17. Rock Band series
Here is a big ol’ chunk of text about one of the most popular games of the generation. Rock Band makes me kind of sad I have no aptitude for playing instruments, because I would like to do something besides singing when I play Rock Band. Especially since I don’t even like most of the songs in the games’ sets. When they finally publish King Crimson: Rock Band, however…
10 thoughts on “GameSpite Quarterly 2, #17: Rock Band series”
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Guitar Hero 5 contains “21st Century Schizoid Man,” but the remainder of the setlist leaves, uh, something to be desired.
Yeah, GH5 is awful. And Schizoid isn’t any fun to sing. It has like, 6 lines of lyrics, all screamed.
I think you just need practice, parish. It’s all just rhythm. When one of the GH or RB games launched, I forget which, the company that launched it had the Bangles come and play some of their songs. The funny thing is, their drummer could out-perform anybody else in the band on any instrument, cause his instrument was all rhythm.
On an unrelated note, I’m guessing this is one of the longer articles for this feature?
Personally, I”m holding out for They Might Be Giants: Rock Band with included accordion controller.
A couple weeks ago the guys were talking about music on Xbox Live and I had confused King Crimson with King Harvest. A good laugh was had by all.
Also, nice article, Mike.
Kirin, I’ll be right there with you.
I always think of King Diamond when someone mentions King Crimson, personally.
Parish – you could be remarkably better after a day or two of play if you start at the beginning songs and work your way down. One of the best thing about Rock Band is the great difficulty curve.
The article left out a very important design diffirence between harmonix’ music games and bemania games. With harmonix, there’s actual feedback to the player input from the game. It doesn’t matter what the player does in a bemani game, the music will play on, but miss or play a not wrong in guitar hero 1 and you’ll hear it.
That makes for a huge diffirence, that makes you feel much more like you’re playing music.
You have a good voice Parish. Much too good for singing “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Pt I and II” ;)
King Crimson (or Prog Rock Band) would be awesome though. Everybody loves those long Who and Boston and Kansas type songs, and in terms of these music games prog just works… because it’s music that was designed to be fun to play and interesting for musicians. Lots more variety than strumming eighth notes for 8 bars in f’in Fall Out Boy.
Throw King Diamond in for good measure too, especially “Them” and “Conspiracy”. He’d be really fun music to play (although singing would be tough!).
Let’s be honest. If Harmonix wasn’t ignorant about the Wii platform Guitar Hero wouldn’t be sitting as far ahead as they are now. For all of Guitar Hero III’s flaws, being the first and only Wii option was not one of them. A ton of PS2 owners migrated to that platform.
In addition, the Wii is the party system and Guitar Hero/Rock Band maximize that trait. Its a shame they waited 6 months to release a gimped version on the Wii and then allowed Microsoft to buy a limited launch window for Rock Band 2. I wonder how different things would be if Wii owners could of had 2 choices from the beginning.