Current mood:	smug
Entry tags:	friends, games, music

Rock Band and Guitar Hero III
I feel vindicated!

I guess I never posted about how much fun I had playing Rock Band at our Anti-Superbowl party a couple of weeks ago. wrexen brought it over and a bunch of us took turns playing it all day. It was also the first time that I got to see how vocals worked, and my feelings were mixed. If you know a song well enough, the dips and raises in the pitch line are more than enough to give you the info you need to hit them correctly. If you don't know the song, you're pretty much SOL. (Although there was one point where loganb accidentally changed the song selection before I confirmed, and I was stuck singing a song I'd never heard before. I was pretty pleased with myself when I hit the first note spot on just by guessing from the instrumentation that led up to it. ;-) )

My only complaint about the game is related to the drums. I'm not a big fan of playing lead guitar on games like that because I haven't really found a comfortable way to hold the controller and I don't do especially well because I don't play all that often. The nice thing about Rock Band is that I have even more options than Guitar Hero III: I can play Bass or Drums or Vocals. Vocals were fun, since I was familiar with a lot of the songs, and it was interesting getting to finally see the lyrics for parts of songs where I just had no idea. If you can sing reasonably well and know what to expect, it's pretty easy to do the vocals even up on Hard difficulty. I was not brave enough to try Expert, which I assume was just less forgiving than Hard.

Drums were a lot more challenging for me. Both times I've played it, I felt like the drums weren't calibrated just right. I would hit the drum controller at the point where I felt like it matched the music, but the "note" would register as being missed. It was less of a problem on songs where I had to play more often and more regularly; I'm guessing that would be less of an issue on the higher difficulty levels, sort of like how it can be difficult to get Perfects on Light DDR songs. Since most of the other people played the drums without complaint, I figured it was just an issue with my hand-ear coordination or something. Now, after reading krunk4ever's post, I don't feel so crazy. :D

RE GHIII: Last night I noticed on the new Xbox Live News feature thing that this weekend they're offering a free download of "Dream On" by Aerosmith in commemoration of the upcoming release of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. (Ooooooookay.)