The thing most people have been looking forward to are the keys and Pro modes. The keyboard is an actual 32-key MIDI-based keyboard that, with an adapter, can actually be used as a real keyboard. The game has both a standard and pro mode for the keyboard. The standard mode uses just 5 keys on the keyboard and works very similarly to the guitar controller where the player just presses one of the five colored keys as the colors scroll down. I found the standard mode to be pretty fun but a little less engaging than most of the other instruments since I only used one hand to play it. The pro key mode uses the full 32 keys and displays ten keys (as well as sharps/flats) on the screen at a time due to lack of screen real estate. It shifts the screen left and right to move up and down the keyboard. To start off, the pro keys mode is really freakin' hard. It is essentially like playing a real keyboard, albeit a small one. I could only manage to play a couple of songs on Easy difficulty without constantly missing notes (the INXS song is your friend). The hardest part of playing on pro keys is finding your place on the board to start out and keeping track of where you are when it shifts the screen. It definitely takes some getting used to, and since I typically play the game with my wife, I doubt she will have the patience to just sit and watch me try playing the same song over and over until I've got it down. I honestly don't see a lot of long term use in the keyboard. Others who are more serious about than myself may find it very beneficial as a jumping off point for learning to play a real keyboard.
The pro drum mode adds cymbals and an extra bass pedal for hi-hats. I actually didn't have an extra pedal that wasn't broken, so I wasn't able to try the hi hat pedal out, but I did get the cymbal expansion and have played with them quite a bit. Overall, I found the pro drum mode to be a fun addition. Since I already played on expert, for most songs they weren't that big a leap to adjust to playing. On the screen, cymbal notes are displayed as round instead of the typical thin rectangle notes, making it very easy to distinguish between regular and cymbal notes, unlike the Guitar series where both the cymbals and regular notes are round. The only real complaint I have about the cymbal expansions is that they don't fit on the drum set very well and have a habit of sliding down the poles as you play them. I basically had to anchor them with duct tape. Once I did that, they seemed to be fine.
Pro guitar mode apparently uses a full 6-string guitar controller by Mad Catz or a real Fender guitar to control with the note chart looking not dissimilar to guitar tab. I personally haven't tried this mode, so I don't really have anything to say about it other than it seems like a really awesome idea. I have a feeling I will have similar feelings to it as I did with the pro keys mode in that it will be very difficult to learn since it is essentially learning to play a real guitar. For vocals, they've carried the vocal harmonies feature over from Beatles Rock Band which brings the grand total number of possible players at the same time to eight. The vocal harmonies work as well here as they do in Beatles Rock Band. If you have the people to play it, they can present a pretty daunting challenge even for those with perfect pitch.
As far as game modes, Harmonix seems to have kept what they felt worked and added some extra, very much needed features. The biggest addition to the game is that it is now driven by Career Goals which work similar to the Xbox achievement system or PS3 trophies in that it is a massive list of objectives for the players to achieve that are spread throughout all the various game modes including even the download content. I found the goals to be pretty cool, extending the life of game well beyond the regular modes are exhausted. As far as regular modes, taking the place of the Tour mode from the previous games are the Road Challenges. They play out in a very similar way with your band basically rising in the ranks, getting cooler stuff like buses and jets while playing through various gigs (gigs are comprised of a setlist of songs). To throw a little variety, sometimes the challenges have different objectives like using as much overdrive as possible or getting long note streaks, not unlike the challenges in the Guitar Hero series.
Speaking of which, with this game Harmonix seems to have studied the recent Guitar Hero games and taken what has worked best. One of the biggest examples, other than the challenges, is the much needed and greatly appreciated (at least by me) revamped menu system for character and instrument selection. In previous games if you had multiple people wanting to play, you had to exit all the way out to the first menu of the game to add or remove a player or even change difficulty. Now it can all be done on the fly: adding or removing players, changing instruments, changing difficulty. It can all be done in mid-song regardless of what mode you are in. Another interesting little feature that some achievement hounds who are less than skilled at the game will appreciate is that you can now get achievements with the No Fail Mode turned on. It works great for when you have that one guy at a party who demands No Fail Mode when everyone else is wanting the multiplayer achievements.
For those of you like myself who have a boatload of download content, the sorting and filtering modes for the song list are vastly improved, giving a lot more flexibility in the way you can scroll through and select songs. Although I found myself still wanting a filter or two (like filtering out songs you've already played), it is definitely leaps and bounds beyond what was previously available. The Battle of the Bands and Custom Setlists from Harmonix in Rock Band 2 are still here with the additional ability for players to create their own Battle of the Bands challenges that they can link to on Facebook. I thought this was a pretty neat addition and had wondered why it wasn't added in RB2.
And even if you didn't care about any of the new features or modes, RB3 also comes with a whole new 83-song setlist. I can definitely tell an effort was made to pick songs that shined on keyboard. As a result, you now have stuff like Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting", Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" which all feature very prominent keyboard parts. They have also released download content after the game has come out that do not even have guitar like John Lennon's "Imagine". I find the setlist overall to be a good cross-section of music from every decade with some stuff that genuinely surprised me by their inclusion like The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1", which happens to be an awesome song I never expected to show up in Rock Band. Of course, with their still continuous release of new download content every week and with the Rock Band Network, there are a lot of songs I never thought would be in Rock Band that are now readily available.
In the past, real musicians have seemed to turn their nose down at the music genre in general with claims that they'd "rather play a REAL instrument". With the Pro Modes this game adds, their scoffs of derision have much less merit than they once did. In a nutshell, this is a freaking awesome music game. I understand that the music genre is general is starting to die down in popularity, but if you have even the slightest interest in music at all, give this game a try.
No comments:
Post a Comment