some of which are astonishingly good.  Granted, that doesn't really matter, but if they put this much effort into the videos, I'm hoping they put as much effort into the gameplay and DLC.

Amen. You are cordially invited to play in my mediocre band anytime.

More Rock Band DLC announced! (http://kotaku.com/gaming/rock-band/rock-band-dlc-news-nothing-short-of-pants-explosion-320625.php)

Kind of puts Guitar Hero's continuing "song pack" clusterfuck into perspective...

How much are they charging for them?

Yeah, that could be a problem.   :sad_panda:

I can't see them charging the same as an iTunes download like a lot of utopians out there are praying for.  I think I'd be comfortable with $2 a pop, though.  I'd just be judicious in my spending.

They're $2 a pop.

Forgot this was the rockband thread. NM.

See, my problem with the GH downloads is that they're locked into those shitty song packs that usually only have one song I want.  Harmonix, on the other hand, has promised that they'd be making singles purchases possible.  I can cope with that, paying $6 when all I really want is the Bad Religion song, not so much.

I also think they'd be well advised to charge less for cover songs.

R-tards all across Canada are going nuts because EB switched their date from Nov 20th to Dec 20th. From working at EB I know that release dates are horribly subjective and rarely accurate. None the less, I have to ask, does anyone know anything for sure? Maybe you know a supplier or someone at EA/Harmonix.

Rock Band is pretty much all going to US at first.

So which one of you lovely people wants to buy my copy for me and ship it on up? Hrmmmmm?

You don't know how much it weighs yet, do you?

Oh, I do. I'll con someone in to doing the travel. Someone has to live in Buffalo.

I heard this on the radio the other day and was amazed it wasn't on any of the GH/RB song lists yet. It is a natural!

Does anyone live in Buffalo or Detroit? Close to the border.

Would you actually be willing to make that trip?

Toronto isn't too far away, but it's also not non-trivial either.

I've already made the plans to either go through Detroit or Buffalo to get it. Just deciding which one is more convenient.

Good luck.  Do you have a near-guaranteed source at either location?  Limited resources sound like the rule as opposed to the exception.

All the bonus songs are now announced/leaked.

"29 Fingers" – The Konks
"Blood Doll" – Anarchy Club
"Brainpower" – Freezepop
"Can't Let Go" – Death of the Cool
"Day Late, Dollar Short" – The Acro-Brats
"I Get By" – Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives
"I'm So Sick" – Flyleaf
"Nightmare" – Crooked X
"Outside" – Tribe
"Pleasure (Pleasure)" – Bang Camaro
"Seven" – Vagiant
"Time We Had" – The Mother Hips
"Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld" – Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld

Out of this list, I'm most interested in the songs by Freezepop, Vagiant, and Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld.  :awesome_for_real:  I was kind of hoping for another song by Dethklok, but so it goes.

My roommates are already excited DLC-wise about the CCR song. I could easily see all of us buying at least 16 songs from the current announced DLC list. If Harmonix/EA/MTV prices their songs as much as Red Octane/Activation did, that's around 32 bucks just on addon songs for Rock Band dammit.  :|

I will say, if Red Octane was expecting to cruise on GH2's model of success for DLC... I'm guessing people (like me) who end up buying both GH3 and Rock Band will probably limit their DLC purchases to primarily one of the two titles, and maybe occasionally buy one or two "must have" songs from the other system that are exclusive. GH3's relatively tepid opening, compared to the announcements by Rock Band, don't have me very excited about GH3's chances.

It's all about Honest Bob and the Factory to Dealer Incentives for me.

Big Gulp here is a fan of the slow surfer jams.

 :lol:

Check out the music that Ookii grabbed off of my iPod.  There's a lot of Commander Cody, Dick Dale, Stray Cats and Reverend Horton Heat in there.

There's enough music on that to choke an elephant. There's no "patterns" any normal human is going to take from that mix!

Best Buy isn't doing Pre-orders and I'll be leaving my town (closer to the border) between 3-4 AM. Estimated time to getting to the Best Buy is about 6-7AM or earlier. I'm a crazy sonovabitch.

Good news and bad news. Good news- Rock Band is out the 20th, not the 23rd like I thought. The bad news is the cocksuckers at Gamestop won't let me reserve a copy over the phone, even with a credit card. The one closest to my house has 1 reserve spot left, which will be gone by the time I get down there.

Gonna try the one nearest to my office, since I will be working the day it comes out (have Black Friday off). Wish me luck, and watch the news for a spree shooting if I can't get a copy reserved.

Shacknews confirms the delay in Canada (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/49887). Dec 17th? Fuck that. This is a horrible move by EA. It'll still sell well, but not giving a reason? Rumor is bilingual packaging, but EA has probably been through the french issue before, this shouldn't be new.

I think they're fucking crazy.  If anything, I'd make Canada top priority considering how weak the US dollar is.  Aren't they already charging you guys around $200 Canadian for the bundle?  Make hay while the sun's shining, I say.

As of like 2-3 weeks ago every game release has been set at American pricing. It's $169.99.

Did EBGames drop the wage for everyone too?

I get the joke and I'm sure they would if the government didn't make it a mandatory $8/hr.

It wasn't a joke. If managers were still getting paid $40k+ Canadian (as I know some do in Vancouver and Toronto areas), that would be _ridiculous_.

Hmm...  If the dollar keeps dropping I might very well sneak across the border and snag one of those lucrative McDonald's jobs.

A McDonald's job in Alberta actually is lucrative right now. I'd peg their hourly wage at about $14-16. Go go oil boom!

I knew a few managers who made 40K+ a year, but they were with the company for about 5-10 years. Otherwise you barely made $35K+ a year. Assistant Manager averaged out to about $28-30K

Well, I am fucked. Every Gamestop (the only place taking preorders) around me is out of reserve spots. Not being able to reserve it over the phone with a fucking credit card is just insanity. Some 12 year old kid can wander in and put his name on a list, but god fucking forbid I try to GIVE YOU FUCKING MONEY FOR A FUCKING PRODUCT. And I will fucking guarantee that there is at least one stoned fuckhead who will forget he reserved it at two different stores.

Best Buy is having a midnight opening for it, but that would make getting to work a giant PITA the next day. Fry's claims I can call and reserve it the day it comes out. I can just see how that will work for me. At this point I will be lucky to have it by Christmas. FUCK.

I've called once or twice, just to confirm my pre-order is still valid.  I'm terrified that they'll find a way to botch things.  :hello_thar:  When I went to pick up GH3 from my friendly neighborhood Gamestop, they informed me that in fact I had preordered just the GH3 game, and not the bundle.  Last time I called, they confirmed that I did have the bundle, with the right system for Rock Band.  Hopefully they don't get crazy and try to hold a lottery with the current pre-orders.

Still, it could be worse... http://community.rockband.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=7493

btw, Scorehero.com, which is one of the more popular clearing houses for Guitar Hero scoreboards, was a part of a battle of the bands, involving all the various game review sites.  Winner of the battle of the bands would get exclusive rights to release information about soemthing about Rock Band that Harmonix hasn't annouced yet (supposedly). Gamespy did a writeup about their experience in the final round, when they went up against 1up: http://ps3.gamespy.com/articles/835/835124p1.html

The real interest in the whole article, besides seeing the logistics of a tourney, is also seeing how Gamespy is separating what's easy/fun to play, what's challenging to play, and what's really difficult to play.

(http://xbox360media.gamespy.com/xbox360/image/article/834/834919/whiteboard_1194997616.jpg)

Some of the songs don't make a lot of sense as "we're boned".  :| I wonder if it's songs that are obscure enough to their group so that the song is hard to sing (Electric Version?), songs that they got an expert guitarist with, so the song's not so bad (Green Grass, High Tides), or songs that they've never really bothered to practice before.

There is not a single SINGLE SONG in that game that Cpt_Jigglypuff, Hammer Frenzy, Phildo and I will have a problem decimating. Just thought I'd put that out there. We're going to fucking embarass this game in a single evening.

Like decimate as in, "I'm so fucking good at this game, I just ran over it with a backhoe"? or decimate as in, "Man, I just squeaked by with a 59% on expert on Psychobilly Freakout. Fuck Yeah!"


Props to you guys if you can skate through everything easy-breezy on expert. That's insane.

I can hit over 90% on psychobilly freakout consistantly. It's a cakewalk.

Yes, we're going to run over it with a back hoe, sherman tank, AND 16 cats.

As I recall from reading Schild's posts earlier about GH2 and GH3, he's had a ton of experience clearing out the nasty higher tier songs in co-op mode.  In addition, 1up's coverage of Rock Band has noted that folks with fairly strong drumming backgrounds can very quickly pick up the drums, as evidenced by their drummer Nelson.  I have no clue how "tough" vocals are.

So you got to figure, if one of the 4 guys is a strong drummer, and if the vocals are fairly easy to pick ups, then yeah, schild & co can probably tear through Rock Band.

My wild-ass guess is that amongst the competative community, it won't be as much a matter of the bragging rights being that you finished a song, the bragging right will be what the total score is for your team. 

I need to practice some c2v on GH1-2-3. I don't play it enough and then I get frustrated because I suck. I'm supposed to be good at these rhythm type games.  :oh_i_see:

Anyway, Rock Band + Beer + Liquor = A really fucking good time. (Coming soon to my living room)

Phil is the good drummer. I imagine singing will be a fucking cakewalk for anyone even if they sound like ass, but I think Hammer Frenzy will sound beautiful. Justin and I can wreck just about any song together. Though after about 20-30 tracks it tends to wear on us.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to some crazy multiplayer action too, but on a much lower-level scale.  Two of my roommates are probably mid-tier hard quality guitar/bass players (Pinky gives them some limited problems, just barely starting to try HO/PO), and another roommate has atrocious rhythm game skills but will probably be a capable singer.  The last roommate has no interest in playing. I'd honestly guess that for our group to have "fun" sessions, our team will probably be:

Guitarist/Bassist: Hard/Expert, maybe Medium/Expert on a really nasty song
Drums: Medium
Vocals: Medium

As a result, I think with our house, we're going to play more of the "fun" as opposed to "hard" songs.

That's probably one of the good things about the vocalist; my general observation is that as long as you know the song's tempo and lyrics fairly well, you'll have a hard time failing in medium difficulty. Vocals are going to be interesting to see what people do with them.  Presumably, it's the easiest of the intruments to start out in.  On the other hand, with the other 3 instruments, as you increase in difficulty, you get a bonus of feeling like you're "playing the song", as you're playing more and more of the notes.  With vocals, I'm not sure you have that feeling as you move up.

Is this for all of them?

Nope: http://www.bestbuy.com/site//olspage.jsp?id=pcmcat136400050001&type=category

Excellent! My plans are still in effect. I actually debated whether or not to leave Monday to make the midnight launch in Detroit.

That's from about a month ago or so.

That means singing is absolutely broken if the original singer can't do it.

But then, technically speaking in terms of game design and flow, Harmonix sucks a cock.

Depends on the singer. I think some would go for the all out experience when they were singing for the game, when it really just looks for pitch.

I finally played the demo for Rock Band today in a Best Buy and I have to say that I was very impressed by the feel of the guitar. The non-raised keys really made a difference for me on slides; playing big solos will most certainly be easier. However, I played through Black Hole Sun on Hard (A quick warmup) and noticed it was more like Medium on GH2 with the orange keys thrown in. Anyone else notice this?

Has either company released details about compatibility of guitars? I'm too lazy to google it, since I have to put together all my furniture from today and watch the Bolts tonight.

Thumbs up so far.

GH3 guitar works with Rock Band. Rock Band guitar does not work with GH3.

Also, DLC pricing is announced (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6182927.html?action=convert&om_clk=latestnews&tag=latestnews;title;0)

They are picking the worst fucking songs from each band.

No way. The worst fucking songs from Metallica would be:

1) The House that Jack Built
2) That song from MI:3
3) Anything off that stupidass new album.

Those songs aren't bad at all. The other bands I can't really speak for.

Fade to Black, their cover of Stone Cold Crazy, and Master of Puppets would have been, oh, I don't know worthwhile. Those 3 songs are not worthwhile. Well, 1 of them is. And it's the EXACT SAME REASON GUITAR HERO SONG PACKS SUCK.

Fair enough. I giuess you don't like them, but I for one will most certainly pay for that as soon as it is available.

Blackened will be a fun song to play and so will Ride the Lightning.. It has a nifty solo at the opening.

Looking at that list further, The Police, Punk Pack, and the first Individual pack are a joke. I'd buy the Buddy Holly/My Iron Lung pack though.

Hopefully whoever is running the DLC will just do individual songs like iTunes. That'd be far superior -- just pick and choose what you want, none of this bundle in a shittastic song.

Songs Phil would like to play: Ride the Lightning, Roxanne, Fortunate Son and Buddy Holly.  Only two of them are being sold individually.  They lose.

Nope, from the article: Rock Band will still feature pre-selected three-song packs for download, but they will instead cost $5.49 (440 Microsoft points on Xbox 360). Songs will also be available individually for $1.99.

Neutral on the song selections for Metallica.  My musical tastes don't really lean metal, so it's a non-issue for me. I'll probably get maybe one of the Police songs, 3's and 7's (go go GH3), and half of the Individual tracks.  Fuck.  :oops:

Man, the fucking Queens of the Stone Age are the worst addition to this genre. How could you possibly enjoy 3s and 7s?

Those packs are pretty fucking uninspiring. Full albums? How much are those going to cost, based on what we're already seeing?

And the same, full price for "made famous by" versions? Fuck that.

Yeah, too many of those songs are covers.  Also, I'm assuming that the songs they mention as 3 packs are going to stay 3 packs, and the others that were mentioned as "Individual Tracks" are the ones being sold, well, individually.

I understand completely why packaging 3 songs together.

It's not like we're going to get Unforgiven and Fade to Black with Ride the Lightning. They want to package shit that won't sell a pack with one thing that will.

It's brilliant and completely fucking evil.

They mentioned .99$ songs. I'm assuming those are covers, though I'm not sure. I'd assume they are as on their forums they implied that they wanted to sell them cheaper because we all know they aren't master tracks and therefore lose some value.

Hmm, lemme make this more obvious:

http://community.rockband.com/index.php?do=/public/blog/view/id_610/


If you do some looking up, he's the senior designer at Harmonix.

Agreed on the 'paying full freight for covers sucks ass' point. Why would they bother with non-masters when so many artists are already cooperating? Leave the other fuckers out in the cold and let them watch when 16 year old kids start buying Black Sabbath albums on iTunes.

My Rock Band bundle just shipped from Amazon. Giggity.

Played a little bit of Rock Band at a local best buy....

Actual game is fun, on more than one occasion, the crowd starts to "sing" along with the singer, which is pretty awesome.  :awesome_for_real: My friend and I who did a fair amount of drumming were able to rack up big scores, but the Best Buy demo units are modified to automatically register kickpad hits without the need for a kickpad. Adding the kickpad will probably add a new dimension of difficulty.

Drumming is pretty fun. The yellow pad was broken, but we were able to work around it by having someone press the yellow keypress button.  The center of the drum unit has a set of standard buttons that can be used instead of the drumsticks.

Guitar is unknown, since the strum bar is totally broken. In addition, while the store had a mic, they didn't allow it to be used because they had complaints with noise from other customers at the store. The store employee also explained that all the parts that came with the demo unit are pre-production. In addition, kids have the capacity to be destructive little monsters.  However, going forward I'm definitely treating the sturdiness of the Rock Band pieces with some wariness.

And looks like someone has gotten a copy of Rock Band early (no drums however), and this is the same guy who managed to snag a copy of Guitar Hero 3 early.  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  :oh_i_see: Anyways, here are some of the songs that he's uploaded via YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=pdtecrj

The general consensus around the internet seems to be that the Rock Band's guitar expert is comparable with GH2, and a notch below GH3. There's even talk that GH3's Hard is more difficult than Rock Band, but I think with the smaller hit window (as compared to GH3) and looking at some of the higher tier songs (Green Grass and High Tides), I have a really hard time believing that.

You'd be surprised how early games leak these days. My friend beat Super Mario Galaxies before it even shipped.

These songs look like dick for serious Guitar Hero types. Like, every single one of them.

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=corporalgregg

Slightly tougher songs, but even the author admits that on his second try he was 5-starring Expert for all the songs. Makes you wonder if Gold Starring will be the new 5 star (note, Gold starring =! FC, it possibly means that you averaged a 5x score on the song).

Like I said, for my skill level and for my friend's skill level, the lowered difficulty bar is NOT a gripe.  I'm really interested to see amongst the more competative community (read: schild) if the lower-ish difficulty will completely turn off that group or not.  At the same time I want to see if that matters to Rock Band's popularity; while you want to feed the desire of the ubers to keep on playing, there's nothing wrong with broadening the base (especially on the "initial" outlay).

I think I am totally done with these types of games. I was really hoping that RB would have some fun guitar parts but all the videos I've seen make it look like all the note charts are made for retards, by retards. I can understand that some people may find expert mode on GH hard, but it is no excuse for making the note charts in RB look like utter shit. I will play at a drunken party capacity and nothing more. These douches aren't getting anymore of my money.

This all really makes me respect Neversoft even more. Their note charts were damn fun to play, even on the shittier songs.

Fuck serious guitar hero types.

Go play a real guitar if you want to put that much time into it. GH3 is too hard; GH2 should be the baseline for difficulty.

Wrong. Expert is too hard for you. Just because you can't beat expert doesn't mean it's not fun.

No, it's just pandering to the minuscule amount of people who can move their hands that fast. The unlockable only-on-expert songs are just a kick in the balls to people like me who will never be able to play at that level. The difficulty bar is simply too high for us plebes, and I'm definitely not your average gamer.

What exactly is wrong with this note chart (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b04xmwh9ps) anyway? I assume you mean the tabbing but that looks fine. It's like we're seeing and playing different games.

This is just a big middle finger from Neversoft straight to me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_znMI5hRxKY). Starting at 3:20.

