Rock Band - Harmonix - XBox 360

[Yegolev]

Most people remember the first time they go to a rock concert. There's a sense of "this is the way music is supposed to be!" You can feel the bass thumping, you can see the lead guitarist flying up and down the frets, and the crowd is just part of the show, an amorphous thing that sings and dances along. For a brief few hours those audience members get to feel like part of the band, an extension of the music. They get to rock hard. Rock Band is that feeling turned to 11.

Rock Band is brilliant because it tries to hide the artifice. If your part isn't playing, then you're not playing. The tab generally also feels truer to the actual songs than Guitar Hero, although the guitar and bass are definitely much easier in Rock Band then they were in Guitar Hero 2. The guitar looks more like a guitar and less like a child's toy. Also gone is the annoying click from Guitar Hero that frequently drowned out the music unless we cranked the volume higher. The basic mechanics are the same as Guitar Hero, but they do a great job of dressing it up.

The real star of the show is the drumset. I only played for an hour on easy/medium but even with that small amount of time I came away feeling like both a rock god and a complete noob. Coordinating all your limbs is a bitch, but when it works it's sublime.

This game makes you feel like a rock star, and what is even cooler is it makes your crew feel like a band. The golden moment comes when all your band members are nailing their parts, and the audience rises up to sing with you, to bask in your rock. There isn't a damn thing in the world outside of strapping on some leather pants and hopping on stage to get that feeling. It certainly will be _the_ game to play at parties with my friends from here on out. Goodbye Guitar Hero, it's been real.
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Rating: Buy It

[Yegolev]

This is actually from Prospero.

[Phildo]

To comment further on the drumming, it's essentially a real drum lesson.  The toy drums are MUCH closer to the source instrument than the guitar is in either this or Guitar Hero.  If you can work your way up to export, you can definitely start a real band with your awesome drumming skills.

I am a drummer, and I endorse this statement.

[Rasix]

The game felt cheap in the little time that I played it and the drumming just supports my theory that I have no rhythm at all.  Didn't like the guitar either.  I miss the click and I didn't like the buttons not being raised. 

[Morfiend]

The game felt cheap in the little time that I played it and the drumming just supports my theory that I have no rhythm at all.  Didn't like the guitar either.  I miss the click and I didn't like the buttons not being raised. 

Use the GH3 Guitar.

[WayAbvPar]

Coordinating all your limbs is a bitch, but when it works it's sublime.

Amen. Very cool when I do it right, very tough to get it right. But I am learning!

[schild]

The game felt cheap in the little time that I played it and the drumming just supports my theory that I have no rhythm at all.  Didn't like the guitar either.  I miss the click and I didn't like the buttons not being raised. 

Use the GH3 Guitar.

He played the PS3 version.

[Prospero]

Go bludgeon Activision execs with the guitar you don't like. Tell them you'll stop hitting them when Harmonix can release its compatibility patch.

[schild]

Sorry. I'm not a hippy. They want money to make shit compatible, and I agree.

Harmonix is just too proud to admit they produced a whole lot of totally shitty hardware. Fuck 'em.

[Morfiend]

The game felt cheap in the little time that I played it and the drumming just supports my theory that I have no rhythm at all.  Didn't like the guitar either.  I miss the click and I didn't like the buttons not being raised. 

Use the GH3 Guitar.

He played the PS3 version.

Sucks for him then.

[schild]

Actually, mostly sucks for Harmonix. Game is near unplayable. Peddles break and the guitar is shit.

Woop. $150 meet toilet.

Good thing I didn't buy this one. Or I would've bitched at them publically for invading my motherfucking without my permission.

[Prospero]

Sorry. I'm not a hippy. They want money to make shit compatible, and I agree.

Harmonix is just too proud to admit they produced a whole lot of totally shitty hardware. Fuck 'em.

Yes, those damned, dirty hippies just want the same thing they get with the 360. The audacity. I suspect Sony would like to give Activision a swift kick to the groin right about now.

[schild]

Guitar Hero controller doesn't work on the Wii either far as I know.

Money for tech. It's not a complicated thing.

[Prospero]

It's true, the Wii guitar does not work on the PS3. 

[Samwise]

THOSE WHORES.

