Showing posts with label Rock Band. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rock Band. Show all posts
Monday, May 18, 2009
Auto-pilot
When you crash your car, the airbags deploy. There are even some new Mercedes Benzes that sense the crash and roll up the windows, adjust the seat for impact, tighten the seat belts, and close the sunroof. (Imagine if your seat adjusted, your seat belt locked, and your windows rolled up when you were just driving down the road, minding your own business! That'd freak me out, for sure.) When will the same safety features be implemented into online games? Oh no, you're down by 50,000 points on Rock Band! Auto-disconnect! Punk'd! Now who wins? Yeah, it might crush your reputation, but whatever. Now if we could only find a way to keep it from decreasing your TrueSkill rank... the cheating would be complete. We might be branded and lose all our Gamerscore, but that's a risk we'd have to take to win in life. Or win in games. Or whatever's important. I don't know.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Mom's Day
It's Mother's Day... did you get her a card? Did you get her a Mother's Day version DS with Personal Trainer: Cooking? No? I hope not, that would probably just insult her. Cookbooks are bad ideas - they imply that you don't like her cooking. $150 cookbooks are very expensive bad ideas. Not to mention that the green DS Lite that you can get with the bundle is the only place you can find it, making it sure to be a collector's item someday, and also making sure that everyone knows that you got it from a son that really doesn't like your cooking. Yay for public embarrassment!
Not saying that moms don't like to play video games. I got my own mom Bejeweled Twist just this last Christmas, and I'm sure she loves it. It's true that they probably won't play the next iteration of Wolfenstein or Fallout, but there is enough room in the world for "casual gamers" that only like to play a quick game of Peggle before bed or to unwind after a long day at work. What's more, today's casual gamers could be tomorrow's hardcore gamers. Just because you're friends are excited about Lego Rock Band and you have no desire to even see it take up store shelves doesn't mean it won't give you two someething to talk about when he grows up to playing the real Rock Band. Come on, can't we all just get along? Moms, nerds, little brothers, and dogs? Yes, dogs too... don't be racist (humanist?). Just put some kibbles on your Wii-mote and let Fido go to town on it. I guarantee he'll win at least one match in Super Smash Brothers.
Not saying that moms don't like to play video games. I got my own mom Bejeweled Twist just this last Christmas, and I'm sure she loves it. It's true that they probably won't play the next iteration of Wolfenstein or Fallout, but there is enough room in the world for "casual gamers" that only like to play a quick game of Peggle before bed or to unwind after a long day at work. What's more, today's casual gamers could be tomorrow's hardcore gamers. Just because you're friends are excited about Lego Rock Band and you have no desire to even see it take up store shelves doesn't mean it won't give you two someething to talk about when he grows up to playing the real Rock Band. Come on, can't we all just get along? Moms, nerds, little brothers, and dogs? Yes, dogs too... don't be racist (humanist?). Just put some kibbles on your Wii-mote and let Fido go to town on it. I guarantee he'll win at least one match in Super Smash Brothers.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Good things come to those who wait
If you have Xbox Live Gold and you're not an automatically renewing member, sooner or later, it will expire. After that time, you will log into Xbox Live one day and it will demand of you, "Give us money or revert to (gasp!) Silver status!" Honestly, I didn't play many games online. Sure, I spent a good chunk of time climbing the Rock Band leaderboards, and there's plenty of SF IV achievements that you can only get by playing online, but it was never really a big deal to me. Growing up, I was one of those gamers that lived in his parents' basement, gobbling up the latest RPG's while effectively ignoring the fact that there was a big glorious world right outside full of girls and war, happiness and regret. Now that seemingly everyone is online, it's hard to keep myself from even not having the option. I started looking around for a new year-long Gold card in stores, because if you buy it in real life you get the 13th month free! I found it cheapest at Sam's Club - $43 for 13 months. Not too shabby, less than 4 bucks a month, even after tax.
Then today, I got an e-mail from Microsoft itself! "Come back, we miss you. Here, have a year of Gold for $40!" Sold. Now I can go back to ignoring my "friends" and playing online once every few months. At least my dashboard won't continuously remind me that I don't have Gold and am not hip enough to hang with their crew. Passive aggressive Microsoft jerks.
Then today, I got an e-mail from Microsoft itself! "Come back, we miss you. Here, have a year of Gold for $40!" Sold. Now I can go back to ignoring my "friends" and playing online once every few months. At least my dashboard won't continuously remind me that I don't have Gold and am not hip enough to hang with their crew. Passive aggressive Microsoft jerks.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Game Daze
It's time for GameStop's annual Game Days celebration, where they try to shell off a lot of overstocked games by offering up to half off selected titles. I picked up some old ones, including Namco Museum Virtual Arcade for the 360 and Final Fantasy II for the PSP for $15 and $10, respectively.