Not much makes me LOL on a Monday, but that phrase makes me giggle.

The idea of serious guitar hero is hilarious. Learn to play a fucking instrument.  :x

And the whole GH is too hard on expert is silliness. Schild can't play any instruments and he is a monster on the GH. All it takes a little practice. My kid can beat most the game on hard and he doesn't play many rhythm games at all.

I can agree that you SHOULD be able to open all songs regardless of what level you play on though, but there absolutely HAS to be a more difficult mode for people who have better than average hand/eye coordination.

At this point, it is nearly useless for me to buy GH3 cause I can kick the shit out of 95% of the songs. At this point I would be buying the game for a handful of songs that I SHOULD be playing on my real guitar anyway.

By the way that Faith No More song was BORING. I love that song but that is one boring ass song to play guitar for. I am all for changing up the note charts or adding some extra stuff is it makes for less "me standing there with a plastic guitar looking like a tool and not playing anything at all" moments. That not chart was straight up boring, but in Harmonix's defense, it is a boring song to play on guitar period.

And that Devil Went Down to Georgia is insane. Play it on hard or medium, expert is not for everybody, I for one would love to play that though. I loves me a challenge. 

I've played 3 quite a bit, and while I beat 1 on expert, and got half to two-thirds through expert in GH2/80s, I can't beat one or Raining Blood on Hard in GH3. I can 5 star, and even gold star medium, and I can 5 star most of the first 2-3 tiers of hard, but those songs above suck for my skills. I can't imagine what Expert is like, and I have no really strong desire to find out. I also think of most of the people I know who bought any of the GH games, or tried it out on my system... Most of them can barely get through Medium, and they enjoy that difficulty. GH3 expert is out of their range, regardless of how much they practice.

I like to play the GH games for completely different reasons than schild; reasons that probably put me in the RB sweet-spot. I play them to feel that moment Zen where a song clicks, and it feels like I'm rocking out. That doesn't mean harder note charts, it means good note charts. I'd rather RB be a little easier, than harder. I guess I want to be challenged, not WOULD YOU LIKE A CHALLENGE?!?!?!, and I think RB going to be that game for me.

You know, if you just want a challenge, aren't there mods for the PS2 version?  You could just make a song with tons of skittles on it and put it over whatever music you want.  In the meantime, I'll continue to play the songs that I like to listen to and ignoring anything past tier 6.  Except for Cliffs of Dover, which is a great song half of the time.

Make it harder!

Jesus, you guys sound like the fucking poopsock catasses that blow through MMOG content and then bitch that there is nothing else to do. I am sorry, but if you are shredding expert on GHIII then you are in the minority and might need to find other games to play. The rest of us 'retards' want a fun game to play that doesn't force us to find a coked up spider monkey to unlock content on our behalf.

Had a minor hiccup with my Xbox 360 over the weekend. Went to plug in my guitar for some GHIII MP with trotski. I couldn't get the Xbox to respond to the guitar. Plugged in my charger unit for my controller- no light. I figure my USB port is fucked, so I mention it to my wife. She is about to head out the door to Costco (I got my Elite through Costco.com), so I pack the whole thing up and return it. They don't have any Elites for sale, so I get almost $600 in cash. After 6 or 7 stops, I finally find an Elite for sale. It comes bundled with a game I already own, but fuck it.

Get home, get NHL up and running, then have a sinking thought. Open my GHIII case. Yep, left the CD in the fucking drive of the old 360. Call Costco otw to the Seahawks game yesterday morning. They take my name and number and promise to call me back when they find it. 5 PM, and we are headed home from the game (and I am nice and drunk  :awesome_for_real: ). We decide to stop by Costco before they close. The girl who was supposed to call me back is still there, and apologizes that she got busy. We eventually get a task force of about 6 employees searching for the goddamned thing, and I am the one who finds it (sitting inside a locked cage right next to the returns area). Clownshoes. Get the disk, head home.

I am starting to think I might hit Best Buy tonight at midnight to procure Rock Band. Fuck if I will go into a 4 day weekend without it!

This is a game with 3 iterations all based around the same gameplay with ample training and a curve that's just awesome. I do not play guitar. I got this good at guitar hero by playing guitar hero. We're not in the minority because we're good. We're in the minority because we played enough to get this good. GH is not a game for dicking around and just having fun, because trust me, if you do [just dick around and "have fun"], you'll never ever get to the fun stuff. There's is nothing more fun than 2 very, very good players playing expert on coop. Jigglypuff and I should make a video of YYZ.

This thread needs a huge dose of YMMV.
If you're that fucking hardcore about Rock Band, play the god damn drums and ace singing. If you're so good at it, maybe you can do it better than the original fucking bands (see earlier in the thread).  :oh_i_see:

People do the same shit for every rhythm game that comes out. I know people who think the 13s on ITG2 and 10s on IIDX are too easy, but they definitely don't represent everyone.  Also, it'll probably be quite soon that an editor comes out for use with the ps3/x360 as opposed to only PC. Then you can have your dose of fun edits if shit is too easy for you.

Since schild beat me to the post,


Everyone can have different amounts of fun. What denotes fun for you may or may not denote fun for others. My girlfriend loves playing medium/hard. I on the other hand want to catass to be as good as ya'll. But having been one of the pretty good rhythm DDR/ITG/IIDX players, I certainly believe that people at an arcade have fun playing (insert game here) no matter what skill level. It doesn't have to be almost-impossible to be fun; it only has to be fun.

That being said, a game should strive to be fun for all players. I sorta agree that there should be retarded hard songs for people who are very good, but I wouldn't mind them being edits or extra songs.

This conversation is soooo much better if you caught South Park last week.

...


Sadly, I'm not being sarcastic when I say that I would watch that.

It was a Youtube YYZ video that got me into this mess.

I don't mind people playing songs as hard as they can make them. I just get pissy when content gets cockblocked by the 'You must be this 1337 to play' bullshit. Give me everything I PAID FOR and let ME decide how hard I want it to be.

Eh, they make you play career mode on several difficulty levels anyway if you want to unlock all the songs, guitars, characters, skins, etc.  I've beaten hard, most of expert and about half of coop and still haven't unlocked any of the optional characters.  So much crap to buy.

Way Above Par: Agree and disagree with you. I agree that yes you should get all of what the game has offer regardless of how good you are at it. By that I mean you should have access to ALL the songs on easy if need be. BUT I don't think that people who are good at anything are in the minority and need to play other stuff. Some people are just better at rhythm games, and if they are good, there should be some level of content or a way for them to access challenging content. Just like it is unfair to make content unavailable to the less skilled, it is equally unfair to deny content to the higher skilled player base. GH3 has that level of play for people like Schild and JigglyPuff and to an extent myself. ( I suck at GH) and it also has fun stuff for the less skilled player. ( multiple skill levels unlockable content etc.) BUT I agree that they should have access to all the songs only because there is a pocket of players who wont ever beat song "x' on expert, and they should still have the opportunity to play the other songs on a difficulty they can handle. I think all companies need to make an effort to have accessible content and reward players with progressive difficulty or anything that doesn't exclude novice players, but also not put some BS cap on the acceptable skill level for a particular game. In my opinion there are fighting games that do this well, for example Soul Calibur and Tekken, which reward players of all levels equally. The high level rewards come int he form of titles and fights matchups where a player gets to use all their attained skill against another somewhat equally skilled opponent.

Yes, South Park nailed it.

I played Guitar Hero for the first time the other day in Gamespot. My advice: learn to play a real fucking instrument. Girls dig it. The end of South Park perfectly summarized harcore Guitar Hero players.

Frenzy: Thanks for rewriting my post in a shitload of words ;)

Guitar Hero/Rock Band will continue entertain as long as beer exists and people have friendships.

 :awesome_for_real:

Launch Day is either now, or tomorrow morning for Americans.  One last set of gotchas that may or may not be deal breakers for people on the fence!

1) There's no Hyperspeed.  However, they slightly increased the speed of the Expert scrolling to compensate.

http://community.rockband.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=8210&page=3&highlight=hyperspeed

2) There's some talk on the forums how the PS3 GH3 guitar isn't working as well as it should/at all with Rock Band for the PS3. Pray for a patch folks.  This isn't a problem with the Xbox 360s.

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/19/rock-band-rejects-ps3s-guitar-hero-controller/

Looking forward to rocking out with my friends tomorrow morning/afternoon/night.  I might be down for some online jam sessions later in the week.. depends on how busy Thanksgiving gets.

See that's cool, I can get down with that. I had fun laughing at my friends who have never played any instruments and have no rhythm, for one he literally got two notes right and his play session faded out in 15 seconds. (Then I got a 94% on my first try, heh)

Turning it into something ultra-competitive where you seriously practice? Dude, you are practicing FAKE GUITAR. Lol. It's like people who enter air guitar competitions.

Well, that's an interesting experience.  I just blew through the first four tiers of guitar on expert and, so far, the difficulty is right where I wanted it to be.  Not face-melting.  I suspect it ramps up pretty fast, but learning the new guitar controller takes a while also.  I found myself constantly hitting extra buttons with the palm of my hand while playing until I put in about two hours and realized I needed to hold my hand differently.  Otherwise, not so bad.  And I'm playing on the ps3 with no controller-related problems so far.

The drums, though... I need to put in a solid day getting used to sight-reading their notation.  I gave it one try on expert and failed epically.

Not going to open the microphone.  Ever.

PHIL, NUMBA WAN!

(http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/3513/philnumbawanlz1.jpg)

Awesome-o, Grats Phil.


Funnily enough, the only thing holding me back from picking it up right now is that I haven't heard anything to contradict "Expert Vocals are broken" :uhrr:.

Also in that vein, lyrics: http://joshmedia.net/RockBandLyrics.pdf (http://joshmedia.net/RockBandLyrics.pdf). Yay for not having to deal with LyricWiki!

Well I beat the solo guitar tour on Hard a few minutes ago.  I'm like ranked #60!  In a few hours, multiply that by 1oo.  Lots of polish.  More true to the songs than Guitar Hero, as far as Lead/Bass/Rhythm, which also means quiet a few stretches of buttonless play.  I found myself having a lot of fun.  I'm sure when I get to play with others, it'll be even more so.

Hammers were easier to hit than GH2, but more difficult than GH3.  I was using my GH2 guitar (I got the buttons all loose).  Overall, Hard was easier than GH2/GH3.  Most songs were 5-starred first shot, and I don't forsee any problem going back and fiving them all.

As to the hammer-on things. By Guitar Hero 7 and Rock Band 4, Neversoft will have so technologically passed Harmonix that people are going to realize that Harmonix is amateur hour in the technician department. Neversoft has been creating some of the most technically proficient games in... gaming since the ps1 era, though they hit their stride on the Dreamcast.

Basically, Neversoft should have gotten a hold of Rock Band. They also have better taste in music and don't have to suck the teet of MTV.

I didn't think it was possible for a single person to be so very, very wrong.  And "better taste in music"?  Now I know you're on crack.

We'll see what happens when MTV starts jamming pop sensation shit into Rock Band, won't we?

Not touching the Neversoft technical proficiency comment, sure I bow to your expertise.  However as to the taste in music thing... I'd argue almost all the "on paper" crappy song choices can either be explained away, or matched by GH3.

- GH3 was smart of enough to lock in Velvet Revolver, Poison, GnR, and Rage against the Machine.  So Rock Band couldn't score an comparable (bye-bye Welcome to the Jungle). My guess is that the Harmonix crew would have liked to score at least 2 songs from the above group of 4, as opposed to some sort of hate for Guns and Roses.

- Hole's Celebrity Skin shouldn't be in Rock Band.  However, without it you have to figure that Nevermind has no chance of getting on as an album DLC without Courtney's help blackmail.  And uh, Smells like Teen Spirit will be a rocktacular song for the drunken masses (the Pubbies).

- For every Coheed and Cambria and Fall Out Boy, I give you Slipknot and AFI.

- I will admit, I'm a huge fan of The New Pornographers, so I'm way biased on that choice.

- If you're not in love with Friend-Of-Harmonix bands, then yeah, the GH3 Bonus songs will be superior.  But at the rate that Rock Band has DLC coming out, I can easily overlook that.

- And seriously, for sucking the teat of MTV they've showed an awful amount of restraint so far in not going ridiculous with the extraneous ads from what it sounds like. On the flip side, I'm not feeling too immersive shooting a video on the Pontiac Stage, or strumming my Axe bass.

I dunno, call it agree to disagree for me.

Re-worded some things that seemed unclear.  Stupid Graveyard shift.

I think MTV is staying hands off the first iteration just to get units into people's hands.

This is a want the best, fear the worst situation for me.

Whoever announces Dookie as a downlodable album rules the day for me though. Or even better "...and Out Came the Wolves" from Rancid.

Man. I would fucking kill for that in Rock Band. Just KILL. You want me to fix the North Korea situation? Bring out Wolves.

I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.  If it comes in DLC form the easy thing to do is to not buy it.

Unfortunately, I think that bridge is less than a year away :( :( :(

Did I mention how much I hate this new fucking guitar! I'm terrified that my erection ( caused by wicked solo) is gonna break the stupid thing in half!

Caution: Wicked Solos may cause erection.

Yeah the more I play the RB guitar the more I hate it.

At At first, I was like  :ye_gods:

Then I Was like  :uhrr:

then you were like

 :pedobear:

(http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/4199/soayhpfwpxuuuixayfoxdfgry7.jpg)

Yeah, the guitar is iffy. I might just have to play using the lower fret buttons only.

Yeah, I am going to just use a GH controller if I play at F13 house... Cause really I was all like

(http://zioneocon.blogspot.com/arafat%20buggy%20eyes.jpg)

Then I Was like

(http://www.mackdawgproductions.com/blogs/picturethis/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/photo-16.jpg)

Dunno, I thought Celebrity Skin and the Fall Out Boy tunes were fun to play.  But then again, it WAS 3 AM.  I've also strongly disliked playing all of the Rage and Velvet Revolver tunes on Guitar Hero so far.  The only real tragedy with Rock Band is the aforementioned goat-sucking POS guitar.

Bulls on Parade just isn't that great of a song for GH/RB. It's one of my favorite RATM tracks, just that you can't really replicate what makes its guitar part awesome within the game mechaics.

Just snagged it this morning.

I will report back. I am dubious of the guitar, but we shall see.

That is really weird that everyone hates the guiitar- trotski (who came over today to help me break it in) and I both dig it. Anyone having issues with the kick pedal? I can't get it to work more than sporadically, if it all. Kinda tough to 5 star a song on drums without it...

I think unlike the drums, the kick-bass is unforgiving on lack of precision.  I have to be really precise with it, whereas I can just kind of slob the little drum pads.

Or, yours could just be broken :)  I missed a bunch I thought I should have hit, but every time I really took great care, I hit.  So...  YMMV.

I'd like to be able to adjust the tension in the pedal.  Otherwise, the drums are turning out to be a blast.  I'm about halfway through it on expert and have only failed one time.

Dude, I can't even get past the intermediate tutorial on drums.  It absolutely sucks.   :ye_gods:

Yeah, not sure what all the guitar hate is about. Rock Band guitar absolutely puts the GH guitar to shame, and it is nowhere even close. Doesn't feel like a POS Fisher Price toy in my hands, and the strum is nice and tight...not clunky like the GH strumming. Don't get me wrong, I :heart: GH, just saying the Stat pwns.

FWIW, Par totally rocked the mic today  :ye_gods:

I hate to be a raging dickhead. But I have to ask, are you good at it? I mean, expert only good.

Because anyone who puts their guitar through the paces (you should fly to AZ and feel my PS2 guitar) is saying the RB guitar is a big piece of shit and doesn't seem to register notes that are really really close together as well as the GH3 guitar. Also, it breaks. A lot apparently.

Can someone explain to me how these games work? What I mean is, if I play a note with the first "fret" (button) is it always actually the same note, for the entire song? Does that mean there are only 5 distinct notes total? Or does the same "fret" (button) produce a different sound depending on where you are in the song?

Different sounds. Think of it as air guitar with a score and a certain amount of skill rather than flailing. Particularly in 2 and 3. You could brute force most of 1 because the hammer ons and such were completely non-functional. 2 was better, but 3 really peaks in that department.

My biggest gripe about the Rock Band guitar is that I'm still accidentally hitting extra buttons during chords with my palm, and during complicated solos where I have to move my hand I lose my place too easily.

Hmm that's lame. But I guess the other way would be lame too. I suppose replicating a guitar when you have 5 buttons to work with is impossible.

Someone should make a game that comes with a 24 button guitar (4 x 6) and secretly trick people into learning real guitar while they play.

Ok, assuming I'm decent at playing drums, and was always shit while I was learning guitar, but enjoy music, the question is:

Would I enjoy playing this game? Is it worth the money? Or should I just wait for the next F13 and flail away at schild's copy?

The buttons are way too clunky to be able to pack six of them together in a row.  It could probably be done with higher quality hardware, mind you, but I bet it would end up costing more than a real guitar.

I'm still waiting for some enterprising hacker to write the driver that makes a real electric guitar function as a Guitar Hero controller (analyze the pitch of the audio output to figure out what fret you're on, and convert that into the appropriate button press).  Once someone did that a version of Guitar Hero that used real guitar tab would be very doable.

OK, hooked GH2 back up just to see why I was sucking so hardcore at GH3. I've now discovered why. The PS3 guitar fucking blows.

Since I curl my hand around and press the lower part of the buttons, when you hit them on the edge they can hit the side, stick, and require a lot more force to push down than normal. Shitty design. Also, the amount of force to actually push the button down seems to have been doubled, those springs behind the key (or whatever) are way too strong. To top it all off, something about the guitar makes my left hand start to ache after a few songs.

I need to seriously look into guitar modification because I was SO much better at GH with a guitar I could actually play. I need to try the rock band guitar to see what it's like.

Game of the decade material.

