Rock Band

After an epic delay, Rock Band finally made its way to Australia this month, just as the rest of the world was getting to grips with the sequel.

It's more or less worth the wait.

Straight up front: I am a huge Guitar Hero fan. Rock Band is better than any of the Guitar Hero games up to and including number 3, easily. It's made by Harmonix, the people behind the first and second Guitar Hero games, and these are people who love their music and let it show. There is an authencity and rawness about Rock Band that steals the stage from beginning to end.

If you don't understand the concept of Rock Band after over a year of inter-buzz then you're a very strange and isolated individual, but in short it is this: a song is played, and you attempt to execute a faux performance of it on one of a variety of fake instruments. You have the choice of lead or bass guitar, drums, or vocals.

Guitar plays more or less like Guitar Hero. Notes flow down the screen, and as they cross a timing bar at the bottom you have to hold the relevant fret(s) on your instrument and strum. The notemaps are logical translations of the song and are better layouts on the whole than the ones in Guitar Hero, but in every other respect the guitar portion is inferior. For a start, hammer-ons and pull-offs are depicted with ever-so-slightly-smaller note gems, which are quite hard to spot unless you're an experienced player who knows when to look for them. Also, the included guitar peripheral has frets which pinch your fingers and (at least in mine) it seems to have some trouble detecting when you're tilting it upwards to activate star power.

Rock Band also adds a few gameplay elements to the Guitar Hero foundation. It introduces soloes. During a solo, the on-screen fretboard glows blue. If you're using a Rock Band guitar, you can move down to a second, lower set of frets on the peripheral and pick out the notes without having to strum. This is confusing and tricky for new players and a completely unnecessary addition to experienced air-guitarists. Also, the moulding on the peripheral makes the hand slide quite tricky and sharp edges on the fretboards can result in unintended minor injuries. The Rock Band guitar also has an "effect switch" to modify the audio playback in-game - you can add wah-wah, for example. There's no gameplay bonus; it's just cool. Rock Band on the XBox 360 is fully compatible with Guitar Hero guitars, and is in fact better if you're using one.

Vocals are pretty comparable to Sony's SingStar franchise. The game displays lyrics and a pitch track - you sing the vocals and try and match pitch. An on-screen indicator shows you where your pitch is compared to where it needs to be. You can "wrap" up an octave or down an octave if you don't share the same vocal range as the real singer. Star power is deployed by shouting or freestyling during gaps in the lyrics; during long lyric-less stretches of music the singer is encouraged to lead the audience in clapping by tapping on the microphone. There's no gameplay penalty for ignoring this clapping section which means if you want to sing and play an instrument at the same time you theoretically can. (You'll need to know the lyrics in advance, though, as following the vocal track and an instrument track at the same time on-screen really isn't possible.)

The highlight of Rock Band is the drumming, which replicates the experience of Konami's DrumMania arcade games. You get a set of four drum pads on a stand, with an attached footpedal, and a pair of authentic drumsticks. You're more or less performing real drumming here, which is excellent. The pads are well made and seem to withstand some pretty vigorous drumming, even from those prone to really bash the suckers. The footpedal is a bit more flimsy - a lot of people have reported breaking theirs, although I haven't had any problem yet.

The game really works best when you've got at least three people playing, with one of those people doing the vocals. Playing as a band is a great co-operative experience and generates real energy for everyone present. The solo tours for each instrument are a bit lifeless by comparison.

The two biggest disappointments in Rock Band are the set list and the progression system. A music game lives or dies by its selection of music, and Rock Band's collection is only so-so. There's a lot of genuinely excellent bands featured, but the songs for each band are rarely what most people would consider their first, second or even third pick. While OK Go's Here It Goes Again and Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl are solid choices, it's hard to understand the reasoning behind Orange Crush as the sole song from REM or Rock & Roll Star as the offering from Oasis. David Bowie gets Suffragette City, of all things, and the Rolling Stones apparently have nothing better in their catalogue than Gimme Shelter. Even Harmonix-favourite Freezepop have gone rooting through their B-list to provide the less-than-awesome Brainpower.

These problems are remedied to some extent by the massive amount of downloadable content available for the game, but even here the weirdness continues. The Killers trackpack overlooks Somebody Told Me and All These Things That I've Done in order to supply Mr Brightside, Spaceman and Smile Like You Mean It. There's an entire album by The Pixies, for some reason, but it's not the one that has Where Is My Mind? The Presidents of the USA get three songs but nothing off their first album. Out of eight Nirvana tracks they couldn't manage to give us Smells Like Teen Spirit, and despite seven Nine Inch Nails songs we're denied Closer.