I like old games. They were simple, they never tried to do too much at once, and you didn't feel bad about setting them down for the night to get some sleep. Yet, they can still be tremendously addictive, especially if you're just a few points shy of the top of the leaderboards. When the first Rock Band came out, I got up to #6 on the Bass Score Duel leaderboards. When you're that close to the top, you make sure you don't lose. If your phone rings, you ignore it. If someone trys to get your attention, you say, "HEY I HAVE A 12X MULTIPLIER HOLD ON I'LL TALK TO YOU IN A MINUTE!" In Call of Duty, if you get shot, you still have a chance to come back and win the match. When you're plucking your fake bass strings, you can't miss. One wrong note and you can lose the song, and then you've wasted hours of work climbing the boards, 1 TrueSkill point at a time. On Rock Band, you didn't know how many hours you had wasted, or how many matches you had played. You knew your TrueSkill score, and your rank on the national leaderboards. Get suckered in, and it's hard to get free.
Everyone wants to be the best.
I like old games. They were simple, they never tried to do too much at once, and you didn't feel bad about setting them down for the night to get some sleep. Yet, they can still be tremendously addictive, especially if you're just a few points shy of the top of the leaderboards. When the first Rock Band came out, I got up to #6 on the Bass Score Duel leaderboards. When you're that close to the top, you make sure you don't lose. If your phone rings, you ignore it. If someone trys to get your attention, you say, "HEY I HAVE A 12X MULTIPLIER HOLD ON I'LL TALK TO YOU IN A MINUTE!" In Call of Duty, if you get shot, you still have a chance to come back and win the match. When you're plucking your fake bass strings, you can't miss. One wrong note and you can lose the song, and then you've wasted hours of work climbing the boards, 1 TrueSkill point at a time. On Rock Band, you didn't know how many hours you had wasted, or how many matches you had played. You knew your TrueSkill score, and your rank on the national leaderboards. Get suckered in, and it's hard to get free.
Everyone wants to be the best.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Part III - What makes music games so great?
This one's easy: music games let you party like a rock star. You invite a bunch of friends over for Guitar Hero or Rock Band and you can all be guitar legends or rock out on drums that go clack clack instead of boom boom or sing terribly off-key renditions of Alanis Morissette. Even if you are terrible at real music, set the game to easy or no-fail mode and you can feel like you are actually playing Free Bird in front of millions of screaming fans.
The games are the same basic formula as DDR - you match the notes flowing down (or up) the screen, and you rack up bigger and bigger combos as you play better. It's strange that by merely including a plastic guitar instead of a dance mat, the entire genre took off. Best Buy and Wal-Mart even have whole aisles now dedicated to the ever-increasing amount of hardware you need for these games. I don't think it was the peripherals that helped launch companies like harmonix into the stratosphere; I think it was the music.
DDR is techno music, house music, and trance music, with a few current pop hits sprinkled throughout. Guitar Hero is rock. Not only that, it's good rock. When the original Guitar Hero came out on PS2, nobody knew it would take off like it has. People would say, "Oh, another game that costs $90 because you have to get a fancy controller with it." Until they played it. The game had songs from everyone from Queen to Ozzy to Incubus to Pantera to the Stones. At first, every song on the game was a cover, but they were remarkably good covers. Harmonix really knew their stuff. Maybe their musical chops had been honed with Frequency and Amplitude, or maybe it helped that they were all musicians in real life. But they could tell the difference between a song that you'd want to listen to on the radio and a song that you'd like to play fake guitar to. When they found one that had both qualities, they would stick it in the game.
One thing not great about music games is the overlapping songs. There is 50 years of rock 'n' roll history to choose from, so why do we get a dozen songs that are the same on two games released barely month apart? I can understand band overlap - who doesn't want to be Kurt Cobain? - but making people pay almost 200 more dollars to play songs they've already played is almost criminal.
It's true: playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing real guitar, and if people actually practiced real instruments as much as they played games there would be a lot more starving artists on the streets begging for your change with their guitar. However, the drums are very similar to real life. You have a bass pedal and you use real drum sticks to play real drum songs. Move the pads a little farther away from each other and you have a real drum set. How many drummers for bands in the future will have gotten their start on Rock Band? We'll see.
Even though it's not the same as the real thing, playing fake guitar can be just as challenging as real guitar. You can't fake your notes. You can't play power chords instead of full bar chords. you can't tune to Drop D to make songs simpler. You have to hit every not that comes at you without making mistakes if you want the top score. Play Through the Fire and Flames on expert then try to tell me that it doesn't take real practice and real skill to be good at fake guitar just like real guitar.
With the invention of the Internet, face-to-face interaction in games has been, shall we say, stifled. Music games are bringing that back. Sure, you can play on the 'net with people on the other side of the world, but there's nothing like having your own Rock Band rockin' out in your living room, spilling beer all over your mom's couch. It recalls the days of the Halo LAN parties for the original Xbox, before Live had really taken off. Face time with like-minded peers has been lacking recently, not only in the game industry, but in other aspects of life as well. Its nice that, even in this troubled economy, you can still have some friends over for a good time. Thanks, music games.