That's tricky.  It's like playing a wonky electronic kit with the snare drum on the left.  Or like playing the tenors in a marching band, etc, etc.  As I've said, I'm enjoying it so far, but I wish you could adjust the action on the pedal.  Also, I think I'll need to memorize the harder songs rather than site-read them the way I can on the guitar.  But it IS fun.  And don't you want to be able to show off your sick fake-drum chops at the next F13 thingy?  Especially if Schild sucks at them?  The quality of the song choices and most of them being master tracks goes a long way to making it fun, too.

(I do not know for a fact whether or not Schild sucks at Rock Band drumming, but I'll file a full report next week)

Woohoo, picked it up this morning and have fiddled around a bit here and there.  My thoughts: 

1) there's a lot of Strang und Durm on the official forums about busted units.  So far, everything's working okay on my end.  :awesome_for_real:

2) The guitar is odd.  Due to the lack of raised buttons, it's much harder for people who were using the bump of the buttons as a guide to move up and down to play the faster sequences.  In addition, the length of the guitar (it's feels longer than the GH3 guitar) does it make it more awkward to strum for me, at least.  I can see however that when there's the ending bonus free-play sessions, you'll want the solo tap buttons.  Good luck practicing how to shift your fingers from the regular buttons down to the solo buttons. That's going to take myself some time to get proficient at.

With the tighter window (compared to GH3) for HO/POs and the lack of "responsiveness" when you strum, I've had a hell of a time with some of the harder guitar solos with the Stratocaster.

On the flip side, there are some people who just thrive on the Stratocaster, I think it's going to be one of those things that has no middle ground.  One of the 1Up video blogs did a great job of discussing it. http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/15950 at around 2:56.


I'm really interested to see people who get into these sorts of game via Rock Band and are totally raised on playing the Stratocaster, to try the Guitar Hero guitars and see how they respond.

3) The drums aren't too bad.  Most of my roommates are starting on easy/medium. Kick Pedal is making them humble, and songs that look easy on paper can totally defeat them.  I haven't tried em yet.

4) Vocals aren't bad, but you need to be able to carry a tune to some degree.  Warbling all over the place will quickly get you to fail, even on Easy.

5) Solo mode is okay, nothing feels new in the little that I've played.  In the interests of unlocking things as quick as possible, I'm playing on Hard, and so far I'm breezing through it. But like I said earlier, My Sharona's solo was a bit uglier on the sightread on Expert.

6) Band World Tour is pretty fun, but you really want everyone in your band to be Medium level or higher.  With a rag tag band of Hard Bass, Hard/Expert Guitar, Easy/Medium Vocals, and Easy Drums puts us in the mid 4 stars-5 stars on an easy song (In Bloom). Having the ability to custom work on your Avatar is definitely a draw for people who weren't into Guitar Hero to begin with. Among some of the mini tips I'd suggest in group play:

a) In group mode, your 2x bonus Overdrive/StarPower affects everyone. Drums only can trigger their Overdrive after a successful fill, and Singers have a specific (although plentiful) window in which they can trigger Overdrive.  As a result, I'd suggest that the Guitar and Bassist pick their spots to kick Overdrive and watching the Drummer and Singer do theirs. If you do it right, if my math's corrent you'll have the Guitarist doing 8x4 points, Drummer 8x4 points, Singer 8x4, and Bassist 8x6(bassists top out their bonuses at 6x) points. At the very least, you'll want to have at least have your Overdrives paired every time.

b) On the flip side, if you're playing with people who are shaky singers/drummers/etc, have one of the string instruments save an Overdrive for bringing people back.  When a specific person fails, it doesn't doom the entire group right away; successful Star Power/Overdrive usage "brings them back".  Up to 3 times though.  If it's not done in time, the Rock Meter slowly but steadily drops until your entire band fails.

c) Unfortunately, since the vocals are based on word recognition, if your singer doesn't know the words you're in for a world of pain song-wise. It's probably better to have the singer pick the songs early on.


Unless you have no friends who own it, wait.  I adore the game and am a total fanboy for it, but I had multiple occasions to try the game with friends first. 170 bucks is a non-trivial investment. Many people who've played guitar before have complained that the GH/RB plastic guitars are nothing like guitars, and require a totally different skillset. If you have a background in keyed instruments (Saxophone, Piano, Accordian?) I think will pick up on it faster.  As for the drums, it's a mixed bag.  Harmonix has been claiming on a limited basis that it teaches you rock and roll rhythms.

Honestly, you're better off waiting for a local bar/college dorm/bestbuy to carry it, and messing with it there. 

I'm pretty sure the game only recognizes pitch. I've had moments where I've muttered nonsense cause it went by too fast, but I kept the pitch and it gave it to me.

All communication from Harmonix is that it does both.  No clue if that's actually true in the field.  Our vocalist had really sketchy pitch.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/hoodoo-operator/rock-band-details-explosion-269074.php


No clue if they toned that down after people were complaining during coding that the vocals were way too hard.

EDIT: I should point out that there's some quasi-immersion carrots that are sprinkled throughout the BWT.  You can design your own logo that's displayed on the Drums, and the loading screens chart your progress as you get more and more famous.  You start out with band shots behind a crumbling wall, and you slowly work to shots of sitting in a limo, and the like.  Kinda cool, if you care about that sort of thing.

EDIT 2: Dammit, stupid double post.  :uhrr:

Why are there buttons at the neck of the stupid Strat guitar? SO DUMB

I swapped to the GH3 controller around 45 or so songs into the guitar solo tour, haven't looked back.

I honestly think that the game is completely playable on the Strat, but the Strat is definitely a less well-made guitar, and it's just a preference thing.

Drums are SO. DAMN. FUN. Holy FUCK.

I like the new guitar mostly. I think it is more comfortable. I played a good 8 hours+ today, mostly guitar, and my hand never got tired or cramped like it usually does with the GH guitars. I did have a harder time with the solos and hard stuff. Probably due to the new buttons, also the solo frets are going to take some practice/getting used to.

Oh also it broke. Won't strum down anymore. So I will concede that the GH3 guitar is better made.

Anyway I really like the set list, better then GH3 in my opinion. Although I have not played all the songs as we played multi player mode and didn't realize till rather later that we were unlocking songs VERY VERY slowly. I think around the 6th time we played Dani California someone realized we were getting screwed.

I do have a question. Where do you download content from? Because I never found it in any of the options. Or do you have to do it from the dashboard?

When I picked up My Sharona and Fortunate Son, I bought them outside the game, in the Xbox live menus.

When I was dicking around with the Stratocaster, my right arm (I am right-handed) just felt uncomfortable during long strumming sessions.  It also seemed like I was really off during the HO/PO sessions... maybe I'm too used to the Guitar Hero-styled guitars.

Okay, let's just say that my buddy Roger and I suck bad at the drums.  BAD.

I was starting to think that we'd be screwed and not have a drummer when Roger's roommate Al comes over, and having never played the drums in his life, gets 92% on Gimme Shelter (granted, on Easy, but we're just looking for basic proficiency here).  The dude's a fucking idiot savant on the drums!  So thankfully, we've got that covered now.

That's awesome.

You are all making me sad.

I want to buy this, but have no nearby friends :(

A friend bought this and brought it over for our weekly gaming night (normally reserved for LAN-based geekery) last night. It was the most fun we've had in a long time.

The band tour mode was great and I really loved having to do sets where you don't know what the songs aree going to be. We were all switching around instruments a lot which led to some frustration trying to change players in between songs so we ended up just leaving the players the same and switching instruments without regard for individual stats.

Having never played GH I really liked the guitar. I found I could play very comfortably using the inside set of buttons and never had any trouble with the palm of my hand pushing them accidentally. It seems like there's some issues due to motor memory on the GH guitar rather than a flaw with the RB guitar itself. I purchased a X-Plorer strat for my PC version of GH3 (and as a bass guitar for RB next time) last night so I should soon be able to offer an objective comparison without having trained on the GH version.

Drums quickly became the house favorite, but some people just don't have the coordination for it. When the beat goes out it's usually disaster for everyone else unless we all know the song really well. We had both a dark horse who was amazingly good at drumming on their first try as well as a guy who thought it looked easy and gave up in frustration after 2 songs, vowing never to touch them again.

As the only person in the group with some singing background I was stuck with singing more often than not. (I sooo want to drum for the rest my life) The pitch detection on the vocals is excellent and I found that the little arrow showing you where you're off was pretty helpful. Songs that I had only passing knowledge of were difficult and could probably gain from a few practice rounds where I just sit and listen to the lyrics. I'm fortunate enough to have a falcetto that can do songs like Maps but it doesn't make me feel any less gay to be singing female vocals.

Overall, it was much better than I expected. The game itself isn't as good as the combination of friends, drinking, video games, and music creating an amazing synergy and entertaining the people not playing as much as the band members. Even my wife, who dreads any situation in which she's the focus of attention, said she considered picking up the microphone to sing a song or two.

GREAT SUCCESS

You can play the instruments only right?  No need for a singer?

I'm patiently waiting for

(http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e257/superkensey/BluegrassBand1.jpg)

I think you could do better. C'mon. :hello_thar:

How big is the game (spatially)? Would the box be small enough to fit in a large suitcase? What about if you packed everything seperately?

I want a synthpop hero so badly.. :( 

Synthpop Hero would wreck my soul. If I could sit down and fake play some Iris, VNV Nation, Wolfsheim, X Marks the Pedwalk, etc. I would totally crap my pants every 5 minutes at the awesome. It'd be a poopstravaganza.

No way the box fits in a suitcase. You MIGHT be able to break everything down and pack it separately, but it would be pretty bulky.

So- who went out and bought a drum throne and microphone stand? I am into this thing almost $300 already, but it really seems worth it. If the kick pedal isn't busted (am hoping that a restart of the system will help it...haven't tried since last night).

Singing a song you have never heard is even more difficult than drumming or strumming an unknown song. The 6-pack random sets can be a challenge, but definitely a fun one! I can't wait to play "Won't Get Fooled Again" on the drums (trotski and I did it yesterday with him as Townshend and me filling in for Daltrey. 5 Stars! on easy.... There are so many expansion ideas for this it is just sick. I would definitely pay some decent coin for better/more realistic drums from a licensed third party. It seems like you could rig a drum set with mufflers that would pick up stick impacts, right? Cymbal might be tougher to fake though.

If your Rock Band shit breaks, you can get a new instrument cross-shipped, 2nd day.  No charge.

The drums are awesome.

It looks like I can "pug" (pub?) with people over xbox live.  Has anyone tried this?


Edit: I was wrong about cross-ship.  They will just ship you a new instrument and a postage-paid box to send your broken instrument back with.  2nd day.

Ok, who lives in the Boston area and wants to invite me over to play?  :grin:

Considering none of my friends have any interest in this or musical ability to speak of there is no chance in hell I'm ever buying this.

You can play any of the instruments you want and the rest is filled in by the system. A drummer and two guitarists will work just fine.

The progression through songs in this game sucks my ass and the mystery set lists and custom lists need to not exist until you've unlocked everything. We've played Creep 5 times.

Seriously, it's fucking wonk.

And the guitar is for people who are bad at guitar hero.

Make that 7 times. Creep has come up 7 times. I'm also starting to fucking hate Should I Stay or Should I go.

Thats what I said schild. Just have someone play through on solo once to unlock everything. Works just like the old guitar hero.

Or it doesn't work anything like the old guitar hero. The band tour is the point of the game right? Too bad it's completely busted. Fucking Mystery Set list can shove it up it's ass.

I don't know if anyone read the other Rock Band thread, but I was wondering if there was a patch out. Also, is there a way to force games to patch? I've made a US silver account, but it just won't auto update.

Is it possible to just disable some songs? Seems like a logical feature to offer for songs that people just hate and aren't any fun to play, especially in a game like this where enjoyment is tied pretty closely to how much you like the song.

It seems that the 'fans' request the songs you do best on, thus the Freebird effect.

(http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y222/Abagadro/AlecHalloweenThanksgiving063.jpg)

I can pretty much guarantee that many people here will have problems with their Fender Strat "downstrum" at some point in time.  There are fixes posted on the forums that a few of us adventurous people tried and so far my Strat has performed flawlessly ever since.

Here's a fix:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=40188

Another fix is to simply file down the "nubs" on the contactors so that they cant roll off eachother when strumming hard.  I dont advise this though, as it seems a bit extreme mod-wise... and it's not something you can back out of unless you feel like soldering.

The simplest fix (the one I used) is to simply put tape between the outer contactor and the plastic post with the rubber stopper.  About 4 layers (fold tape twice) should do it.  I then tightened the screws on the microswitch to make sure it didnt move.


rock on...

 :nda:

Yet another report of the Strat out of the box not working in strum down mode.

Also, the bottom set of frets actually has a game play reason--in many songs, the guitar solo will come up with a bluish gowing background--you get mucho extra points if you drop down and play the solo on the bottom set of frets.

Is playing through solo confirmed the best route to get the most songs unlocked? We've got a bunch of folks from GG playing, and are trying to get some of the cooler songs we all know unlocked for tonight's session, but not quite sure the best strategy.

Play through Solo on Medium and play the entire Rio De Janeiro Bonus Tour (this unlocks like 10 songs by itself).
As for the lower frets, I use em only for the ending solo portions when all the keys are lit up... since they're much quicker.  Havent tried that normal solo use yet with any kind of bonus - interesting.

Ya know... anyone else think the manual is a little lacking?  Perhaps there's an intentional air of mystery or something.

So, I've been playing this like crazy since it came out...  I've finished the entire solo tour on expert guitar (including all DLC), gotten the score duel and tug of war achievements, done some medium drum (fixed) solo tour, played a bunch of random multiplayer games on live, and gone through a fair amount of the band world tour(got the jet) by myself (playing guitar + vocals at the same time). 

I'm not playing at the moment because *sigh* my guitar down strum broke.  Totally.  As in, one of the little metal strips broke into two pieces and down strums do not register at all.  So I've now been to EA's support site, and have a replacement on the way (fully automated, including tracking number is a nice way to handle it!). 

Someone mentioned they're getting the same songs over and over on the mystery set lists...  I've heard that this works by picking songs that the leader has completed in single player...  So if they haven't done the single player tour yet, well, there's only a few songs it will choose from.  I finished everything on expert, before starting the tour, and it's been really random for me.  (First one I got on my guitar + mic tour was DLC - Joker and the Thief).

Speaking of DLC, I'm really impressed with how well it gets integrated into the game, showing up as random songs, etc...  The only thing I find mildly annoying with respect to that is that it also makes the endless setlist longer...  I haven't done it yet, but ran into someone who had the achievement...  Their icon actually changes color (from the black background to the appropriate metallic color (platinum, for the one person I've seen who had done it)).   

Guitar + Vocals at the same time can be a real challenge.  Thankfully there's a couple songs I'm good enough to do expert/expert on (songs like Black Hole Sun, and Dani California).  I'm mixed on the fan cap in the BWT if anyone is playing on a lower difficulty...  Oh, and I found that if you do guitar + mic on Live, you can no longer use the headset to chat with people while playing...  Why?!?

The overdrive / star power applying to the whole band in multiplayer is really neat...  Getting 8x going in random matches is fairly rare, but I've had it happen...  8x while playing bass with 6x (48x) really adds points up quickly. :)

So, while there are some minor issues, I agree with OcellotJenkins:  Game of the decade. :)

(Fixed: replaced medium guitar, with medium drum)

I lolled hard.

Sure, it's not going to be everyone's GOTD, but nothing is.  Rather than go into reasons, I'll just mention that since I like playing music (when not programming or playing MMOs) that probably helps bump it up a few notches for me. :)

In some of the interviews, Harmonix staff have talked about this being the game they've wanted to create since they founded the company.  I'm glad that circumstances (technology and finances, most significantly) have allowed them to do so. 

There are a few people who it won't be a good game for:  I know someone who just isn't musical at all...  Tried to pass the easiest Karaoke Revolution song on easy, and simply couldn't do it.  For him, it's not a fun game.  Everyone else?  Well, I think you should at least give it a try. :)

 

If this is the game they wanted to make since they founded the company, they really should've started with "Let's not make the guitar a big pile of shit."

It's too bad that arcades have mostly fallen by the wayside.  This is a game that seems like it could really benefit from a large, durable, and stationary setup that you could pay a dollar to play instead of paying a couple hundred to buy.

Come on man--you've really gotten unusually bitter about a lot of shit over the last several months.

Game Developers have little to no input on how the supporting hardware is manufactured. Sure, the team lead probably had input, but I can just about guarantee that given the quote, they were talking about the game interaction and capabilities, not the fact that you and a few other very vocal people don't like the guitar that comes with the game. For the record, in our set of more than 15 people at various stages of GH experience (from 4 star every song produced for all 4 GH releases on multiple platforms, to brand new people, to real musicians), most really like the new guitar's feel. Sure, the microswitch failure is an issue, but the guitar in and of itself they love.

I gotta be honest here, you've been so over the top the last several months on so many things that the feedback F13 used to be valuable for has kind of dropped by the wayside :(

Stephen, there've been a lot of GOOD GAMES that I've loved over the past couple months. And a lot of games that should've rocked my socks off that failed horribly at what they were trying to do. Assassin's Creed and Rock Band just to name two. Yes, I get unusually bitter when there's core failure among things that should have been guaranteed awesome.

It's not a microswitch problem on my guitar either. It's simply a piece of shit guitar. The strum bar goes further up than down and gives too much pressure no the downstrum. The original PS2 guitar is still, by far, the best one they've made. Nothing incenses me more though, when people who do not play GH on an expert level talk about the Rock Band Guitar being good. It's not. It is a bad guitar and heavy passages can only be described as an epic failure when using it. It is not a good guitar, it is not even a passable guitar. It is a complete failure. In an effort to make something incredibly pleasing aesthetically, they forgot to make it feel good.

Before I even got to play on the Rock Band guitar, friends were warning ME that it was a massive piece of shit. I, of course, responded with the same thing anyone would "Can't be that bad, those guys made the original Guitar Hero SG." To which they responded "You'll see." And they were right. That thing is an aborted piece of equipment. The strummer design was a throwaway at best and a known fuckup at worst. The buttons don't have enough feedback and hitting two at once is way too easy. The solo buttons are a total throwaway and the solo "freestyle" sections are such a dismal musical failure that I don't even know how they made it into the final design.