The other major problem with Rock Band is it feels a lot less like a game than Guitar Hero. With four instruments and a massive number of songs, attempting to "play through" the game feels like floundering in a bottomless ocean. The solo tours involve slogging through the built-in songs, sorted by difficulty, with no real rewards or incentives.

The multiplayer "World Tour" mode at face value has more structure, with content locked off until you've acquired enough "stars" or "fans", but for some reason most of this mode is focused on making you play multiple songs back to back. Less demanding tasks ask you to play two or three songs in a row. Later you'll have to play six or eight songs without interruption, where failing one song drops you out of the challenge completely. World Tour mode culminates in the ridiculous "Endless Setlist" where you'll have to play all 50-something songs included in the game non-stop, without the ability to save your progress until you're done. That takes about seven hours.

There are some other things you should take note of if you're planning to buy Rock Band. There are two "real" versions, being the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 iterations. All the other versions are gimped in some essential way, starting with the inability to download extra tracks and moving on from there. Don't buy the fake versions as I do not have any nice things to say about them.

Also, there's quite a complicated treatment of gamer profiles. When you create an in-game avatar, it's bound not only to the profile that created it, but also to the instrument you were on when you made it. So you'll need to create separate characters for guitar, drums and vocals, and you'll need to be signed in on the instrument you intend to play to use them. Shuffling musicians around mid-session requires either a bunch of signing out and signing in, or people abandoning their avatars to another player and playing under someone else's name.

Also when you create a band, the person who created that band needs to be signed in on the same profile and instrument as when they created it in order for that band to be played at all. So if you created the band as a drummer, you'll always have to have a drummer when you're playing that band. It's a system which is frankly odd, and hugely frustrating to the process of organising local multiplayer. My experience is with the XBox 360 version so I'm not sure to what extent this problem might persist on the PS3.

Okay, so that's a long list of gripes, so I should probably say again: the Guitar Hero games are excellent, excellent games, and Rock Band is better. If you're not initially convinced, all you need to do is hear the crowd sing along during a particularly excellent performance of a song's chorus, or freestyle your first drum fill. This is an excellent game, and everyone should own it. Maybe own it twice. That's how good it is.

Currently Playing

Got a bunch of games in my queue right now, none of which I'm particularly near finishing, so I thought I'd do an "in-progress" kind of post.

Left 4 Dead (XBox 360): Awesome. Just... awesome. It makes my jaw drop roughly once a minute and I'm starting to get muscle fatigue around my mouth as a result. Some observations though: as you start to learn the levels the game becomes about speed-running, and I'm not yet sure whether that's an evolutionary step in the gameplay or the point at which ennui sets in. Also it's obviously focused solely on multi-player, and I can't say I've ever gotten more than ten hours out of a multi-player first person shooter before. This may be a first, I guess.

Rock Band (XBox 360): Finally out in Australia. Drumming is excellent and the handling of the vocals is several iterations better than the horrible Singstar franchise. Guitar is a bit lame though, due to an unappealing on-screen interface, a peripheral that pinches my fingers, and punishingly short timing windows. Playing with four friends is great, but the game feels poorly structured as far as progress and incentives are concerned. Luckily it's fun just playing, incentives or no incentives. Also it's clear the developers loved what they were making, which is something it shares with Harmonix's previous efforts Guitar Hero 1 and 2. Neversoft-developed GH3 didn't have that and it's that faceless-corporation direction the Guitar Hero franchise is going in that's really turning me off that brand.

Fable 2 (XBox 360): Not a fan. I can't get attached to the main character, who wanders mutely around the countryside expressing himself solely with corny poses while every NPC has rather excellent voice acting. I can't get attached to the NPCs, who will watch you kill their entire family in horror but then offer you gifts once you dance a saucy jig for a few minutes. The customisation system is shallow, and you end up picking clothes based on their stats rather than what they say about your character. The much-vaunted moral choices are poorly handled, especially compared to something like Mass Effect, and often boil down to "do what you're told, or be a petty jerk". Despite a lot of really well-implemented features, the whole package feels deeply artificial and I have serious doubts I can be bothered playing to the end.

Final Fantasy III (DS): I started this six months ago, I'm about three quarters of the way through and I can't bring myself to pick it up again. The graphical updates are nice, but the "job system" has been poorly grafted onto the original game, giving you little real incentive to play with the different jobs and in fact actively punishing you for changing class. The late game suddenly opens up the map but offers poor direction about where to go next and again can punish you for exploring with the sudden introduction of crushingly difficult encounters. The combat is painfully dull and considering that's most of the gameplay that dullness is a real problem. Despite my gripes it's still a great remake, especially considering the age of its roots, but not a real contender compared to some of the excellent modern RPGs on the market.

