02/17/08 by Garvar at 8:33pm ESTIt's a shame I wasn't able to get this new comic out until now - I was planning to have it for Friday so that tonight I could close up this sort of two-parter comic, alas, strange happenings.
On the plus side, I finally got to try out Rock Band at my brother's place on Friday. A quick recap of my opinion on it: The element of variety between Guitar, Drums, and Vocals is a really nice element absent from Rock Band's arguable parent, Guitar Hero. Many gameplay elements and UI additions improved gameplay, such as tapping, freestyling, and formally identifying guitar solos and performance appraisals on said Guitar Solos.
The downsides to it are that the pill-shaped hit markers don't work as well as Guitar Hero's circular button-shaped hit markers, and the hammer-on/pull-off indicators are harder to identify as a result. But that's tolerable and would easily come naturally with a bit of getting used to.
My biggest beef with Rock Band is the abysmal track list. It's quite expansive and offers what people who aren't very musically-inclined would call "excellent variety", but the 78 tracks I had access to on Rock Band proved to be even shittier than Guitar Hero 3's track list. Both GH3 and Rock Band have their own fair share of real winners, but the number evident in Rock Band doesn't even approach the double-digit marker. I was delighted to find something in there by Faith No More, and they picked a good Iron Maiden song, but the abundance of Black Sabbath tracks (read: four) could have been better selected, and if you're going to do Metallica, do pre-sellout Metallica please. You know, back when Metallica sounded like Metallica. That shit was awesome. I did enjoy St. Anger but it certainly wasn't Metallica.
Putting the pathetically small selection of familiar tracks aside, I recall more than half of the songs creating this atmosphere of "I'm playing a videogame" rather than the intended "I'm performing a song in my imaginary virtual band" which is something of an appealing concept. If I was going to name my game "Rock Band", I probably would've put more effort into creating the feeling of rocking and not pop-rocking a la so-called "alternative" music.
Excellent idea, executed rather poorly.
But again, the game is called "Rock Band" - I wouldn't expect it to focus on metal. It should be filled with pop-rock to appeal to the generic tastes of the masses, which extend far beyond the demograph of people who take music seriously.
Guitar Hero, on the other hand - what the fuck is your excuse? Now, GH has quite a bit more metal in it than Rock Band does, but I don't think the Metal to Total Songs ratio even approaches 20%. Metal is all about the riffs. It's about making the guitar kick ass. It's a shame Guitar Hero went the way of mainstream music and abandoned this principle in favour of the pop-incentive "music for the money".
It's a good thing for free-distribution PC ports and PS2>USB adapters, though I haven't taken a look at Frets on Fire in ages. Back in the day, their songs had no standards and the community was an indifferentiated mix of people who knew what the fuck they were doing, and people who did not.
It's nice to know that some people have standards and a system that allow you to filter out shitty work.