I'd love to go back to it once they get these design issues worked out as they are EASILY FIXED, But with EA and MTV lurking behind the scenes, I should've known better. They've been about aesthetic before design for years now and I don't think that's changing.

You wanna talk about COD4, Team Fortress, Revenant Wings, Portal, Uncharted, or any other number of amazing games that came out? You'll see me unusually happy. The pendulum swings both ways. And despite me expecting just plain "Meh" like the original guitar hero technical mechanicals from Rock Band, they somehow delivered an experience worse on all fronts.

Except for the drums. Despite not liking the drums, they seem awesome. (I mean, I don't like drums in real life, at all). The only complaint I've heard about them is that we should've been able to weight down the feet somehow (fill them with sand or water for example because they move on carpeting) and the pads should have been padded a bit more to not be so loud (they're louder than the Taiko Drum Master drum).

So you can say I'm unusually bitter, but I think people are giving these companies too much leeway and I need to make up for it. Because the people who don't like fuckups like this aren't bitter enough. And most of the people (not just here) are complimenting design features that break down completely at a high level. And that's just retarded. No offense, but it falls in line with Hammer Frenzy's commentary on fighting games. How can you know something is mechanically bad if you never get to the part where it becomes mechanically useful.

I'm fucking good at the guitar and the guitar itself is getting in the way of me being that good. If they'd simply used the same button and strummer design or a SLIGHT VARIANT instead of going whole hog and fucking up the whole thing, I'm sure I would've loved it. But they didn't. They fucked up the whole thing. So, you can call it whatever you want but all I know is that design failure made me worse at a game that I should've owned fucking face left and right on.

Not to mention the nearly unintelligible hammer-on notation.  I'm pretty sure that's not the hardware department's fault.

For what it's worth, I like RB's notation better than any previous game's.  I have no trouble noticing the narrow vs wide notes.  GH3's system was decent, but of course, it needed to be, due to some of the crazy "let's put a random note in that you'd think you could HO/PO, but you can't, Ha!" that some (mainly DLC) songs have had...

As for the guitar, there's one other piece of info that's worth bringing up.  Supposedly there are 4 different revisions of the RB guitar out there in the initial retail packaging...  So while I like (well, except for the breaking part) the RB guitar I got, yours might be a totally different revision of the hardware.  They've also mentioned that all returns get the latest version of the hardware, so I'll see once my new one arrives if the newest is good or not.  If it's bad, I may join your bitter club, schild. :)

Beyond the RB guitar, I agree that the original SG controller was the best.  If you consider that the last guitar they made before this one was the 360 explorer (which I absolutely hate), I think it's a big step forward.

1 step forward from zero.
9 steps back from 1.
1 step forward from -8 is still -7.

For reals. The guitar is just crap. Because it's not just the strum bar.

Four different revisions just makes things worse. It's like someone didn't think the failure rate of the 360 was enough for the consumers to be angry.


All this really tells me is that you like it easy. Which is fine. Ironically, since you're like 15 miles from me, we could have a rock off. Or a rock on. Or whatever. If they ever fix the guitar issue and our boy Phil is back in town, I may very well be up for that. ^_^

The issue here is that your dial only has a 1 and an 11 on it; both your critique and your praise have become increasingly shrill and charicatured. You seem to pick games and issues almost at random then go crazy in one direction or the other. ZOMG THE WII SUCKS!!! ZOMG HELLGATE RULES!!!

Everything has become politics-style advocacy, like we're back in 1993 having a Mac vs. PC flamewar on a BBS. Blindered advocacy is a major turnoff. Not everything is the Most Important Issue Ever (tm) that you have to have some insanely extreme position on.

The entire games industry was like that this fall.

Games that were getting 2 and 3 from sites that don't give that away were getting 8, 9s, and 10s.

I've always admitted to being fanatical and crazy about games.

Of course, it's amplified when expectations are let down. But yea, I've always been crazy.

OK. I played this for the first time tonight. Here's my review.

First, the guitar kicks so much fucking ass compared to the GH3 guitar. Yes, the strum is a bit rubbery. So fucking what. Some guitars break within the first day. Yeah, that sucks, but so far the one I played hasn't. You can get a new one overnighted to you. The important thing is the design itself -- it's the buttons that made me get down on my knees. Oh fucking yes. The buttons that are so perfect in every way that the GH3 buttons are not.

They are actually made so wherever you press them, and listen up hardware designers, they don't stick when pressed on the edge. That's right. They do what you intend them to do. Apparently, this tiny bit of functionality has been left out of the GH3 guitar, making the game nearly unplayable by me. Also, since they require a lot less force to push, it makes it easier to get faster passages and my hand doesn't seize up after 30 minutes like on GH3. I played it for about 5 hours straight with no problems at all. I had a little bit of trouble telling the buttons apart at first, but you easily learn there are boundary raised bumps before the first and after the last that bracket the buttons nicely, so you can always bump against them to re-acquire your position. Some other guitar design decisions are puzzling. For example, the whammy adjustment selector seems worthless and should have been left out, and the 'on' button is both a playstation button similar to the GH3 guitar along with a push button in an area that simulates the jack line out. They appear to do the same thing. The select and start buttons are exactly underneath your strum hand -- another poor choice.

The drums were better than I expected, but they are still badly designed pieces of plastic. I don't know why they bothered with a design that allowed height adjustment, since it added complexity along with a whole 5 inches of difference between minimum and maximum height. One of our height adjuster clamps didn't work, so we were forced to play on minimum height. It was fine while sitting on a couch. I also don't know why they added a hard plastic rim on the drums, the material should have wrapped around and been fastened on the underside leaving the entire face of the pad available for pickup. The difference in sound is kind of annoying. I'm nitpicking on this, but seriously -- fix your stand adjustment. Either make it adjustable by at least a foot and a half (so you can play standing or sitting) or don't bother. I guess there was no way to dampen the sound? That would have been nice, the 'click click click' is kind of immersion-ruining and you have to turn the sound way up on the game to drown it out.

The local multiplayer is unparalleled, assuming you have 3 friends and one of them can sing. It turns out I'm not terrible at the drums, and my guitar skills transfered over fine. I was confident (97%+) on hard and can drag through expert (~75%) on guitar, and on drums I was about one difficulty lower. This difficulty setting is perfect for me. I'm aware that my skill level is different from Schilds' and have taken this into account by completely disregarding his opinion -- I'm not Schild and neither were any of my friends. I was also the most skilled person of about 7 there tonight -- most everyone was pegged at easy, except for two girls who were our singers. Between them, they destroyed (read: 99%-100%, every song) on hard mode. A grand time was had by all.

The remote multiplayer stuff seems kludged together but that's par for the course -- so far I haven't seen a good implementation on any console, ever. Sorry guys, you're about 10 years behind PCs and it shows. When it's easier to simply call my friend on the phone to set up a game, your multiplayer needs to be scrapped.

We didn't touch the downloadable content, but GH3 can kiss my ass with their overpriced song packs. I know I can download individual songs, admittedly still too expensive for my liking, but at least it's not a slap in the face.

In summary, It kicks the ever-loving shit out of GH3 in every way -- guitar, local multiplayer, and downloadable content. All in all, an extremely worthy purchase -- especially since I didn't buy it, my friend did.

I wish I could return GH3 and buy this instead.

You had me at 'hello.'


They're $1.99 a piece right now afaik. Same price as the GH ones in a 3 pack. Or their own 3 packs for that matter.


This is exactly what I've said. Easy doesn't reveal a single one of the problems I've complained about. In any game, really. And as for your friends, I'm glad they have fun with it - so do mine. Doesn't mean there isn't a million things that need fixing. Most everyone here plays hard and expert on whatever instrument, and they all have valid complaints. And valid reasons that only one person is buying the set even though some have to drive further than others to get here. I'm also pretty sure everyone has or is canceling their preorder of it almost solely due to the shit guitar implementation. It's simply one of those "wait for a revision" situations.

Yeah, but I'm not forced to buy 2 additional shitty songs along with the one I want. Instead, I can buy 3 good songs.

Also, I think the guitar is better than the GH1 guitar, but not by a whole lot -- I think the extra length in the neck reduces strain on my wrist somehow. In my imagined redesign, I'd take the rock band buttons, add the GH1 strummer (is there a difference? I don't recall one), then move all the 'extra buttons' to be far away from my strum hand to avoid the pause screen come up along with the dismaying "ahhhhh jeez" from the 3 other people I have just messed up.

Oh, after playing a bit, the tabbing/whatever you want to call it on GH3 was better, but I like the tighter timing on rock band and I actually prefer the visuals. It seems to have the same annoying "Random note that you can't HO/PO that you should be able to" that GH3 does. I can tell the notes apart, even with full 4 screened multiplayer going on.

I didn't like the GH2 guitar either if you remember. In fact, I went out of my way to set up a USB->PS2 converter to use the original GH1 SG. Nothing touches that guitar. And those buttons would never ever stick unless you played with it after eating sausage gravy...







... with your hands.

I didn't remember, but I believe you. I thought I have one guitar that's GH1 and one that's GH2 but I can't really tell the difference between them. I think maybe I have 2 GH2 guitars. Not sure. I like those strums. Here's a pic I just took:

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/img00041195968737.jpg)

So yeah. Those buttons never stick. The GH3 ones are just too tight and whatever trigger they press against the circuit board is tiny and round, and the stupid button sides push and wedge against the casing. Hate. I'm going to try WD40 this weekend and, if that doesn't work, it's dremel time.

oh hello new picture. Cherry guitar. I bought GH2 without a guitar. I don't even know what that top one is, I'm not kidding. The bottom one is the only interest I have in playing ever. Though I imagine the cherry is exactly the same as the black.

Edit: Top one is GH3 PS3? Lulz. I couldn't even tell. I honestly didn't play it that much with that controller. Maybe 2-3 times at most.

My order goes like this GH1->GH3->GH2---------------------------------------------------------------------------> Rock Band. I'm sorry but the strummer is the most important part and hey flubbed it so fucking hard they should be issuing a recall.

Top one is GH3 for PS3 model that I'm hating on so much. The bottom two I bought from a friend along with GH1 and GH2 for the PS2 and they kick ass. Yeah, pic was too big, I resized it.

My GH3 buttons never stuck. Ever.

If you've ever played the GH2 360 guitar, you'll learn to love the PS3 one. It's a step forward from the GH2 axe.

Maybe I got a defective one? It wouldn't shock me. The green button is especially bad, but generally because I push it down on the bottom edge more than any other button.

As far as I can tell, the bottom two guitars are completely interchangeable. I guess they are GH1 models and he bought them for GH1 and didn't buy a guitar with GH2.

Ok. Yours sounds defective. I just puttered with mine pushing real real hard. No dice. Thing is rock solid and nowhere near sticky. I even pushed it under the surface and it popped right back up.

Like I said, don't really care about it since it's out for the PC and I can use the original GH1 model.

This is what happens:

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/button1195969750.JPG)

It sticks like that and doesn't actually register a press if I hit it on a side. Especially the 'bottom' (as it is when you are holding the guitar). If I don't hit the button pretty much on the middle, no dice. I can eventually push it in but it takes way more force than it should which basically ruins whatever I'm trying to play.

How do you use the GH1 model? What's the adapter?

I use an adapter that says HVG2 on it. It's completely no name. Picked it up at Fry's Electronics for $14.99. Next time I'm there I'll see if they still carry it if you don't have a Fry's around you. There's a million ps2/1 to USB adapters out there. They should all work. Why?

Because of Joy to Key. Basically, I match the guitar hero keystrokes using J2K to the proper keyboard key presses. And it just works perfectly.

DEPRESSING AS FUCK SPOILER INFORMATION:
The PS2 adapter will allow controllers to be recognized on the PS3. But Rock Band only recognizes the SG as a regular controller. Epic failure made worse by the fact that Harmonix is trying to blame Red Octane and Activision for it not working with their code. HILARIOUS. If I could use my GH1 guitar with Rock Band, my opinion would change RADICALLY.


Bad guitar. Never had this problem. Not once. No one here has. We all use the same two guitars (Jigglypuffs and my own).

(http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/1958/30421stapf7.th.jpg) (http://img249.imageshack.us/my.php?image=30421stapf7.jpg)

Soooo... does that mean that I can buy a $15 adapter and use my GH1 guitars with GH3 on the PS3? Can anyone confirm this works? If not, I suppose I could... "acquire" the PC version, since frankly I don't lie awake at nights if I, ahem, "format shift" a game I already own.

Doesn't work.

Yeah, that annoyed me to no end.  I solved it by rounding up my old mousepads, cutting drum pad sized circles out of them, and duct taping them to the surface.  It doesn't kill the sound entirely, but it does help a lot.

But yeah, I agree.  They should have rubberized those pads more from the beginning.

It's really strange. Everyone who has played the drums says that exact same thing. And then they say they hate the strummer on the guitar not clicking.

Which I fully agree with. But it's just amazing where it seems the engineers behind these instruments failed during core "fun" tests. Like, did focus groups just not give real opinions during prototype tests?

Yeah, count me in on the list of people with some weird strumming issues. But thankfully I have an XBox360, so I have a working guitar from GH3, and I've borrowed a friend's guitar for GH2.  So as far as we're concerned, full band no problems a-okay. Dunno if we're going to fix the Strat ourselves, or turn it in.  It's a real shame too.  I was starting to really get the handle of the Stratocaster before it started messing up. I would daresay that a fixed Stratocaster is a step above an Explorer (Yeah yeah, IF it was fixed).

I'm feeling really bummed for PS3 players, they got screwed up the yingyang by this. Is it true that the PS3 guitar can't be used with Rock Band? Honestly a flaw like that is amazingly weak sauce, and I don't know who to blame. I vaguely remember Harmonix has made noises that it's up to Sony to make sure these things happen, but I have a hard time believing this. I would definitely imagine that having only one guitar (and a broken one at that) to play Rock Band would seriously negatively color your experience of Rock Band. That has to be one hell of a gamebreaker, and should be shouted at everyone who wants to pick this up for the PS3 to warn them off until the peripherals get straightened out.

And as someone who had the PS2 version of Guitar Hero 1/2, let me third my echo of the SG love. Comfortable and a non-shitty guitar = win. Out of the 2 offbrand wireless PS2 guitars, the SG, the Explorer, the XBox GH3 Les Paul, and the Stratocaster as guitars I've used extensively, the SG is #2 on that list in terms of comfort.  It's easily the #1 wired guitar I've ever used. I have to imagine that having to incorporate all the junk for XBox led to the Explorer being.. less than awesome.

On the flip side, I'm baffled by the lack of GH3 Les Paul love. The only knock on it that I can think of is that it isn't as comfy as the SG, I notice my strum arm bumping against the guitar from time to time. On the flip side, due to slightly cramped spaces, I can use the Les Paul to play wirelessly and unimpeded behind the singer, the drummer, and the bassist, which is a huge thumbs up. It is the best wireless guitar I've ever used, hands down.

Yeah, the Cherry red guitar is the PS2 version of the SG for Guitar Hero 2. It has no discernable difference from the Guitar Hero 1 SG. It held up better than the GH1 Black SG, but I think that's because we wailed on the original guitars so hard during GH1.

As for unlocking songs, there's an unlock code floating around in the wild.  http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/xbox360/code/938870.html Dunno if you have to punch it in every time you play though, and I don't know if it's for the PS3. What I did was play solo when no one else was around, on a difficulty that I knew I could clear through (hard).  It's sensationally easy to 5 star the game, so this isn't bad.  In addition, you get a free guitar as a guitar player for clearing the "regular" tour as well as the "bonus" tour (the non-DLC tour). Not to mention you get paid money for playing songs in Solo tour.  But with the exception of the chinzy explosive pots ending to completing the regular solo tour, there's not a lot of attractive draw to completing solo tour from a gameplay perspective. On the flip side, I'm pretty much able to buy whatever I want in the rock store now, with the exception of the fantasy guitars.

(and on a side note with the unlockable guitars, I think playing GH1 and GH2 has made me rather snobbish with respect to guitar types. While I got excited about seeing Stratocasters and Telecasters, the Gretsch & Jackson guitars I'm almost inclined to not bother to unlock.  Can a guitar nerd please properly pimp the guitars to get us unwashed masses pumped up?)

However, unlocking too many songs can be a mixed bag.  With one band, we were "lucky" enough in some random setlists to get songs like "Don't fear the Reaper" and "The Electric Version" unusually early on, the latter which was just obliterating my wrists.

On the other hand, me and two other friends were trying to get the Tour Bus challenge.  I had expert Guitar, another roommate took Medium drums, and the other roommate took Bass+Vocals on medium. The Tour Bus challenge is a 3 random song playlist, and we started out rocky with Okay Go "Here it goes again", barely eking out 3 stars. As it turns out, sight singing and sight playing a bass is difficult. Then we got Jet's "Do you want to be my girl", which we 4 starred.  When we saw that the last song was "Wanted Dead or Alive", the Bassist/Lead Singer declared "It's over, we got this".  We proceeded to easily 5 star the song, and in so, win the Tour Bus. Moments like that is where I think why people can easily love this game.

As for the game on the higher tiers of difficulty, I'm really interested to see where this goes.  From my unskilled eyes, I can see Drummers in particular getting the brunt of the pain, due to the sheer volume of notes they have to hit perfectly.

So far I just have a latch on the drum kit that doesn't strongly hold the pads to the poles. I may send it in since I have the opportunity, or not. I thought the guitar might be messing up yesterday while I was running through hard, but it "fixed" itself. Which means I'll be watching it closely the next several days.

