This past Saturday I had the chance to play rock band for the first time. How was this possible? Rock band doesn't come to Canada until December?! Well one of my friends managed to convince his friend to bring a copy up from the states with him when he came for convocation last week. So ... they had it at the party I was at on Saturday. I've enjoyed most of the guitar hero series. I played through guitar hero I and II and managed to pass all the songs on expert. I bought guitar hero III when it came out, and have enjoyed it to a certain extent, but the game has driven me mad on a number of different fronts. The first issue is the game seems to be hard for hard's sake. Rather than focusing on making the experience as realistic as possible, it seems to be catering to the people who enjoy showing off that they can pass a wicked impossible section at 100%. What this does is it makes it nigh impossible for a more casual player (which I think I fall into) to pass the game in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable frustration level. The other part of GH3 that I can't stand is the guitar duel mode. To me, the game is at it's best when it is you versus the challenge of a particular song. It's hard enough to pass some of the more difficult tracks, so why do you need to throw in a random element with an opponent making it yet harder?! Maybe this is just me being frustrated, but having passed GH1 and GH2 on expert, I have yet to even come close to passing GH3 on hard due to the final boss battle. Ugh.

So what do I think of rock band? It's awesome! The most obvious difference between the games, of course, is the added instruments. The drums are, in a word, sweet. The guitar requires a larger abstraction to make it accessible to a more general audience. That abstraction comes in the form of 5 buttons instead of 6 strings. The drums, on the other hand, require almost no abstraction. You have things to hit and a kick pedal, and that's all you need for a basic drum kit. So where skills in guitar hero won't likely transfer to a real guitar, I have a feeling skills on the drums in rock band will transfer okay to a real drum kit! Of course, there are things about real drums that aren't emulated, but a lot of the stuff looks like it should transfer. The drums are also a lot of fun, which doesn't hurt!

The vocals is the other obvious addition to rock band. On this spot, the Harmonix crew took it easy on the people who have trouble with pitch. The easy difficulty level is amazingly forgiving, which means that the biggest barrier to entry for the vocalist is just the potential embarrassment factor - which karaoke seems to have solved in a lot of places (with some help from some liquid courage). After you get over that, you don't really have to worry about failing your band mates by failing a song. The more adventurous singers can up the difficulty level to get a challenge. The one thing I don't like about the vocals part of it is the interface is a bit awkward. I'm used to reading music, and that might help me out quite a bit. I found it was almost a requirement to know a song pretty well before attempting a song or I had no hope to figure it out as it went.

There are some tweaks to the game that just feel right. One simple one is the game shows you how many stars your current performance is getting, and how far away you are from the next star. No more wondering how close you were to 5-starring a song! The other biggest change I noticed is you can still collect star power even when you are currently using it. This change just makes sense to me.

Anyways, I got a chance to play a few songs on each instrument, and I was thoroughly impressed. I especially can't wait to give the drums more of a try at some higher difficulty levels!

Heraldk