Rock Band: A Pre-review.

When Guitar Hero III came out, we thought we had a choice to make: GH III or RockBand? GH coming out sooner pretty much sealed it for us (though if I had the choice to make again, I would have skipped GH III).

Saturday, Ymiris & I were out looking for christmas games for our friends when we came across a demo for Rock Band. They had a guitar, a set of “drums”, and a microphone, and it was set up right next to a demo for GHIII. Side-by-side, you can tell they come from the same minds. The graphics are incredibly similar, so much that I would almost call it a Guitar Hero 4. The tabs are a little changed, and the graphics look revamped (almost for the worse), but it’s easy enough to understand if you’ve ever seen GH.

After watching the graphics for a few minutes, we decided to try our hand at it. That’s right, it’s Couple Gaming Band.. with Ymiris on Guitar, and Ophilye on the Drums (I wasn’t about to take up the microphone in the middle of Best Buy) , performing EPIC.. as made famous by Faith No More.

Ymiris picked Medium and picked it up with ease. The guitar from the front looks a little less game-ish; the colors are listed along the side, and the buttons are the entire length of the guitar neck, instead of just buttons sitting on top of it. Ymiris reported immediately that they took a few minutes to get used to, and it wasn’t entirely a pleasurable experience, unlike the new wireless GHIII guitar. But, it wasn’t as sticky as the GHII guitar either.. so I suppose that is a good thing.

I picked Easy for the drums, and quickly realized that the yellow drum was broken, so I could only hit the other 3 notes. I also realized that there was no foot pedal.. but I still did pretty well without those 2 things. It came a lot more naturally than you would think, as I have never played the drums in my life; however, it was also a lot more difficult to keep the beat, at least in that song. There were drum beats where I couldn’t hear any, and it was missing things I thought would be there (it turned out being the base). However, the hardware was incredibly easy to get used to, and spaced apart fairly well.

Instead of just strictly Star Power to boost your collective score, you used something similar to help out your friends when they were sucking it up *cough*ymiris*cough*. The vocals & the drums have no control over when they use their power, but the base & guitar do. (I mean really, what are you going to do, shake the drums up & down to use the power? hehehe.. that would be awesome..)

Lastly.. we must bring up the songs. Now, I personally loved the GH1 songlist, was OK with the GH2 songlist, and despise the GH3 songlist. Don’t get me wrong, Barracuda is good, but when there are only 3 songs you like, they get annoying very quickly. Rock Bands songlist is Much more impressive. NIN, Garbage, the Clash, Soundgarden, Jet? These are bands I WANT to be! And they already have out 10 downloadable packs! granted $.99 – $1.99 per song is an obnoxious price to pay, (C’mon Microsoft. Just because I’ll pay it to have it on my Zune does NOT mean it’s acceptible for a stupid GAME that can’t go ANYWHERE with me!) but at least you’re not paying that amount for songs that already came in another game *cough*GH1*cough*. To get a full list of songs, view Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_son… )

So, as for the answer of GHIII or RB… well.. on our way out of Best Buy, Ymiris & I began discussing things. We’re pretty sure Santa could bring it to us this year, as Ymiris has been an absolute saint. Which, we continued discussing, is good, cuz I’ve been an absolute bitch. Luckily, I have some dirt on Mrs. Clause, so I’m expecting my Acura RDX to be in the driveway by 4 am.

I’m off for now. I need to go brush up on my singing…

“Wait.. they don’t love you like I love you.. maaaaaaaaahaaaahaaahhaaaaaps Wait.. They don’t love you like I love you!”