I love the button spacing on the strat, I can do G<->O stuff without shifting, which makes that stuff easier, and I like the feel of them (the fact that they are recessed is nice). I am one of the few in the world that apparently loves the strumbar. No clicking is awesome (especially as it doesn't annoy my wife anymore) and after getting used to it, I enjoy the feel of it. I am an unreformed down-strummer, and at first I had problems getting through fast strum parts. I was beginning to believe the anti-hype, but I messed around with my down-strum style, and now it feels (to me, a non-guitarist) much more like playing a real guitar. In the GH games I used to always keep my thumb on the bar, now I "tap" the bar and can hit the fast parts as long as I am not screwing up.

This fix works great, thanks for posting it.

Sure I'd be up for it.  I'll follow this up with a PM.

Finished the solo drum tour on medium earlier today.  Had to take a few breaks along the way, maybe I'm hitting too hard, or just not a drummer, but my wrists would get tired/sore after awhile.  Still was fun and much more of a challenge than guitar for me.

My solo band world tour (guitar + vocals) is up to trying to get enough stars for the hall of fame (got the PR Firm).  I really just want to see the endless setlist for myself...  Someone posted on scorehero that it didn't actually add in DLC, and if that's the case, then one of my few Rock Band complaints will have gone away.  I've given up on trying to get fans at this point...  I'm over the hard cap (600,000) and at ~10k fans per song, hitting 1 million for the achievement doesn't seem worth spending time on (since there's only a few songs I can do expert/expert on).

Also started playing around with the solo buttons...  It seems like big rock endings are significantly easier if you use them there (it's trivial to keep all 5 bars lit up) but adjusting back to the regular frets for the final note(s) can be tricky.  Not that this justifies them (or this mechanic making them important)...  Just an observation.

Had a couple good matches online, one my favorites was when I got matched up with a really good expert drummer...  I mean, 99% on a difficult song good.  Guitar + Bass + Drums all on expert ended up with over 800k points, the highest I've seen so far.  (If only we had a vocalist!)

As soon as my new guitar shows up, I'll comment on how it is.  I'm hoping the newest revision will have fixed most, if not all of the problems.

Yep, Fender Stratocaster is still busted. Instead of hand fixing it, I'm tempted to just putting up the money for the deposit and having EA ship in the replacement Fender.  If at least just to know if the problem is related to a version of the Fender Stratocasters or not.  Also, I'm concerned if the drum is starting to fall apart too.  So far it's holding up....

I can't verify our drum status firsthand; I'm asking how they're holding up from my roommate, because I'm horrible on the drums.  Like painfully inept. There's definitely a line between people who can pick up at medium, and who needs to start at easy to get things down.  Sadly, I'm in the latter category.

Our current Band World Tour setup is:

Roommate 1: Medium Drums, some Medium vocals, hard/medium guitar/bass
Roommate 2: Medium Vocals, Easy/Medium drums, Easy/Medium Guitar/Bass
Roommate 3: Hard/Medium Bass/Guitar, some Medium vocals, no drum Experience
Roommate 4: Expert/Hard Guitar Bass, some Medium Vocals, no drum Experience

It's not a horrible lineup, we can get through things at a decent crawl, averaging 4 stars.  5 stars on songs the vocalist can nail, 3 stars on songs foreign to the vocalist, with some downwards drag in there for songs with really hard baselines (Foreplay/Long Time), or complicated drums.

For songs we're really solid on, we time our Overdrive/Star Power off the drummer, since he has the least flexible ability to engage it. Usually the guitarist follows his lead, and the bassist follows the Guitarist's lead. If the drummer has no saved Overdrive, then we'll engage it off the vocalist. Doing that ensures you have runs of 6x Star power. Have a guitarist with 4x or a bassist with 6x already, and you will see your stars rapidly fill up.  Even if I know I'm not at 4x, I'll still follow up other people's Overdrive, since I generally can catch up, and other people might already be at max bonus, and the whole group will benefit.

For a shakier song, I'll save the overdrive for when someone is about to fail out.  While it's much more satisfying to save someone (Oh yeah, when someone fails, the band doesn't totally crash at that point.  Instead that player's track is muted, and someone will have to engage Overdrive to "bring them back".  You can only do this 3 times per player until they're out for good.  Failure to bring someone back means the Rock meter slowly goes down until you get to 0, at which time the entire band fails), it makes more sense to use it at the point that they're beginning to fail out.  Overdrive will then have them quickly move back up to the green zone.

Really, since the guitarist and bassist can kick in Overdrive whenever they please, they have the most responsibility to watch the rock meter, to see if people are failing, or to add their Overdrive to others.

So we're early on in BWT, just starting out on the first tour bus.  Then we had a roommate's girlfriend show up. We knew she was a solid bassist, who could play most basslines on medium.  What we didn't know is that she also has had formal voice training...

As soon as we had her sing Say it ain't so, and realized that she was phenominally good, we quickly scrambled to press her into service. Her only limiting factor was that her background of rock and roll was limited, so she had strong knowledge of about 7-8 songs.

Then we got to Learn to Fly, and the drummer wanted to try it.  So we swapped her to play drums.  The bassist and I swapped a concerned look.  We then swapped many looks when by sheer force of will, on a song she's never tried before, did a passable job on Medium, never even being in danger of failing out.  She's basically some sort of musical freak of nature.

After all that, we advanced greatly, moving up past the Roadie challenge. Just a fantastically fun night. I know we're not going to ever really compete for the top tiers of scoring, but who cares?  4 Whiskey Grid is coming to a town near you... and hey, we're in the top 200 of Roxanne!  We're up and comers!

I played some of this at Schild's house this weekend and I am pretty unimpressed. I think that the idea is really neat but in execution it just wasn't much fun. I played all the instruments and did spend most of my time with vocals and I found it way too easy to sing and play expert vocals. It was my first time playing and any song I actually knew I could do expert vocals on. It was just kinda wacky. The guitar is wonky as hell. It really is just a god awful guitar, and the guitar note charts/tab is just crappy. I found myself just wondering, "what the fuck are these guys thinking?" It was not a difficulty thing either, they are just boring charts. The drums on the other hand were pretty neat, but I thought the set is kinda flimsy and way too light. I also think that it being a straight line set up kinda kills the effect for me. the set kept sliding around a lot too, so we had to set up big water jugs behind it. All in all, I would rather play Guitar Hero any day of the week. But I have to admit, after I had some booze in me, the game was much funner. It shouldn't take me being drunk to enjoy myself though.

Hmm, I have to admit I came away with a totally different experience. With respect to vocalists, even when it was songs that people knew really well, people could still easily fail out of them; maybe it's a pitch thing?

The guitar will be one of those holy war things that people are going to back and forth on. I played about 1/3 of the solo guitar tour with the stratocaster, and after a bit of a training period, I can totally see why people can make a case for the stratocaster. There's not the reassuring clicking noise as verification of note played like with the Red Octane guitars. However with a functioning (the important part) stratocaster it takes less effort to strum, making some of the trickier alt-strum areas easier to do. In addition, you can rack up huge points with the solo buttons at the Big Rock Ending sections. I'll admit though, there's a bit of re-learning that has to occur before the Stratocaster makes sense.  Plus it uh, needs to actually work.

As for the charts, I got mixed feelings.  I'm almost glad the charts are less strenuous because I'm following everyone elses's abilities/Overdrive meter because I have the most flexibility to bail people out. Because of that, I've noticed I'm missing a lot of notes that playing by myself, I probably would not have missed. Plus when you're playing over the din of vocals and the sounds of drum hitting pads, I find myself slightly off on the rhythm of the song.

And yeah, people have uniformly complained about the drums sliding all over the place. The usual suggestion is to get carpet samples.

Hammer's experience on Vocals seems pretty universal, the songs that people know are getting slammed on Expert. Familiar song + (any) vocal training shouldn't be difficult on Expert just because you don't have that abstraction jump like you do from Real Guitar to GH/RB. The rap parts are tougher just because it falls back to phoneme detection versus pitch and that's where one might have trouble keeping up.

Overall, it seems like Vocals "work" but I can't help but get into a schild-like difficulty rant. Humming = CAL SMASH, but that gets the job done a lot of the time simply because RB doesn't really do phoneme and pitch detection at the same time. That said, while you can't fix "boring charts", I can tell my friend to grow some balls and start singing when I'm on bass or some such.

I am enjoying the game, at least when I can play it. The drum kick pedal gave out the first day. Saturday, the disc stopped loading (all my other 360 games work fine still). Best Buy doesn't have any replacements. I tried to set up an express RMA through EA, but I never got confirmation that my credit card transaction went through. I started a support ticket at 7:04 PM on Friday for the kick pedal. As of now (10:23 AM, Monday), there has been no reply. Nice fucking customer service, EA. God they suck so much cock.

Yeah, I finally sucked it up and sent in the express RMA for my Stratocaster.  Might as well give it a good faith shot.  If they still have failure problems, I'll go ahead and start opening the Strat up.

BTW, I didn't bother calling.  I went instead straight to http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/rockband.php You're going to have to register a EA account, so if you're deathly opposed to that... yeah, call it in. I also have not checked to see the shipping progress yet, so yeah, I'm not going to go out on a limb and say this is the way to go just yet.

Played a bit more with my friends.  We're getting the hang of things a bit better, we're starting to pick safer songs and averaging 4 stars on a half medium/half hard setup.  I noticed with today's vocalist, she tends to stray from the established vocal patterns, which hurts her score.  For all you wannabe singers, just remember this isn't American Idol; re-interpreting a song on the fly won't get you anywhere. Unfortunately the guy in our band who knows the songs the best has enough on his plate playing bass. I really want my bandmates to learn "Time we had" though.  That's a very enjoyable (although really easy) song.

Some guy on the official tech forums:


lol

Are the warrenties on the replacement guitars refreshing? or is it always off date-of-purchase?

Also, lawl at a class-action. Unless the guitars all explode on the date on expiry or they start killing people I just don't see where it could go.

I want this game but have already spent to much on other people for the holidays.

Edit to add an attempt at a bit of content:

Carrie Brownstein comments on Rock Band vs. Real Band (http://www.slate.com/id/2177432/pagenum/all/)  Nice enough read. Although, I'd prefer less writey, more music plz.

My replacement guitar arrived yesterday, and I played a bunch with it last night.  Hooked it up, and tried it:  Immediately FC'ed (100%, no streak break) a 3rd or 4th tier song on expert that I hadn't before.  Had great time with it for the rest of the night.  I wish this was the guitar that had been in the box at release.  If you're having trouble with your guitar, I highly recommend getting it replaced. 

Is the new guitar gummy on the downstring. And does it click?

If not, it's not fixed.

In other news, I had a friend's 360 for the night and the wife wanted to try out Rock Band for herself. She's now in love with playing the guitar and wants me to buy a 360 and the game. <3

I got to play this in front of about 30 people on a stage at my school yesterday.  It was fun because both of the groups before mine failed on easy songs, while we rocked Weezer hard.  I got a free T-Shirt for my troubles.

God, I am so ashamed!

Goddamn your school is full of dorks.

More like full of  :awesome_for_real:. And maybe some  :pedobear:. Who would go to a rock band concert anyway?

Just kidding, I'm sure it was loads of fun!  :grin:

They have a truck that tey drive around to different college campuses to set up demos.  They happened to be here on a lunch break, so there were a lot of people just milling around who decided to check out where the awful singing was coming from.

So- nearly 8 days after starting an RMA ticket with the geniuses at EA, I finally got a response. As I suspected, my RMA claim had not gone through. Glad I had to wait over a fucking week to find this out. Even better- when I click the link to update my ticket, I get this-


Are you fucking kidding me? I think I am going to take this piece of shit back and wait for a reengineered model or something. Giving EA any money ever again makes me want to punch myself in the balls.

Rare photo of EA customer service agent at work-

(http://www.larryharmonpictures.com/images/bozo.jpg)

I've heard about so many reliability problems there is no way I'm getting this. I don't play console games so I can struggle with faulty hardware and constantly return shit.

RMAed on Tuesday, online.  Got guitar Friday night.  Guitar so far is still working, knocking so so much on wood.

The Fender is just a totally different animal from the Guitar Hero guitars. Here's how I compare the two

Guitar Hero guitar:
- Clacky Microswitches tell you when you've sucessfully strummed.
- Raised buttons give you a better idea of exactly where your fingers are.
- Wireless++
- Somewhat less anal Star Power/Overdrive initiation.
- The most effective way to downstrum on the Les Paul is to put my thumb on the center of the strumbar. A side effect is that my inner forearm sometimes scrapes against the top of the guitar.

Fender Advantage:
- The key to the strum bar is figuring out how much pressure you need to exert for a successful strum. It's less than the Guitar Hero guitars. This leads to somewhat quicker double strumming if you play your cards right. Part of me also is guessing that the Fender needs to be calibrated more than the Guitar Hero guitars.
- The recessed buttons make it easier to move your fingers over for fast sections that may require it.
- The solo buttons at the bottom really can spike up your Big Rock Ending score.
- The most effective way for me to downstrum on the Fender is to put my thumb on the tail end of the Fender strumbar. A side effect is that my inner forearm sometimes scrapes against the top of the guitar.

Yeah, it's a real dissapointment that Rock Band has shoddy components out of the gate. For a game this expensive, you really needed to have everything working out of the gate. I was lucky, I got to play more than a few times on demos that weren't totally broken. The game pretty much can sell itself if it didn't have so many freaking broken components.

Played a bit more last night, got to the PR firm in Band World Tour. At this point, all we need to do now is pick up stars to get to the Hall of Fame. At this point, we're realizing if we want to maximize stars, we go with:

Vocals: Medium/Hard
Bass: Medium, Hard on an easy song
Drums: Medium
Guitar: Hard, Expert on an easy song

Right now the limiting factor on moving up to a higher difficulty (we've already capped the fans) is the drummer. He's trying to get up to speed as fast as possible, but the upper difficulty drum songs on medium he can't finish yet (like Green Grass and High Tides). I've tried drumming once or twice in practice, but I get too frustrated and give up.  I just need to just tear through the solo tours.

We had two friends pop on over to check out Rock Band.  One guy sang, doing a hilarious version of Timmy! Overall they seemed really impressed with Rock Band, although the sticker shock surprised them.

As for Phildo's experience, lemme clarify and explain how they did things around the University of Washington.  They basically rolled in a huge trailer into the lawn of the student union.  The trailer basically expanded into a mini stage, with a main section with a big screen to play on, with sound on speakers so everyone around could here it.  There were also 3 smaller units to the side where there was a smaller screen that people played on, and sound was limited to headphones. Basically your crowd is made up of gawkers and fanboys. In addition, one of the booth girls did a way too accomplished spin around one of the bracing poles while she was killing time, making me raise an eyebrow. UW apparently wasn't prepared for the noise, so they limited performances on the main screen/speakers only during the time in between classes.

Just spent the later part of the evening playing guitar hero with my girlfriend, and she is now in love and wants me to buy Rock Band. I was all set to go out and get it tomorrow but now reading about all the problems, I'm scared.

Is there any thing I can do to make sure the Guitar works right from purchase?

You really need to ask yourself two questions:

1) Do you own a PS3 only?  If so, you can buy yourself some time because as it stands right now for the PS3 units (to the best of my knowledge), GH3 guitars don't work with Rock Band.  This means if your girlfriend wanted to play guitar/bass, you're out of luck until either Rock Band patches in the right compatibility, or Rock Band sells individual guitars.  Of course, if the plan is to have the other person drum instead or something, back to square one.

2) People have pretty much cited that you want to be on the lookout for a specific build date; that's the build date with the most defective units.  Unfortunately, doing a quick scan of various forums, I can't really find the specific date. As I recall, the newest newest build date works just great, but I don't remember what that date is, sorry.

So I went to Best Buy to have a look at it. They didnt have any in stock, nether did Toys R Us or Gamestop. Ok, now I have to have it, cause I cant. Managed to pick up the last one at my local Target. Played it all day today and had a blast.

The guitar feels a lot more chinky than the GH3 one, the strum bar is sort of lose, and there is a screw or some thing inside the guitar rattling around. But, I really like the feel of it better, and I like the recessed buttons.

Drums are hard.

I really enjoy watching someone new to drums give it a shot. The first time through is always a disaster but after a few Starter songs on Easy anyone with a sense of rhythm starts to find their groove and enjoy it. The biggest challenge for most is learning to use the kick drum foot independently of the hand movements.

I've finally reached a point at which I can play Normal drums on any song and Hard on some of the really easy ones. I can't even begin to imagine the zen-like state one would need to play on Hard/Expert. I still get a rush when I get through Enter Sandman on Normal with all the crazy offbeat snares at the end. My inability to play Hard drums is our band's limiting factor at this point, although you can complete the game on Normal so it's more a matter of mastery than anything else at this point.

I have gained an immense respect for drummers now and can't help but listen to the drum line on every song I hear and marvel at the coordination required.

The strum bar requires less pressure to trigger, and doesn't have a click, which can make it a bit more challenging to find its feel. The rattling sound is supposedly (from folks opening things up) part of the star power overdrive trigger mechanism.

My replacement feels much more sensitive in the strumbar. I need to get more use in. I don't have the rattle, but the star power is a little harder to engage than my broken guitar.

Our Drum Pedal broke last night, it looks like this (not my pic)

(http://zombie1942.com/rb-pedal/IMAGE_165.jpg)

I got that picture from a thread where it happened to some other random guy and he fixed it by screwing in four pieces of metal:

(http://zombie1942.com/rb-pedal/IMAGE_170.jpg)

Something I will not be doing for it is not my Rock Band, but I would highly suggest something of the sort for anyone who doesn't want their Drum Pedal to snap in half.

http://rockband.scorehero.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1579 (http://rockband.scorehero.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1579)

Well it will be two weeks on Tuesday and they STILL have not shipped me a replacement guitar. I think I will go to Sears and try and take this MOFO back. Cause this shit is retarded.

Got my replacement last Friday night.  Guitar seems to be working just fine. I got lucky in the process (so far) I guess.