Age of Booty (XBox Live Arcade): Yar, me hearties! Age of Booty is real-time strategy dumbed down to its lowest level, where you control one ship and attempt to capture enemy ports with or without allies. It's effectively one-button control, ideal for casual players. It should be awful but it's a heap of fun and pretty much exactly right for the low, low asking price. Local multiplayer for up to four players, or you can take it online to battle the intertubes.

Overlord (XBox 360): Played the first level of this, loved it, borrowed it from a friend, and now it's just waiting until I'm done with Fable 2 or something so I can give it the time it deserves.

Travian (PC / Browser): Actually I've been playing this for a few months. A very hardcore real-time wargame that advertises itself as a casual-friendly city builder. One campaign lasts roughly a year of real-time. An excellent game providing you know what to expect; a very frustrating game for those looking for a casual experience who get eliminated by the cutthroat tactics of the real players. I'm loving it.

Rock Band DLC

I'm a little confused. Rock Band is still not out in Australia, and there's no way to play copies of Rock Band on unmodded Aussie 360s, even if you import.

And yet, XBox Live Australia is advertising Rock Band downloadable songs on the Marketplace blade, specifically Maximo Park and the MTV2 Pack. Clicking the ad results in a "content not available" message.

Sounds like somebody's advertising dollars are not being well spent.

Rock Band Dated For Europe

Rock Band is finally making its way to Europe, with an XBox 360 version coming out May 23 complete with bonus tracks that include Blur, Oasis, Muse and Die Toten Hosen.

There's no word on whether this is one of those "Europe includes Australia" kind of deals, or whether Down Under is still in rock-related limbo. If we've been shafted again I think some UK importing action is going to be the go.

Full story via Gamespot.

Assorted Stuff

Yes, it's time for assorted stuff. Everyone likes stuff, right?

* In case you've missed it in the last two weeks, for all you Dynasty Warriors fans who aren't already over the moon about Dynasty Warriors Gundam, there's also word of Warriors Orochi, which is basically just a new Dynasty Warriors game featuring the entire cast of the Dynasty Warriors franchise plus the crew from Samurai Warriors, united at last. Plus if you read this article in the right way you can interpret it as meaning there'll be three-player co-op. Awesome.

* My favourite developer that nobody loves, Quantic Dream, are not only following up their fantastic PS2 title Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) with a PS3 release called Heavy Rain (old news), but they're also for some reason doing a PS3-exclusive sequel to their unanimously reviled Dreamcast relic Omikron: The Nomad Soul. That's great; while they're at it maybe they can get the rights to Phantasmagoria off Sierra and release a few more redundant iterations of that franchise too.

* I'm working my way through F.E.A.R (again at least a good year behind the hype), and I absolutely can't believe how you can pour as much raw talent and technical genius into a game as has obviously made its way into F.E.A.R. and still produce such a charmless and unmemorable end product. I'd be writing it off completely, if only it weren't so darned fun unloading my shotgun into those Replicas. The completely-tacked-on attempts at scariness just make me wish I had a new Silent Hill game to play.

* And in case you weren't excited about Rock Band yet, here's another big helping of huzzah.

Guitar Hero 2 Post-Mortem

Guitar Hero 2 is a lot of fun, and features some excellent design aspects, but the extreme difficulty and song selection may exclude some new players.

Guitar Hero 2 largely follows the same format as the original game. In fact, if you've played the first you'll be able to jump right in and barely notice the changes. Coloured notes move down the screen towards you, in time with a musical track, and you have to hold the matching fret buttons on a novelty guitar controller and strum at the appropriate time. There's a whammy bar to make those long notes interesting, and you can tilt the guitar upright to deploy "star power" and start the audience cheering and clapping along.

If you've bought both this game and the original, you'll end up with two guitars, so it's a good thing that Guitar Hero 2 includes some new multiplayer modes. "Face Off" makes a return from the original game, which sees each song divided up between the two players, with Player 1 taking a riff, then Player 2, and so forth, with both players joining in on the chorus and ending. There's also "Pro Face Off", which lets both players play the entire song at the same time.

The most interesting new mode, though, is "Co-operative". Here, one player plays the song's lead guitar track in its entirety, while the other player takes the rhythmn or bass track (depending on the song). Players share a single score, star power meter, and rock meter. The effectiveness of this mode really varies from song to song - Killing In The Name Of and John The Fisherman, for example, have killer basslines, where you can really tell if your bass player screws up. On some others, though, the lead guitarist may as well be playing alone, as you can barely hear the other player's efforts. When it works, though, it's a lot of fun.

