Tuesday 15 January, 2008

SUMMARY

Rock Band (360) is a rhythm game in the styling of Guitar Hero that supports up to four players. In addition to the "guitar" controller, there is a drum pad controller for and a microphone for a vocalist. Dots scroll down an on screen fret board and the color and position of the dots correspond to buttons on the "guitar" controller and drums on the drum pad. As each dot scrolls down to the line at the bottom of the screen, the dots/notes must be hit in rhythm.

GAMEPLAY

Before I started playing Rock Band with a friend, there was a small crowd in the dormitory lounge that had been watching the previous players who were quite good.Sitting down in front of the drum pad already felt like getting up on a stage to play. Creating a band is a fun process, and I felt an intimate connection with my on screen avatar because of the breadth of customization options. The auto band name generator was a blast as well. We spent a good five minutes browsing and laughing at the band name choices it came up with.

I wish that there were more songs on the song list that I liked, but in general, Harmonix did a good job at including songs for everyone's tastes. Medium difficulty was very challenging on the drums at first, but within an hour I was comfortable at that setting. The jump from medium to hard on drums requires some fancier bass peddle beats that were too challenging for me

It was really fun to be in perfect rhythm with the song and my friend on "guitar". The fact that people like to watch people play this game lends to the feeling of being in front of an actual audience at a concert, and it can be exhilarating.

DESIGN

Rock Band sets a tone of generalized music counter culture by using menus, fonts, sound effects, loading screen music factoids, and other elements to comfortably immerse the player into a culture they might not identify with. In addition, a deep and fun character creation system helps create the player/avatar bond.

The harder the difficulty, the faster and more complex rhythms are needed to pass the song. On drums, tricky double bass drum beats are introduced as well as tricky patterns on the drum pads that incorporate simultaneous drum hits. On the guitar controller, the 5th orange button is put into play on Hard, and it requires sufficient dexterity to slide your hand into the different positions

A good initial entry. In future entries try to ask yourself why these games are making you do the actions or feeling the way it is and ask if it makes the game better or worse from a design perspective. Try to stay away from a play by play entry of what it was like to play the game.