Morfiend: if you're playing Band World Tour, I'd strongly suggest that you take your created character and play through the solo tour up until the songs really start to overwhelm you. Band World Tour on mystery setlists is set up so that it only uses songs that your band leader has unlocked. If you don't play through the solo tour, it only uses songs from the first tier of difficulty. On the flip side, if you unlock too many songs, you could very easily have on a randomly selected setlist a song that's fairly difficult, like Highway Star.  I unlocked the entire setlist, and our drummer visibly shudders when Green Grass and High Tides pops up.

Penny-Arcade's Tycho has an interesting viewpoint on the different guitars:

Highway Star is an awesome song. That whole album (Machine Head) is awesome.

Too bad Rock Band doesn't come with a keyboard because Pictures of Home would be great fun.

Agreed. Between that and Smoke on the Water, it's Deep Purple's finest moment. They should DLC the whole album. For both GH3 and RB.

I was trying to think of a list of songs I'd love to see from the original GH1, GH2, and Rocks the 80s list (all songlists from when Harmonix was still working with Red Octane, so they would presumably have an idea of the song charts). It's not quite as far fetched as you think, because Rock Band has upcoming DLC using a song from GH2 (War Pigs), and they have DLC already based off one of the Rocks the 80s tracks (Synchronicity II).

The realistic constraints would be that there couldn't be any pure instrumental songs (so no YYZ, no Spanish Castle Magic), and no songs done by groups that have tie ins with Featured GH3 artists (No Poison, no Brett Michaels band (haha), no GnR, no Rage against the Machine).

After trying to construct a song list of songs I would want, I basically realized it would be easier to list songs I wouldn't want. I could especially see a huge market for the lower tiered songs, as just fun for everyone.

I'm looking really forward to the next set of announced DLC.  I haven't picked up any of the Bowie songs yet, and I'm not sure I really want to grab any of the Sabbath songs.  On the other hand, we're probably going to get the entire punk pack, and invariably all the songs from the 18th release set (I'm a sucker for the Pretenders).  :heart:

I'd definately get the Sabbath pack, if it were performed by, you know, Sabbath. As it is, maybe at best. I don't know that there would by necessarily be anything preventing GNR or RATM songs being included in RB DLC, even with Slash and Morello's involvement in GH3. Last time I looked, RATM was defunct, and I'm not even sure that Slash has much say in anything to do with GNR song licencing anymore since Axl seems to own the band.

I'm not real impressed with any of the DLC for any of these games at this point...

Sabbath's main problem is that they have no master tracks left. Apparently studios back in the day didn't care so much about master tracks, and the master tracks were disposed of. As such, they had to be remade with cover artists to get it into Rock Band/Guitar Hero, or they have the artist go back and re-record the song, like Guitar Hero 3 had happen with In Living Color's "Cult of Personality" and The Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the UK".

As for GnR and RaTM: (http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2007/11/05/rock-band-audio-director-on-master-tapes-bumping-into-guitar-hero-iii-and-dlc-part-2-of-2/#more-1520)


As for the DLC, at my place the Police pack was well received, Roxanne and Can't Stand Losing You especially.  My Sharona also is fairly popular (although the guitar solo at the end is somewhat tricky).

Edit: decided to clean up the URL.

In Living Color: Wayans Brothers sketch comedy on Fox in the late 80s, early 90s.
Living Colour: Band that wrote and played Cult of Personality

You know, having never really understood/listened to My Sharona's lyrics, I never knew how dirty that song was.

Maybe I'm just blind, but after a brief check, I couldnt find anywhere that it listed DLC for Rock Band. Little help?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rock+band+dlc&btnG=Google+Search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rock+band+dlc&btnG=Google+Search)

Sorry that was worded badly. I mean in the game couldnt find the option to go download tracks.

They are found outside of the game, in the XBL marketplace under the music game genre I believe.  When you buy and download songs, they then show up under a special tour section in the game.

One thing I'm sad to see is that few people (that play online in random matches, at least) seem to get the DLC.  Since you can't play a DLC song if any one of the four members of your band is missing it, it tends to make playing the DLC in random matches very rare.  It was actually a bit of a shock tonight, when, in a 4 player band, I hit random, and one of the Police DLCs came up...  We checked afterwards, that pack was the only one that everyone had.  We had fun playing the other two, but then went back to the base songs...

Songs seem to download fairly quickly from Live...  I wonder if it would be possible to do something where if at least half your band has a song, the rest could download it and play it while a part of your band...  So if only you have a piece of DLC, you could play it with one other person, and if two people in the band have a piece of DLC, a full band could play it...

Probably too late to work out the licensing to do it in Rock Band, but maybe a sequel could do it...

Getting 3+ new songs for the game every week is really nice. :)  Part of why I like Rock Band so much.

You could do it by passing encryption keys around but that's extra programming work.

Ah, makes sense. Though since the original line-up is apparently back together again and about to record a new album, I'd be just dreamy  :awesome_for_real: if they could get them to re-record some of their key tracks. I'd pay seriously good money for real Sabbath songs, played by Real Black Sabbath.

As some of you guys know I recently picked up Guitar Hero 3, and then Rock Band. I used to hold these games (Guitar Hero anyway) in a sort of disdain. They look pretty goofy when some one is playing it, and I always thought "if your going to spend that much time, pick up a real guitar". I have changed my mind. I still think people that complain expert is to easy should seriously go learn a real instrument (I'm looking at you schild). But other than that, I am having a great time. I have been playing GH3 for about 3 weeks now, and Rock Band for 2. This is the first I have ever picked up on of these type of games. I beat GH3 on Medium, including beating Lou my first try, and was pretty proud of my self. Also, I can 97 - 100% all the rock band songs on medium. I really want to move up to Hard on both, but maybe I don't have the hand eye, or my fingers don't work right, or I'm doing some thing wrong. I am horrible at hard. So far I can finish one song on GH3 on hard, and I can stumble through Rock Band easier songs at about 65-70%. I did manage to finish Maps on expert at 85% which I was very proud of.

So anyway, do you have have any tips, tricks or styles that I should know, or that would help me move from Medium to Hard? Mostly having to do with how to hold the guitar, and which fingers to use for which frets and stuff. Right now I don't really have a specific way, I just kind of fumble a finger to the closest key, but that ofter leads me to miss the Red, Yellow and Blue buttons more than the Orange or Green ones.

Help.

A cheesy way for me to get through the songs is to have the index for red and just slide up a bit for green with it. My hands are bigger than most people's though I would imagine. The key to hard is to know where your hands are at all times. If you pick up GHII, Heart Shaped Box is a good one to practice because you have to go back and forth so much.

Practice more.

No, really, it's simply a game that takes practice. Strategy doesn't really have a place until the last few songs on each version. Well, none on the first.

I disagree, Schildo.  I was thinking about technique from the minute I started playing GH1 on hard.  I usually keep my hand on the higher four notes and use my index to cover the odd green note, unless there are chords involving the lower notes.  That way there's less pinky stretching and your hand doesn't need to move as much.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2716-Zero-Punctuation-Guitar-Hero-III

I love Yahtzee.

So fucking true. This is the wrong thread, though! :)

Brilliant... as always.

So I played another 2 hours on hard in GH3 last night. I managed to finish one more song in the first tier. And I had to practice it like 5 times first and then play it 5 more to finish it. Could it be possible that I just really dont have the coordination to do hard? Or maybe I need to memorize the song layouts? I hope this isnt the case, cause I dont want to have to practice every song 5 to 10 times to beat it.

Will there come a point where it just sort of clicks and all of a sudden I am able to handle hard mode do you think? I really really want to be able to do this, but last night I was very frustrated. It seems the jump from normal to hard is a little to big IMO.

Any words of encouragement, or tell me to fucking quit trying already?

Well, most songs on hard have sections that are either mostly G-R-Y-B or R-Y-B-O. You can generally assume that most of a song will be in the latter, though there are exceptions. You just need to play until shifting hands without losing track of which set of buttons your hand is on just "clicks".

Of course, I'm just a "Yahtzee"-level player (though I beat the first one on expert), so I still haven't beat GH3 on Hard. Beat Rockband on hard easily though. I'd actually use that as your practice for GH3 hard.

I agree with Yahtzee's assessment of the difficulty curve on GH3.  Unless you're psycho obsessive it's best to just stop playing the game on Hard once you get to the "battle for your soul" section.  The jump in difficulty at that point is just nuts, and it jumps again at the final boss battle.  (The final boss battle on Hard is reportedly even harder than the same section on Expert.  How's that for  :uhrr:?)

In GHIII, I didn't notice the difficulty really ramp up until I hit Metallica's One. That solo is insane -- way harder than anything else I had played prior.

Medium to Hard seriously just involves putting in lots and lots of time.  It sort of just comes to you. What I can suggest is if you have multiple games, is to play the lower tier of hard on one game, reach the ceiling where you can't handle it, and then swap to the other game. A ton of it is just getting muscle memory and seeing the same songs over and over.

It helps that when you played Medium that you were somewhat okay with using the pinky to hit the blue notes.  Although to be fair, I've noticed I've slipped a notch lately; I'm having a really hard time nailing the rapid strings of Blue note with Orange hammer-on.

We still play Rock Band a fair amount, probably once a week, when we can get everyone together.  Unfortunately one of my roommates is not amused by Rock Band, which makes things difficult.  It doesn't help that she isn't crazy about the sound of drumsticks striking rubber pads either, shocking.

In spite of this, I've managed to put in a bit of time on drumming, and can now competantly play about 80% of Medium songs with a mid-90% accuracy rate. For the longest time my foot/ankle was sore after playing, until the game reminded me that what I can do is put my foot down and depress the kick drum pedal, and then right before I had a kick pedal note coming down, lift my foot slightly and then bring the foot back down.  It takes a bit of effort to do properly, but it hurts a hell of a lot less afterwards.

Looking forward to Tuesday... Buddy Holly will be a lot of silly fun, and I have a soft spot in my heart for The Pretenders, even the covered versions.

Since the GH3 thread is sort of dead, I'll bitch here: I can't fucking beat "Raining Blood" on Expert.  The Mosh section is impossible.  Okay, fine, it's not impossible, but I can't do it.  Any hints or strategies?  I want to go beat Lou already.

I can't beat it either. In fact, here's a secret - I gave up on the last tier. Well that's not true, I've gotten really good at Cliffs of Dover.

And I could beat Through the Fire and the Flames if I could get through the intro.

Its time to buy a real guitar.

I can play the song on a real guitar without any difficulty.  Hell, I can do it on my acoustic.  Simulating the damn thing is a lot harder.

Served.

In green, right? Who the fuck cares if you can play a real guitar -- the guitar thread is in GD.

I never thought I'd see this post on f13 :o

So, I finally broke down my wife and went to get rock band.

Couldn't find any 360 versions anywhere.  I almost bought a PS3 and Rock Band for the PS3.  Almost.

You obviously missed Morphiend's silly post.

If you havent left for your vacation yet, and are still looking, two things.

1) Dont buy the PS3 version, the GH3 guitar wont work with it, and its a much better guitar.
2) Try Target or Toys R Us or Costco, all three of those places had it in stock this weekend here.

The Federal Way, WA Best Buy had 6 or 7 on Saturday (I got one when I returned my busted pedal/CD version). They are starting to show up in ones and twos in B&M stores, and many online retailers (not gamestop) show them in stock (BestBuy.com, ToysRUs.com, etc).

Game is lots of fun. Drums get very hard very quickly (even on easy) as more beer is consumed, I have found. I am having to learn to play all over again, since I never had a working drum pedal before. Much harder this way!  :ye_gods:

I like the Rock Band guitar more than the GH3 guitar for the ps2. Having the buttons come all the way across the neck makes it much easier for my small hands.

Both seem tiny, and made out of cheap plastic though. Mostly because they are.

I found mine via Circuit City's online store. If it's out of stock online they'll instead reserve a copy at the nearest pickup location it's available.

So I finally completed drums on Medium. Didn't fail out of any songs once I "got" drumming.  Some notably tough songs to wrap my brain around towards the end include:

Green Grass and High Tides
Train kept a rollin'
Enter Sandman
Foreplay/Longtime

Anyone notice that it seems like their drum likes to drop notes?  I can't tell if I have a total lack of rhythm (possible) or if the window is just tiny, or if there's lag, or what.  Especially when I think I'm on a roll, just to notice that the kickpedal is dropping notes.

On the up side, the very brief ending scene for Drummers is different than Guitarists in solo world tour.  There's certainly no lasting storyline, it just ends up looking like the big dramatic end to a concert, depending on what instrument you play.

And yeah, to echo the warning about PS3, looks like Activision/Red Octane is fighting wth EA/Harmonix over this: http://kotaku.com/gaming/rock-band/activision-on-gh-not-so-fast-mtv-333855.php

Sounds like things aren't getting settled anytime soon.  Sorry PS3 owners.

Am I the only person in the world who thinks it's pretty much impossible for anyone to play one of these "toy instrument" games without looking like a total dork?

The ground was already broke with DDR.

You need to go to calibration, and do the manual calibration, then after that there is an option to sync your instrument, do that also, it should work wonders.

Do you think that anyone playing any other video game looks any cooler? It is about having fun, not looking good.

Like the afterburner mod for the game boy, enterprising people (http://www.rockbanddrumpads.com/) rushed to fill the drum set's poor and noisy design.

I am praying that the game's popularity will spawn a cottage industry of peripherals. It wouldn't be hard to improve on the hardware that shipped with the game.

(http://www.mopo.ca/uploaded_images/wow-player-794285.jpg)

Am I the only person in the world who thinks it's pretty much impossible for anyone to play Ultima Online without looking like a total dork lost-in-the-past asshat?

Damn this game is good. I just played for the first time at a friend's house tonight. It's 100x better than I thought it would be, and I had high expectations. Playing the drums for Enter Sandman is fucking full of win.

Bravo Harmonix.

Brought Rock Band to work for the Christmas party and it was a smashing hit. Someone else brought a Wii and it sat in the corner unused while most everyone waited for their turn to play an 'instrument'. It's pretty fun to watch the stuffy administration folks rocking out, especially since it has a good collection of older songs they can get into. One of our interface guys commented that it just feels wrong to play a game in which the system is telling you exactly what to do and scoring you on how well you do it.

Anyone have a link to a schedule for DLC beyond this week? I am anxiously awaiting Who's Next and Nevermind.

As far as I could find they dont have any listed for next week and beyond. I really hope they keep it up though. I am hoping for some more hard rock or metal songs or maybe some more NIN.

The fidelity to classic rock is. . unfortunate.  What percentage of their audience do they really believe is over 40?

My personal wishlist:

• War Pigs - Faith No More (cover of Sabbath).  Epic was the incorrect Faith No More choice
• No Quarter - Led Zeppelin
• Undertow - Tool (I'd prefer Swamp Song, but the profanity would likely make it harder)
• Silent Lucidity - Queensryche (for fingerpicking)

I even thew a little classic rock in there so it has a chance of happening.

I dont think you will see any Tool. As far as I know, they still wont even put their stuff on iTunes.

It may be blasphemy, but I actually like the Faith No More version better than Sabbath.

As to if/when DLC is being released,

http://kotaku.com/337037/rock-band-dlc-available-next-week-on-xbla-ps3-has-to-wait


Man, I keep feeling bad for the PS3 experience.

 Well, they uh, announced the DLC.  (http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17450)


Makes sense to throw in some modern songs to appeal to a broader segment of the population right before Christmas. And having it at 99 cents hopefully is less a holiday appeal, and more a precedent sent for modern hits.  I might take a shot at the song from The Sounds, a friend of mine is a fan of theirs. Joystiq was nice enough to put up a youtube video for every song  here.  (http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/24/rock-band-weekly-all-american-rejects-30-seconds-to-mars-the/#comments)

After seeing those 5 songs, I don't feel bad for PS3 owners.

I just can't see the All American Rejects songs being any good in Rock Band. I'm definitely considering getting the 30 Seconds to Mars songs though.

I dig The Sounds song, but the rest I probably won't taint the random playlist with. Considering the breadth of kickass songs I've heard lately that I wished were in the game the 'big release' is pretty meh.

It makes me wish the Harmonix DLC strategy was more cohesive. Making the assumption that as this progresses, they're going to release a mix of 80s hits, classic/southern rock, and modern hits. I'd love to see them spread them out, with:

 - Two classic/southern/Punk/Pop/80s/grunge song at the 2.99 price
 - One modern song/obscure artist/band that MTV wants to promote at .99

This way, people who don't want the newest Fallout Boy hit can instead go after say, a song by Faith No More.

Of course, that changes if the songs are getting the okay to be used at the last moment, requiring songs to be packed bundled up in its current incarnation.

Happy to see the song by the Sounds, I would have preferred "Painted by Numbers" but cool.

After relating my difficulty in finishing the last easy drum song on easy (Grass and Trees or something like that) my friend said that he read that the song was a kinda joke in terms of difficulty level, is that true?  That song was just plain mean.

Not sure how Easy is, but Green Grass and High Tides on Normal difficulty has been challenging for me because of the grueling long sequences where the kick drum is off beat with the snare. I can usually hit it for 5 or 6 repetitions before I lose it and have to recalibrate myself. If you can get that beat down then it's just a matter of endurance, since I'm pretty sure it's the longest song in the game right now.

Move Along will actually have a fun drum part.  Not particularly complicated, but fun.

 :grin:

I jumped on Monday morning to see if there was anything new. Saw these, didn't recognize them, downloaded last week's stuff instead. I wouldn't download them if they were free, in all likelihood.

Curses. My kick pedal broke at the hinge tonight during Enter Sandman.  :ye_gods:

Echo on the weird long sequence.  It's easy for your brain to turn off, and it can really screw you up coordinating the drumming with the pedal-work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24ac3294VAg <-- not me, but what was screwing us up on the drums tends to be around the six minute mark, that red&yellow alternating with yellow kick. I believe that's medium drumming on the right.

If you like to drum, pick up the song by the Sounds.  I downloaded that because we occasionally have a female lead singer, and I wanted to snag a song more in line with a girl's "natural" range. Not the most exciting song to play lead guitar to, just a lot of two note chord-y stuff.