[Prospero]

I got a chance to play again tonight, and it's still fun. I still prefer the new guitar, but I will say when you get lost, getting back on track is a pain in the ass. I was starting to get accustomed to figuring out where I was by the bumps towards the end of the night. I think I need another good 4 hour session. I don't own GH, so I suspect I have less to unlearn than most of the folks that dislike it. The tilt mechanism is totally fucking broken in the new guitar though; some of us had it go off all the time, others had to shake the thing over their head.

4 players makes for a serious amount of rad, and the World Tour is pretty cool. I think I still prefer quickplay, but I think if we end up with a regular band then the world tour will be cool. Keeping four people busy at a time makes it a much better party game than Guitar Hero.

[Samwise]

Having been there, I feel compelled to add that everyone in our group EXCEPT Prospero (including the two who owned Rock Band and have been playing the crap out of it since it came out) preferred the Guitar Hero controller.

Here's my breakdown of what's wrong with the RB guitar:

• Overdrive activation seems completely random.  Especially annoying when you need to "save" a fallen band member.
• The full-width fret buttons alternate between getting pressed accidentally and getting pressed halfway so they don't register.
• The "braille" on the fret buttons is nearly unreadable, making sliding up and down the neck much tougher.
• The strum bar fails to register upstrums about a fifth of the time.  Good luck getting a long streak on a fast song.

I'd chalk this up to needing time to get used to the new controller, except that I didn't have nearly as many of these problems the first time I played Guitar Hero.  Luckily, the game compensates by having the tab be about a difficulty level and a half below GH, so new players are less apt to fail out even if the controller is ignoring them a fifth of the time.

As an aside, whoever thought that having the fret buttons go the full width of the fret would make the controller be more like a real guitar must have gotten beaten with the stupid stick as a child.  Real guitars do not have strings (you know, the things you press) on the sides of the frets.  They have them up on top of the fretboard, raised slightly.  You know, sort of like the GH controllers. 

And it's a goddamn sad day when I'm forced to say that the GH controller in any way resembles a real guitar.

[Prospero]

I'd chalk this up to needing time to get used to the new controller, except that I didn't have nearly as many of these problems the first time I played Guitar Hero.  Luckily, the game compensates by having the tab be about a difficulty level and a half below GH, so new players are less apt to fail out even if the controller is ignoring them a fifth of the time.

To be fair, you weren't well trained by another similar controller when you first played Guitar Hero(a normal guitar doesn't count). The three people who were most vocal about preferring the old controller all own Guitar Hero. Me, not so much. This is not to say the guitar is faultless, I'd like a more of a gap between the buttons. Oh and the overdrive thingy was totally busted on that guitar. I spent some time looking up how it is supposed to work and yeah, that guitar is crap. I'm not sure how it is that the Rock Band guitar is worse about activating star power than the knock off wireless controllers for Guitar Hero. That's a feat.

Still, I  the non-clicky strum bar. It makes up for any notes I miss when I get lost on the frets.

[schild]

I could deal with the non-clicky strum bar if the damn thing had the full range of motion as the GH guitar. The fact it feels like there's soft restrictive padding and that same padding is more notable on the downstrum is just a huge goddamn mess. Whoever designed the thing just needs to get out of industrial design and go be a Subway Sandwich Artist or something.

[Samwise]

To be fair, you weren't well trained by another similar controller when you first played Guitar Hero(a normal guitar doesn't count).

Bzzzzt.  Next crackpot theory plz.   

(Also, Jozz claims to prefer the GH controller as well, and you have a hell of a lot more hours logged in GH than she does.)

[Prospero]

You were well trained on an arcade game released in '98? Tis true though, I haz more hours than j0zz. I'm apparently just a freak. I can accept that.

[Samwise]

Clearly you're forgetting that I attended college at the Bemani arcade game capital of the country.    I didn't play GF as much as I've played GH since then, but if having played with a different guitar controller could somehow taint me as you're suggesting, I should have had the same problem the first time I picked up GH.  Or at the very least I should have spent some time waxing nostalgic about GF and bitching about GH's shortcomings by comparison.  Nada.

You being a freak is a good thing, though.  It means we don't need to fight over who plays what guitar.

[sidereal]

taint

hee hee hee hee


I don't mind the fretboard so much.  I can't recognize any of the braille except the middle one, but that's the only one I need to be able to find.  My issue is with the overdrive trigger.  I tend to play somewhat vertically, kickin it Zakk Wylde style.  The overdrive trigger seems to be around 30 degrees above the vertical, so I pretty much trigger it on an ongoing basis.  The Wii GH3 controller was more of a 60 degree angle.  That worked better.