The sound balance as a whole throughout the game is fairly sub-par. The lead guitar is nice and loud, but the vocals are often barely audible, the rythmn and bass lines vary in quality, and the crowd cheers and special effects are often loud enough to drown out the drum track and leave you struggling to find the beat. You can mess with the audio settings to some extent, but you can't isolate the guitar tracks individually or separate the vocals from the rest of the band, so it's hard to get a satsifactory result.

The track listing isn't quite as great as the first time around either. Guitar Hero 2 has an unremitting focus on metal and hard rock. Despite the inclusion of songs like Rock This City and Heart Shaped Box, the sequel just doesn't have the same generation-spanning appeal as the original game. Metal fans will likely love it, but those who enjoyed the first game for tracks like More Than A Feeling or Killer Queen might feel a little left out.

It also doesn't help that most of the songs are covers, and some of those covers are outright appalling. Killing In The Name Of, You Really Got Me and Misirlou are all particularly nasty, bearing little if any resemblance to the versions you know and love. On the other hand, Primus apparently provided the gold masters of John The Fisherman, so you can hear that one in whatever original glory it can be said to possess.

The bonus songs are great, though. Guitar Hero 2 follows the tradition of its predecessor by including a bunch of indie and lesser known artists as optional extras, including some fantastic tracks like Buckethead's Jordan. Plus you can play Thunderhorse by Dethklok from the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse, and the extended version of Homestar Runner's Trogdor.

Probably the most controversial aspect of Guitar Hero 2 is the difficulty. It should be said straight up that Guitar Hero 2 has one of the best tutorial schemes ever used in a game. It's short and to the point. I've seen maybe a half dozen people use it now, and it does a fantastic job of not only teaching you the basics but also building your confidence and inducting you into the atmosphere of the game. The tutorials are followed up by supplementary tips on loading screens prompting players to try out techniques they may not have attempted before, or explaining the game mechanics in more depths.

All that teaching will go to good use, because Guitar Hero 2 is vastly more difficult than its predecessor. Easy mode is still fairly easy, and works fine as a "party" difficulty. Medium, though, is more akin to the original game's Hard mode, and Hard is exponentially harder again, throwing five frets, three-note chords, and long complicated rhythm passages at you until you want to cry. It's likely that a lot of players will just hit a brick wall at the end of Medium and not be able to progress further, which is more than a little disappointing.

For all the difficulty, when you do manage to make the skill jumps necessary to conquer previously impossible songs, it's incredibly satisfying. The game doesn't need to reward you - the mere consciousness of the insane fingering you just pulled off is deeply motivating. Very few games have ever motivated me as much to keep improving merely for the sense of mastering the skills.

There's a practice mode this time around, that lets you slow down songs to learn the fingering, or play (for example) just the chorus, or just the solo. I haven't actually found it very useful - I prefer to just keep repeating the song - but I'm sure some people will get a lot out of it.

Guitar Hero 2 still holds up well as a party game. The difficulty and song selection mean it's less suitable for non-gamers than the original, but on the other hand the wider variety of multiplayer modes compensate.

Thanks to Sim for coming down from Sydney for a marathon two-day Guitar Hero session. It turns out she's a fiend on a bass guitar and I wouldn't have been able to unlock all the extra bass guitars without her.

Guitar Hero II - First Impressions

Guitar Hero II came out in Australia today, and I have my copy. It comes complete with new guitar, which I have obligingly adorned with a zombie teddybear sticker from one of the large selection of decals provided with the game.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that it's hard. In the original game, I could beat No One Knows on Expert, and have a pretty good stab at Bark at the Moon on Hard. In Guitar Hero II I'm being severely challenged by the game's third song (Surrender) on the default difficulty. It's insane.

Also, the cover artists blow. A bunch of songs that should be instant classics are butchered by some horrible cover vocals. I think the developers realised this, too, because the default audio settings have the vocals turned way down so you can hardly hear them. That's not too big a fault, because after all, the guitar's the star here, but if you're a fan of tracks like You Really Got Me or Who Was In My Room Last Night then you'll be ready to use your shiny new guitar to bludgeon someone to death.

That aside, it's great. Moments after firing up a rendition of Mother you'll be strutting around and jamming the whammy bar like there's no tomorrow. It's really a blast.

I haven't had a chance to try the multiplayer yet, but having bought both games I now have two guitars, so some axe-grinding showdowns are in store for the future.

Also, in case you haven't been exposed to the interblog for the last month and have thus been coccooned from news like some kind of contagious leper-baby, the game features both Deathklok and Trogdor.

Because the Trogdor comes in the NI-IGHT!