At this point, I can play most of the songs on Medium, and am slowly working on hard. I'm getting to the point now to where I'm actively seeking out the more energetic songs on Medium to drum on (Suffergette City, etc).  I played a bit last night with some friends who were visiting, and they really seemed to get a kick out of the system.  Unfortunately, none of them knew much about the music, so when we were trying to assemble a full band, I had to end up singing. My vocal abilities definitely only go as far as medium.

Wondering what next week's DLC will be. I have a sinking suspicion that the reason why they're not announcing this week's DLC early is partially because it's going to be relatively forgettable stuff like last week.

Yeah, I usually hate these kinda games, but I actually played for a few hours with some friends of mine.

Seeing as I have no actual musical talent, I was relegated to mic duty. It was actually fun, until I had to sing some shit by Bowie. Fuck you Bowie, for destroying my throat and voice for 3 days. I don't have that kind of range....though to be fair, I had trouble hitting any of the high notes, seeing as I had spent 8 hours vomiting the previous day.  :uhrr:

I was still a pretty terrible vocalist, though I was actually able to perform admirably on medium on certain songs (knowing the actual song helps!).



PS: plz 2 have s-child record himself doing vocals. It would be even more funny than that old JP-version Persona 3 preview.

Working graveyard and trolling some sites, picked up this bit of information from http://majornelson.com/archive/2008/01/01/rock-band-tracks-various-1-1-08.aspx (http://majornelson.com/archive/2008/01/01/rock-band-tracks-various-1-1-08.aspx):

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Gimme Three Steps

The Black Crowes - Hard to Handle (Cover)

Rush - Limelight (Cover)

It's Major Nelson, so it's legit.  I dunno, I'm not super interested in Gimme Three Steps or Limelight; I'm probably going to go after Hard to Handle if the cover isn't horrible, although it's probably going to be murder on the vocalist.

Conan griefs Rock Band players. (http://kotaku.com/340226/conan-griefs-rock-band-playing-staffers-does-wicked-edith-bunker)

Awesome.

Is Dire Straits on here somewhere?

I listened to the Black Crowes and Rush songs released this week and they are awful covers. I'd much rather see fewer songs of better quality.

http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21115


I love me some Interstate Love Song.  So awesome.

Ohhhhhhhh Number of the Beast. Awesome song.

Didn't they have permission for Run To The Hills already? Or was that a cover too? Or was that in a totally different game? I swear I remember trying to sing it before...wonder why they would have to use a cover for a song from a band who allowed them to use another song already.

All 3 of those songs are good.

Seconded!  Oh God, seconded!

I want Sultans of Swing ASAP, people.  Get on it.

More STP makes me a happy panda. Although, the Hard drums for Vasoline are currently the bane of my existence and stalling my solo career.

Run to the Hills was a cover, but Number of the Beast it was an original track in GH3.  The most commonly accepted answer is that the master track for Iron Maiden just had the drums mixed down for GH3, which works out great, but can't work for a game which has drums as an element to be played. No clue if that's actually true or not.

That being said, I love this configuration of song releases.  One modern song (Hives), one song that resonates with most of the 25-30s demographic (STP), and one classic song that also doubles as soothing the metalheads (Maiden).  I think if they keep that sort of release pattern up as well as having Mondays be announcement day of songs, they'll knock down a significant amount of complaining.

Or Brothers in Arms, or Romeo and Julet, or Money for Nothing.... or Calling Elvis... lalala the list goes on  :awesome_for_real:

I think that would push me straight out to buy a 360 and Rock Band.

I vaguely remember someone talking about playing GH/Rock band with a real guitar...

http://gizmodo.com/341959/soundtech-ediface-will-play-guitar-hero-with-real-guitar

That would no worky - at all.

First, if you config'd it to use 5 frets on one string as the RB/GH notes, you wouldn't be able to play chords.  So you'd have to config 5 separate strings, probably on the same fret.  And then probably no strumming, so chords would have to be simultaneous picking.  Second, no matter how you config'd it, your guitar would sound very shitty (or at least a bunch of repetitive, dissonant notes) so you'd have to tune out your own guitar, which seems like it kind of defeats the purpose.

The ideal would be to custom reconfig it on each song, so each meatspace note would map to one of the 5 bubbles in the game (but with a custom mapping per-song).  However, I'm fairly confident that even in a single song an absolute note gets mapped to different bubbles depending on where in the song you are.  Plus good luck with chords, harmonics, and distortion.

So yeah. . I don't see it.

Some possible relief (coming in March, mind) for PS3 players who want a guitar for GH3 AND Rock Band...

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3165316

(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2025/2178504791_fa366b7784.jpg?v=0)

Way to dodge getting used for copying the Explorer design folks!  :awesome_for_real:

Those buttons look unplayable.

I'm telling you, get some korean sanwa buttons, mod them into a guitar. You'll have the smoothest clickiest enjoyable guitar on the planet. And will never strain your fingers. Also, replace the strummer on the guitar with some sort of modified shallow joystick. Or even better, 2 arcade buttons. Maybe grooved player 1 and player 2 buttons since your fingers will always be there.

That left guitar looks like ass. Nyko proves once again they can make quality accessories :awesome_for_real:

This weeks DLC:

Why the fuck are the covering so many Sweet songs and they haven't gotten to Fox On The Run yet???

Been able to play a little bit of RB lately...

I can actually do the singing...sort of. Especially for a guy who cannot sing normally, and who doesn't know most of the songs.

I can also probably do Bass on medium. I say probably because I have not tried medium yet; I'm still getting accustomed to actually using those other fingers on the frets, instead of having just my index finger jumping around like mad.

I can do the songs where the vocals are all pretty much at the pitch I normally sing at.  Beyond that, I'm screwed.

Oh, I can get past them if I just turn up the mic's pick up volume and hum, but for some reason I just can't change my pitch when singing.  And truthfully, my voice isn't bad when I sing, I just seem to be unable to alter my pitch to match what's showing up on the screen while actually singing and enunciating the lyrics.

I will come visit and proceed to kick you in the genitals until your pitch changes. You will sing Maps.

NO. Fuck Maps. I fucking hate that song. It's stupid.

Also, I don't wanna say Fuck Bowie, but I can't do his songs either.

You know, I played Rock Band at a friend's house over the weekend.  Some of those setlists are brutal (they played a 10 song setlist and ALL of them were 6-9 minutes long).  It's actually quite an interesting game and we had a great time with it (especially considering both of them were good at drums and I was able to play guitar or bass for the hard songs for them).  The wife says I *will* be picking it up for her, but I hesitate due to all of the complaints of broken hardware (and my friend's mic actually broke while we were playing, funny enough).  Is there any end in sight for them actually releasing hardware that doesn't suck, or are a handful of vocal people just really unlucky?

The game is a little forgiving in that you can actually sing any song up or down octaves, as long as the relative pitch matches. It's particularly handy for singing those female songs as a man, and especially during Gimme Shelter when they cruelly make you sing the female part, as well. I can sing high notes (thanks high school choir) but I find that my throat gets sore after doing it for too long so I just shift it down to a comfortable range.

Wait!  They don't love you like I love you.

Wait!  They don't love you like I love you.

Ma-a-aaah aa-aaaah aa-aaaa-aaa-aa-aaaaaaaps

Singing part on the song isn't that hard if you happen to have a brother with a trained soprano for a girlfriend.  :oh_i_see:

Noobs.

I just lower the difficulty to easy, get trashed, and yell the songs.

A lot of my friends demand I sing Timmy and the lords of the underworld. Apparently I do a very good rendition of the song.

For all you drummers out there, someone has released a Windows application called Drum Machine which lets you free play the Rock Band drums and assign .wav files to each one. It comes with a decent set of drum sounds but it should be easy enough to add any sound you want. It also supports recording and playback so you should be able to hypothetically use it to play drums for a song and add the audio track. I found XP recognized the drum kit right away and it worked pretty well, although I had a few random crashes since it's in early beta. It's nothing groundbreaking, but a nice cheaper alternative to buying a real electronic drum kit.

http://andrewrudson.com/main.php

My girlfriend can hit 100% on maps on expert, with out even watching the TV. She did used to sing in a band though.

Week of January 22nd, 2008

Oasis Pack-
- “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
- “Live Forever”
- “Wonderwall”

Week of January 29th, 2008

- “Siva”- by Smashing Pumpkins
- “Working Man” as made famous by Rush
- “Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial)” as made famous by Coheed
and Cambria

WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE FULL ALBUMS??

If those Oasis tunes are all originals and not covers... I'm in love.

I want a goddamn Bon Jovi pack. That would be  :heart:

It saddens me that Harmonix is making eleventy billion dollars (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=32254) from song downloads.  And since the download quality has been meh, we can assume they'll make double eleventy billion dollars when the song quality gets better.

Not because I don't want them to print moneyhats.  Great for them.  Awesome game.  But it's going to usher in the real world of micro-nickel-and-diming-me-to-death like WoW ushered in MMOs.  I predict in the next couple of years that half of all major releases will involve $30-40 of post-purchase DLC.  Ugh.

Yeah, supposedly according to their website's FAQ in the forums "Who's Next is definitely coming out before the end of the year".  This was written in late November.  What the fucking hold up could be is anyone's guess, I just want my Who.

They might be making too much money by selling people 3 songs at a time...

changed plans on the full album thing perhaps?

Why the hell isn't this out for the Wii? Seems like a perfect fit for the audience and it's not like it has high technical requirements.

Also, why are the PS3 downloads a week behind again?  I was all excited for Oasis =(

That's because you're a tool.

(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/119/294168009_b25decaddf_m.jpg)

OXM reveals March's DLC.  February is still unknown.

http://kotaku.com/350962/rock-band-dlc-for-march-outlined-in-latest-oxm

March 4 - Thrash Pack
At The Gates: Blinded By Fear
Evile: Thrashes
The Haunted: Shadow World

March 11
Bad Company: Shooting Star (COVER)
Lynyrd Skynyrd: Simple Man
The Police: Message in a Bottle

March 18 - NIN Pack
Nine Inch Nails: March of the Pigs
Nine Inch Nails: The Collector
Nine Inch Nails: The Perfect Drug

March 25 - Metal Pack
Iron Maiden: Wrathchild (COVER)
Black Sabbath: Supernaut (COVER)
Metallica: Fuel

So.. Message in the Bottle, maybe the Perfect Drug for me.

They're doing a great job with that "full album" shit.

Really seems to be thay've changed their minds and decided to nickel and dime the userbase with 3 songs at a time instead.

Anyone got the DLC info for this week?

http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27547

"Roam" by the B-52's

"We Care A Lot" by Faith No More

"Calling Dr. Love" by Kiss

 :uhrr:

Yuck. Weak.


I rented the disc to try out the guitar parts and I have to say I really enjoyed it.  Now I want to get the bundle to try the drum stuff.  The conversation with the wife originally went like this: "Sure dear, your toy drum kit would look great in the living room of your new bachelor apartment." Hard sell.

However she tried some vocal stuff just using the Live headset and a) is a natural, having some singing background years back and b) is hooked.  I have named my quest "Operation Roadie".  The plan is working well: "Hey, you'd be even better if you had a better microphone".

 :awesome_for_real:

Edit: One more question. Supposedly any USB mic works.  I have access professional grade mics and was going to try it out with one of these XLR to USB converters (http://www.mostlydigital.ca/detail.php?recordID=H33723).  Anyone know if this has been done? Hooray for wireless if so.

Just tell her your next wife will be happy to play it along with you.

It was hard enough to find her.  I don't know if I can find another that will put up with that much of my shit.

Took Rock Band to a Super Bowl party, to great success.  Some of the complaints:

1) What the hell is wrong with the USB mic? It had a loose connection, and took about 4-5 minutes to get it just right. (and no, I have no clue if a convertor will work)

2) Where are the songs for the girls?  (This is why I welcome/will buy the B-52s song.  The list of songs for "girls" is pretty low.  I know there's octave wrapping, but I'm not really seeing the utilization.)

3) The drums are hard.

If you do want to loosen up a crowd, especially if you had a singer blow away a crowd with their excellent singing, I'd suggest singing Ballroom Blitz, Run to the Hills, Timmy, Tom Sawyer, or anything with ridiculous vocals/lyrics.  I've found after singing Run to the Hills, while trying to keep as faithful as possible to the high notes, generally you've lowered the bar of quality and other people afraid to sing are more willing to do so.

Special J: Get a mic stand (boom mic if you want to phil collins things and sing/drum), a drummer's throne, and one of these. (http://www.americanmusical.com/item.aspx?i=SWI%20SWIRLY&src=D0407FG0HAMS0000SWI%20SWIRLY&utm_source=froogle&utm_medium=feed&)

I am totally getting one of those drink holders. It is a rare day when I play Rock Band completely sober, after all  :uhrr:

I want Beck songs for Rock Band.  :drill:

Operation: Roadie is a go!  And I get to still live at home too!  :awesome_for_real:

If you're trying to get by with a live headset,  a hand mic is the way to go.  Where the wife was doing solidly in medium, she's demolishing them now and starting hard with the ones she knows.

Love the drums, but man I'm having a hard time with them.  It's a very different animal. 

I both like and dislike the guitar.  I like the bigger size and weight, it just feels more real.  The effects switch is a fun toy.  The lack of 'clicking' vs. the GH one feels strange but I think I can get use to it.  I'm not a big fan of the fret buttons though; I think its strange to have a quiet strum bar and then have loud, clicky buttons.

Lantien:  you're right about Roam.  The wife complained about the lack of 'girl' songs, so I downloaded it.  BTW, that drink holder is awesome. I think I need one.

FWIW, I think I picked up the drink holder while I picked up a mic stand from GuitarCenter.  You're going to use it a lot less than you think (since you can pause songs, you can drink), but it impresses the hell out of friends.  :awesome_for_real:

As for lady-songs, the current downloadable list is:

"Cherry Bomb" The Runaways
"Song with a Mission" The Sounds
"Brass in Pocket" The Pretenders

Song with a Mission isn't bad, but it's sung by a Swedish woman, so expect some weirdness in translation.  I've heard Cherry Bomb is universally panned, and Brass in Pocket is a cover.  You're best off checking youtube for a reference point.

The best thing to do is just go over the downloadable list with your wife and pick out songs that she would enjoy singing.  For people in my age bracket for instance, Buddy Holly tends to be pretty popular for both genders.

I heard "Hot Rod Lincoln" the other day while I was flipping through my music channels on my TV and thought it'd be a pretty cool RB song.

Showing off is the main motive for getting it isn't it?

I'm getting the Sounds track, I think it's pretty decent.  Brass in Pocket will probably get downloaded if the cover is decent.

Here's where I get my previews of songs if anyone is looking for some:
http://www.rockbandcontent.com/rbc/db/songs.php
All the DLC, with video links for all instruments.

Sauced and I picked this up on Saturday. I only know/like the classic rock (~ pre-1994) stuff.  :uhrr:

As the vocalist, I don't really care about the lack of "girl" songs - hell, anyone can butcher some Courtney Love - but after getting five stars on everything on Medium, the jump to Hard is a lot bigger than I think it should be.

Sauced got blood blisters from drumming so awesomely and I am a bit hoarse today.  :grin:

I had always thought music games were retarded, but my buddy brought Rock Band over this weekend and I had to eat crow on this one. The next day we went out and bought it - my wife and daughter absolutely love it, we started our own band and spent hours yesterday working gigs - and shopping to customize our rockers. I would have never thought a game like this could be this addictive, and it's awesome because the whole family can play (well almost, my son is only 3).

http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28990

 This week's DLC for $1.99 per song (160 Microsoft Points)
  "Complete Control" by the Clash (master)
    "Truth Hits Everybody" by the Police (master)
   "Teenage Lobotomy" by the Ramones (master)
   These songs can also be bought in a 3-song pack for $5.49 (440 Microsoft points)

Something for the Fogies!   :oh_i_see:

In all seriousness, I'm probably passing on this week's offering; I always feel guilty about only buying a single song off a 3 pack, and The Police song is the only one that really gets my attention. The group we usually bring in for singing purposes probably doesn't know a single track on this list.

Making the leap from Medium (where I average around 98%) to Hard (where I average around 30% before the epic fail) drumming is going to take some practice.  Hot damn.

Quick question about the DLC - is it incorporated in anyway into Band Tour mode, or is just for standalone playing?  I'm afraid our band might split up before we achieve world domination if Voodoo has to sing that fucking Garbage song one more time.

According to the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_in_Rock_Band), DLC shows up in Band Tour mode.  Hooray!

I do hate Garbage.

Also, looking at the DLC list didn't really rev me up like I hoped. Variety would be nice though, so I guess I'll take what I can get.  It will be fun to sing some Metallica, though, I tell you what.

Sauced and VDL, the DLC stuff shows up in the mystery and random set lists. The Metallica shit is hot, except when you all pick hard and then you land one in a mystery set list.

My singer is a girl, and she flatly refuses to sing any Metallica or Iron Maiden or any of the heavy rock stuff, and those are my favorite songs to play, so its kind of depressing. In fact its downright frustrating.

My girlfriend is on a mission to do expert drums. She did 5 star Wanted Dead or Alive the other night. Was pretty awesome. Funny thing, its our bassplayer holding us back. Ether my girlfriend or her friend (the usual singer) can do almost every song on hard at 90%+.  Our bassplayer craps out at hard on any song over above about half difficulty and cant handle metallia or the hardest songs on normal.

I forgot to mention my loathing for "Wont get fooled again" jesus. This song is SOOOO long and just not fun.

Seriously man, why do you hate rock and roll?

For realz.

Had some fellas over Saturday night to drink a few beers and play some Rock Band. Much fun was had, especially when one of our singers had a Peter Brady-like voice issue. Also, I totally showed Furiously up after he scored 38% singing "Wave of Mutilation" and dared me to try it. I can't sing on key, but I can hit most of the notes (at least as far as the meter is concerned).

He had it coming...he brought this into my house and left it there!-

(http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1019/1289753764_917c089ba8.jpg)

That's a nice desk and a very gay drink.