The games are the same basic formula as DDR - you match the notes flowing down (or up) the screen, and you rack up bigger and bigger combos as you play better. It's strange that by merely including a plastic guitar instead of a dance mat, the entire genre took off. Best Buy and Wal-Mart even have whole aisles now dedicated to the ever-increasing amount of hardware you need for these games. I don't think it was the peripherals that helped launch companies like harmonix into the stratosphere; I think it was the music.
DDR is techno music, house music, and trance music, with a few current pop hits sprinkled throughout. Guitar Hero is rock. Not only that, it's good rock. When the original Guitar Hero came out on PS2, nobody knew it would take off like it has. People would say, "Oh, another game that costs $90 because you have to get a fancy controller with it." Until they played it. The game had songs from everyone from Queen to Ozzy to Incubus to Pantera to the Stones. At first, every song on the game was a cover, but they were remarkably good covers. Harmonix really knew their stuff. Maybe their musical chops had been honed with Frequency and Amplitude, or maybe it helped that they were all musicians in real life. But they could tell the difference between a song that you'd want to listen to on the radio and a song that you'd like to play fake guitar to. When they found one that had both qualities, they would stick it in the game.
One thing not great about music games is the overlapping songs. There is 50 years of rock 'n' roll history to choose from, so why do we get a dozen songs that are the same on two games released barely month apart? I can understand band overlap - who doesn't want to be Kurt Cobain? - but making people pay almost 200 more dollars to play songs they've already played is almost criminal.
It's true: playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing real guitar, and if people actually practiced real instruments as much as they played games there would be a lot more starving artists on the streets begging for your change with their guitar. However, the drums are very similar to real life. You have a bass pedal and you use real drum sticks to play real drum songs. Move the pads a little farther away from each other and you have a real drum set. How many drummers for bands in the future will have gotten their start on Rock Band? We'll see.
Even though it's not the same as the real thing, playing fake guitar can be just as challenging as real guitar. You can't fake your notes. You can't play power chords instead of full bar chords. you can't tune to Drop D to make songs simpler. You have to hit every not that comes at you without making mistakes if you want the top score. Play Through the Fire and Flames on expert then try to tell me that it doesn't take real practice and real skill to be good at fake guitar just like real guitar.
With the invention of the Internet, face-to-face interaction in games has been, shall we say, stifled. Music games are bringing that back. Sure, you can play on the 'net with people on the other side of the world, but there's nothing like having your own Rock Band rockin' out in your living room, spilling beer all over your mom's couch. It recalls the days of the Halo LAN parties for the original Xbox, before Live had really taken off. Face time with like-minded peers has been lacking recently, not only in the game industry, but in other aspects of life as well. Its nice that, even in this troubled economy, you can still have some friends over for a good time. Thanks, music games.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Rock Band Vs. Guitar Hero World Tour
Rock Band is better. Simple as that. The games are basically the same: notes scroll down the screen and you fake play them on fake plastic instruments, or you sing pitches without embellishment. Even many of the songs are the same (this is unacceptable). But Rock Band, also known as the iTunes of music games, is clean and elegant. Guitar Hero's presentation hasn't changed since 2005, when the series debuted on the PS2. That's really not that long ago, but when you bring out pseudo-sequel after pseudo-sequel, once-innovative ideas get stale fast. Now, playing World Tour is like seeing a Motley Crue concert in 2008... you just want to say, "You're too old! Go home!" Before music games, presentation in games was more of a scondary, back-burner, we-still-have-a-few-weeks-before-ship-date-and-we-still-have-$3,000,000-left kind of priority. Now, it's the only thing separating Activision's and Harmonix's babies. The difference: Harmonix is full of musicians. Activision is full of businessmen. Who do you think will make a better music game?
Still, Guitar Hero does have a 3D drum set that feels more authentic, and the create-a-song aspect lets aspiring fake musicians create and share unlimited free songs (at least for now, until Activision starts selling subscriptions to GHTunes...). But when you consider that all the drum sets are interchangeable between games now, and the fact that basically any given downloadable song that you have to pay for will be better than a free one, the choice is still clear. Rock Band rocks. Guitar Hero, once the master, is no longer the only music game on the block. Time to bring something new to the table, Madden.
Still, Guitar Hero does have a 3D drum set that feels more authentic, and the create-a-song aspect lets aspiring fake musicians create and share unlimited free songs (at least for now, until Activision starts selling subscriptions to GHTunes...). But when you consider that all the drum sets are interchangeable between games now, and the fact that basically any given downloadable song that you have to pay for will be better than a free one, the choice is still clear. Rock Band rocks. Guitar Hero, once the master, is no longer the only music game on the block. Time to bring something new to the table, Madden.
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