A ton of new details on Harmonix's Rock Band have swaggered onto the internet, revealing the likes of four-player online play on both PS3 and Xbox 360 and that the game's drums are insane. Apparently.
Information has come from a feature on Rock Band appearing in Game Informer magazine, which a poster on NeoGaf has waded through and picked out the juicy bits.
According what's been posted, the game will have four unique campaigns for guitar, drums, bass and vocals in addition to a "full band game" that it's explained "is designed to allow for one huge co-op playthrough" which can occur online for offline - or apparently a combination of both.
Helping you locate fellow musicians to form a band will be a community system that reaches worldwide.
In terms of instruments, it's said that guitar and bass have ten frets - "five for the regular sections of the game and five for the newly designated solo sections - the guitar features a five-way switch letting you apply five different sound effects and the "Whammy bar is back as is the tilt to activate rock band's version of star power".
Singing is described as more in-depth, with a phoneme detector picking up "individual vowels and consonants you say. Build up enough highly judged phrases and you'll be able to sing free-form. If you do well enough in free-form, then you'll trigger the vocalist's version of star power."
Stopping singers nodding off during lengthy guitar solos, Rock Band's microphone doubles as a tambourine on many tracks - so warblers can still feel involved. And the drums? Well, they're apparently insane (or did we mention that already?).
"You use actual sticks and hit one of four coloured pads in front of you, in addition to a kick pedal attached to the drumming unit. Drummers will also have the ability to do fills etc. in their own little free-form section, do well and you'll trigger the drummers version of star power", the post explains.
It also mentions four songs: Weezer - Say It Ain't So - Original Master Track; Black Sabbath - Paranoid - Original Master Track; The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again - Original Master Track; and Nirvana - In Bloom - Original Master Track.
I can happily say this game looks the dogs b******s (a good thing by the way), And baggsy the ten fret guitar-I hope gh3 has the same inovation.
Problems, finding people that are as talanted as you are- I can play gh on expert (freebird 5star!), but my mates cant play singstar, find bass too boring- and are s**t at rythm games. Also, You need room in your house to play- and no neibors to complain. Only then will it be a winner.....
Obviously a difference in opinion, however I happen to find Heart Shaped Box extremely boring to play on expert. In fact, it was boring on the other difficulties as well. Favourite tracks on Guitar Hero 2 include Hangar 18, Jessica, Jordan, Psychobilly Freakout, Misirlou, Thunderhorse and Gemini. They're awesome.
sounds ok for guitars, but the drums only having 4 pads doesn't sound that great as it doesn't give much scope, Some metal/Rock kits can be as much as a ten piece not including cymbals/hihat my kit is a 5 piece plus hi-hat 2 crashes and a ride, the Rock band kit would most likely be kickdrum (pedal), snare(1pad) tom(2pad) hihat(3pad) crash/ride cymbal (4 pad), where's the scope in that no floor/ mounted tom, no other toms for rolls or fills no other Cymbals to give different crash ride sounds. how are you gonna be able to play the likes of Maiden or Metallica if they have those bands with that setup that's if the info is true of course.
I love the concept of this, but am not convinced that it will work too well in a 4 player situation. I see it like this. If you mess up a note in Guitar Hero, or play it either slightly early or late, it doesn't matter, cos the rest of the music will always stay in time, so you can easily find your rhythm again. But if you got 4 people who aren't spot on 100% of the time (which let's face it, happens to all of us), it'd be really difficult to keep a song going, as there'd be a lot of timing problems. Lol, did any of that make sense?
I love the concept of this, but am not convinced that it will work too well in a 4 player situation. I see it like this. If you mess up a note in Guitar Hero, or play it either slightly early or late, it doesn't matter, cos the rest of the music will always stay in time, so you can easily find your rhythm again. But if you got 4 people who aren't spot on 100% of the time (which let's face it, happens to all of us), it'd be really difficult to keep a song going, as there'd be a lot of timing problems. Lol, did any of that make sense?
it made perfect sense, but i guess it's no different than being in a real band which Harmonix are trying to create a feeling of with Rock band, i'm just wondering how they are going to get this all to work online, lagg is not something you want in this type of game where timing etc is important and lets face it the net isn't exactly lagg free especially if you conecting worldwide as they plan to do.
also the issue of people quiting during a game what happens then it's ok with other types of games such a FPS's as it makes no difference that mauch but a Band is somthing different will the CPU kick in automatacally to fill in for the one that quit and would it be quick enough as to not mess up timing etc.
Yeah, exactly, Terranova1. Lag would play a big factor in the online experience. I mean, I'm sure a company like Harmonix must have taken that kinda thing into consideration, but I'm not sure how they'll get around it. The problem with trying to recreate the feeling of being in an actual band is that a large number of the people playing it, won't be actual musicians. And while that's fine for a 1 or 2 player game, 4 might make it a bit all over the place. Speaking as a musician who is in a band, it takes a LOT of rehearsing to become tight. It's not something you can just step right into. I'll be keeping a close eye on this, and hoping that they can make a good, solid game, and keep the fun factor in place.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