Unfortunately I grabbed the pic off the 'net, so it ain't my desk (notice the lack of clutter and cat hair). Unfortunately, the horrible subject of the picture is still infesting my refrigerator as we speak. Worse yet, my wife plans to try it. Had I known she had such deviant proclivities I never would have married her, obviously.

You should make it into chowder. No, nevermind, that stuff sounds like afterbirth.  :ye_gods:

Your bass player is better than I am.  I'm living la vida medium.   Fuck that orange key right in the ass.

Another thing to try is just hook up the stratocaster and play through the solo tour mode.  If you're unlocking purely via the BWT, it's very slow to unlock to the higher difficulties.  Running through the solo tour unlocks the tracks for Band World Tour (if the account that's playing the solo tour is also the BWT leader).

On the flip side, you run the risk of having a song come up that your group isn't skilled enough to play yet, or worse, a song that the singer has no clue how it goes. The best you can do then is downgrade your difficulties.  This however, is much more troublesome when you get to a mystery setlist...

My main complaint about this week's releases is they are all acts we've already seen DLC for.  I mean I like them, but haven't we had enough Police tracks?  I know I won't like every track, but I would like to see more variety.  I'm probably passing on these.  OTOH I'm quite happy I decided to get the B-52 track.

We had a party at the Special J estate on Sunday.  Rock Band was HUGE with the guests.  Incredibly fun with the full band.  Funny thing was when my cousin, who is a professional vocalist kept getting told by the game she was singing wrong.  Though she later totally crushed Welcome Home.

Oh yeah, Money for Nothing needs to be in this game.

(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2131/2261509897_fdb28d5b01.jpg?v=0)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who went "Cripes, another Police song?" And I like the Police. But damn.

People who are unhappy that next week's DLC will not have music from a band not currently in the Rock Band library will be disappointed by this week's offerings.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/15/rock-band-weekly-stone-temple-pilots-weezer-and-garbage/

    *  Sex Type Thing - Stone Temple Pilots (160 MS points/ $2)
    * El Scorcho - Weezer (160 MS points/ $2)
    * Why Do You Love Me - Garbage (160 MS Points / $2)

Tuesday for the XBox, Thursday for the PS3.

No confirmation on the Harmonix site from a Harmonix employee (there's a post in the Greatest Hits forum, not Announcements) , so take this with a grain of salt.

That being said, I'm buying all three songs, easy.  :awesome_for_real:  Stone Temple Pilots's first CD? A song for girls? Freaking El Scorcho?  This release week (if verified) is right in my wheelhouse.

It's not so much that I'm disappointed there haven't been many new bands, but that it seems weighted really heavily in favour of like. Two of them.

Who here isn't totally fucking excited about this? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXkNkFLiRQ8&eurl=http://sheridanc.facebook.com/home.php?)

This plus NiN pack moved up:


This probably will still dissapoint people chomping at the bit for full albums, but hey hey, moved up NiN drumming frenzy!  :ye_gods:

I want Head Like a Hole :(

And how about some Alice in Chains while we're at it, and Pearl Jam, and...and...

Head Like a Hole isn't really a good rock "band" song though. The most that's happening there is synth (easily doable on bass) and vocals. Something like the Collector is at least something from Reznor's current/analog friendly period.

Yes to all of this and then we need the Journey Believe Pack

Where the fuck is my Pink Floyd?

Have you tried looking under your piles of marijuana?

Earlier in either this thread or the other I asked what game Wratchild was from. I just watched it on YouTube - holy shit what a terrible cover! Yowzers.

Hrm. I only have bales of cocaine (http://youtube.com/watch?v=BHaNrRoZ6LY).

No time for cocaine.  Next week is time for some pretty colors. Bust out the tie dye, it's a six pack of Grateful Dead

http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32696&page=2

“China Cat Sunflower” (Master)
“Casey Jones” (Master)
“Sugar Magnolia” (Master)
“Truckin" (Master)
“Franklin’s Tower” (Master)
“I Need A Miracle” (Master)

All songs can be bought individually for $1.99 (160 Microsoft Points) or the whole pack can be purchased for $9.99 (800 Microsoft Points).

While not a huge (or even partial) Dead fan, I think Rock Band needed more of this mellow rock. Cant say I am excited about any of those except Casey Jones.

WHERE IS MY BON JOVI PACK????

6 songs, and no Touch of Grey? Clownshoes.

Jesus Christ.  The fucking Dead?  The music in this game is getting progressively worse with each DLC.

Where the fuck is some funk?

Its a slow, steady, and methodical process.

It IS surprising that they haven't done Brick House yet.

Or at least some Sly and Family Stone. They were at Woodstock, ffs.

I'd settle for some P-Funk.

Have I mentioned that I am ready for the Bon Jovi pack about now?

At the risk of being heckled...

I urgently await the day that I can play Livin' On a Prayer in Rock Band.

Who in their right mind would heckle you for stating the awesome?

Hey, at least it's a new band...

That being said, where's my Grunge pack? I want Jeremy, Man in a Box, and Touch, Peel, and Stand (Days of the New).

Papa Was a Rolling Stone is a must have.  Yeah, and some Commodores and Parliament would be nice, too.

I'M STILL WAITING FOR WHO'S NEXT, WHILE WE'RE AT IT.

The less than awesome.

You know who you are.

Every time I see a new post in this thread and it isn't a link announcing that Who's Next and Nevermind are being released, I die a little inside. If I ever meet the marketing director for this goddamned game I am kicking him/her right in the junk.

Honestly, could it take more than an afternoon to transcribe Nevermind?

I'm almost certain that the hold-up on the albums more due to "How the hell do we display them nicely in the UI" and less with the actual development of the songs in game. If you can't select whole albums and have to pick each song individually, that'll get annoying fast.

I'm pretty familiar with people who encode their own DDR songs, and I can't imagine that RB songs are any more difficult. On average, it took about six hours or so to get the timing perfect (with testing and whatnot) for a 2:00m song by amateurs.

It's not like they aren't sitting on a BIG FUCKING PILE OF MONEY or anything.

Oh wait, they are.  :awesome_for_real:

My afternoon is pretty busy, but if they need some help I could probably make some time.

I just noticed that Guitar Hero got a No Doubt package.  I like.

No doubt.

Blech, lame. Can we leave the 90s, like ever?

Still some good shit missing from the 80's, I guess. The Cult, Billy Idol, at least something from Back in Black, Bad Brains, Dire Straits, and of course, METALLICA.

The only thing worse than no Metallica is no Zep.

Agreed on The Cult, Dire Straits and Billy Idol. 

I'd give a kidney for Love Over Gold.

Uhh, there are Metallica songs. I play Enter Sandman regularly ;)

Agreed on The Cult and good ole' billy though, excellent choices!

Only problem with those is that they're songs that make a bad singer look really BAD.  :grin:

Ian and Billy are two of the greatest rock stars ever imo, let alone of the 80's.

I would kill to see something from Crosby, Stills & Nash.  Woodstock, maybe?  Just to stick it to those shitty singers out there!

The Cult would kick ass.

Wild Flower (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yLVufAfby0) in particular.

Anyways, I think I'm gonna cut the sleeves off of my jean jacket now. Later  8-)

You truly are a man that lives by no rules. :drill:

It's become a bigger pain in the ass than I thought. As a vest, it needs to be smaller. Time to shrink it.  :oh_i_see:

I know I'm more of a Rock Band apologist than a GH3 fan, so let's get this over with (disclosure: I own Rock Band and GH3.  This is why you buy both, folks).

GH3:  Free Flogging Molly songs, and some for-pay songs:

This's week Rock Band DLC:

http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34465

  :ye_gods:

The only positive spin is uh, if you like Serj (System of a Down frontman)... er.. Paramore has a female singer?  Black Tide sounds like a straight-ahead metal song, which hopefully will make the people who are dying for a much harder-edged music style happy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei8hPkyJ0bU Wikipedia sez Paramore they're influenced by Sunny Day Real Estate.  I have a hard time believing this from hearing this song.  But hey, if you want some accessible poppy-sounding rock sung by a woman, there you go.

I am overwhelmed with apathy.

I'm starting to think Harmonix is having a laugh.

They weren't just some random shitty songs they picked. (http://kotaku.com/366329/rock-band-gets-sxsw-pack)

Fuck you, Harmonix. You have time to release songs from bands that probably weren't even together when the game launched, but no Nevermind or Who's Next? FUCK YOU. I am not spending another cent on DLC until those are released. I will be over in the corner tilting at windmills if you need me.

Yeah, if they announce a Modest Mouse pack before I gets me some Nevermind, I will probably go postal.


Or at least write a strongly worded letter to the editor.

Someone pay me $100 and I'll walk over to Harmonix' office and punch them in the face for you.

Hey guys, how are those full album downloads going in your broke-ass gam..ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I see the problem here. :oh_i_see:

Full albums was probably dumb idea to begin with. Not every song on an album is going to be suitable for Rock Band. What about songs with limited vocals, very repetitive bass/drum parts, etc? Seems like a bad idea for them to have promised that in the first place.

Rancid's "And Out Came the Wolves" or Less than Jakes "Losing Streak" are probably the best full albums that could be in rock band.

Too bad they'll never, ever, ever notice.

Dookie would be nice, but too much cursing.

The video for Basket Case really made me want to learn to play the drums...that would be fun as hell to try.

What a FANTASTIC line up this week.   :awesome_for_real:

Bold mine.

Ok, after listening to a sample. Its at least some thing different. Still very underwhelming. Couldnt they pick some good bands?

I want me some Heart in my Rock Band.

 Crazy On You had about a fifty to one playtime ratio compared to anything else on GH2 at my house.

Loves me some  :heart:

I am of the opinion that Harmonix has no idea who the majority of their user base is from the type of songs they have been releasing.

How can you call something Earache without including Cathedral?

Great. More shitty bands I have never heard of, and still no sign of full albums.


Finally took the time to finish off the Easy tour on guitar and drums last night. Green Grass And High Tides was fucking bullshit. I am never playing that fucking song again. This is a game- it is supposed to be fun.

At first I thought the Outlaws were a shitty new southern rock band trying to fill the shoes Greg Allman will leave when he finally dies.  Then I found out that they were a shitty old southern rock band and the people responsible for that fucking song are already dead.

That said, I five starred it on Hard the first time I tried it - am not looking forward to the Expert version when I get there shortly.

I saw a video on YouTube of a band playing it together on expert. My head nearly exploded.

You have to be very careful when scanners are playing Rock Band.

How is it they don't have a Dire Straits pack yet?

Romeo and Juliet
Sultans of Swing

and motherfucking I want my MTV.

How?

It can't be said enough.  Dire Straits.  Now.

I'd take those, but I'd really like to have Love Over Gold, When It Comes to You, Down to the Waterline ...

Am I the only one that wants 'Use your Illusions I & II' songs to come out for Rock Band? I think 'You Could be Mine' would be AWESOME fun to play.

I would rather see more from Appetite first, but those would also be welcome.

Software update announced:


Could the Music Store mean the albums are around the corner?

Edit - Here's a look at the music store:

http://kotaku.com/369841/rock-band-gets-in+game-music-store

No.

Hopefully this will help avoid downloading the same song more than once via music pack/individual download. I don't think I have duped yet, but there is no way to tell from the XBL Marketplace, and that is fucking annoying.


This is huge. I can't tell you how many goddamned times I have played Creep in BWT. Love the song, but even Radiohead would balk at playing it 4 times in an hour.

The microphone thing will help. I get like 80% on Sabotage every time, and there isn't even any singing.

Apparently they've sold 6 million songs for Rock Band. I'd love to we some charts of sales per track.odt of the. The DLC doesn't seem that exciting, but I'm not exactly on top of the music scene.

Have I just not had enough coffee?

Your going to need a shitload of coffee for that to make any sense.

I'd estimate about this much

(http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj156/LaLi718_2008/Cornholio.gif)

Harmonix swings back and rewards old people!

http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?p=417335#post417335


More than a feeling master's a given.  After that, maybe one or two more songs.  All in all a good week for releases; hoping for a 90s-era set of songs for next week.

Knowing the sleep-deprived state he's currently in, I judge your portrayal accurate.  Spoiler: Prospero is a dad as of last Saturday.

I wish they'd put Cult of Personality by Living Colour on there. And All Right Now by Free. And some Savoy Brown and some War. Fuck sake, people, they're not giving us RAWK!

Ya know, I would blame it on my iPhone keyboard, but I toally reread it at the time and thought it made sense.  I may have to excuse myself from the internet until he grows up. That or I need some infant Valium.

I think you should print that post out and put it in his baby book.

...and look here, here's how much you fucked up papa's mind. He used to be smart, and then you came along and his brain turned to jello.

Speaking of childhoods, if I ever get me some Rock Band I'll have to pick up the Boston song pack. Those are all family favorites from when I was a kid. I never cease to be stunned by how well remember the lyrics.

As an old person, I am now happy.  Pleased to be making with the early Def Leppard and AC/DC now thanks.

The irony in all of this is since GH2 & 3 plus Rock Band, my kids don't groan when i pop in a cd of my old man music in the car anymore.  My 8 year old complains that the cover of Tom Sawyer sucks :-p

Some Rage Against the Machine would be nice for us people that cannot sing.

The terrible Gibson patent lawsuit is going forward. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080322/tc_nm/ba_gibson_guitarhero_dc_6)

Out of all the frivolous lawsuits I've ever seen, that one takes the cake. Just take a look at the patent summary that was awarded--there are 2 or 3 blatant points that make the alleged infringement obviously incorrect (unless of course you call a hunk of plastic with some buttons a musical instrument, and somehow turn your TV into a "head mounted 3D device").

Here's a thought: all of the owners of both GH and RB should get together and file a class action suit against Gibson for causing both Activision and Harmonix to be destracted by frivolous suits, thereby causing us grievous harm (we still don't have our full album downloads, and it's Gibson's fault!!11!one!cos(0)1).

Whatever software fix they put in for the BWT doesn't work for shit. Train Kept on Rolling came up 4 fucking times in less than an hour on Saturday night. The 4th time I was so annoyed I just shut the goddamned thing off.

We had pretty good luck with it on Saturday, actually.  Well, except when it decided we'd have fun playing Green Grass.

One thing, though, at least on the PS3 version - the new Music Store is great but until they add a shopping cart and let you buy more than one god damn song at a time, it's a complete waste of effort.

Heh, yeah- GG&HT came up as the very first random song we were asked to play. I had no problem forfeiting 10k fans to quit out of that one.


Any advice on getting the hang of medium drums? I can keep up for a bit, but eventually I lose the beat and go down in flames. I swear I could beat expert drums if they didn't have that goddamned foot pedal  :uhrr:

My basic procedure for improving at these games is to follow my current difficulty until I hit a wall, and then start playing the "easy" songs on the next difficulty level.  By the time I hit the wall on, say, Expert, I can go back and magically the Hard songs are easier.

If Medium is gettin' ya down, might want to try playing Weezer, Creep, et al on Hard and see how it goes.

Also, to be honest, I read some basic drum 101 info on wikipedia.  Realizing that they built the drum patterns on existing, practicable concepts like Paradiddles makes it easier to work on it.  Paradiddles are really simple exercises that train your ability to operate limbs separate from each other.  When I started trying them, it was very obvious that I could just practice those and I would get better at the game, and it worked.

Drum rudiments (http://rudimentstudies.com/rudiments.htm) for the musically inclined.  Some of them still break my brain.  I need to go practice more.

A lot of expert is simple identifying when the game has switched the rudiments to red-orange, blue-orange, etc.  I can usually find them when I slow it down to 60% or so, but I'm still struggling with consistency.

I have never used the Practice feature...was hoping I could just learn on the fly and fake the rest (which resembles my academic career far too closely). Once a slacker...

I've 3-starred my way through some of the early songs on Expert, but living in the Blicking Red of Death for 3 minutes is unhealthy (to my liver).

edit: green grass only *feels* like it takes 3 months.

Another webbie with rudiments: http://www.vicfirth.com/education/rudiments.html

Calibration is much more important with the drums than the guitar; its a lot easier to be a bit off with the drums than the guitar. Might want to double check your calibration and see if anything is iffy there.

Anyone tried the wireless guitar for RB yet? I am wondering if it is any more durable than the wired one it shipped with- mine is starting to give me issues.

We have a wireless guitar with the PS3 version -- not sure if it was standard or if we had to get a special package to get it.  Either way, it's a piece of shit.  The strummer broke after a few weeks.  Still need to see about shipping it back.

What takes the cake is the three year wait(Gibson). I know management is slow but sweet jesus...

Old people rejoice!


http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?p=504538#post504538

I'm old, but I'm not old enough to enjoy any of the Rock Band DLC.  Are the Harmonix offices in a nursing home?  Where's the FUCKING BUDDY HOLLY?!

Track a song written between 1992 and 2002, plzkthx.

For a slight bit of devil's advocacy, I will say that it must suck to not be able to say "Hey, here's the people we asked to be in our game that told us to Fuck Off".

It's a lot to ask, I know, but I would like to be able to count on more than one hand music in this game that I would actually listen to while not playing it.

The golden age of suck?  No thanks.  Keep up the oldies, guys.

I'm 40. There is more I'd love to both play and listen to from 1988-1995 or so than anything I've seen so far on RB, including the tracks that came with. I think the only DLC that was I was even remotely serious about wanting to play was the Boston 6-pack, and even that I would have selected some different songs myself. (and yes, I realize that's much earlier than the time period I mentioned :P )

It's just like all other art and media.  If you want to find the 5% that's great you have to look for it yourself, mass media and the majority of other people sure as hell aren't going to help you.

Obviously opinions differ.  But regardless of personal preferences, I suspect the market overlap between the 360 and, say, Red Hot Chili Peppers is substantially larger than the overlap with, say, the Eagles.  And I suspect that Microsoft knows that full well and that the reason for the relentless Oldie-a-thon has more to do with rights issues than with customer preferences.

I like the Blondie, the others are classics, but not my style. Pretty much anything is better than last weeks crap though.

Rock Band needs more Bad Company