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Friday 8 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
Me and my 3 other roommates created a band and have been playing for the past couple of days. I’ve stuck mostly with the guitar because I’m used to it but I have branched out. The drums have 4 colored pads and a bass pedal. Compared to the other instruments in the game the drums definitely that the most skill, coordination, and rhythm. Unfortunately I have no rhythm so when I was trying to hit the pads and the bass pedal at the designated times I would only be able to hit one or the other. One of my friends who used to actually played drums was considerably better and was playing expert songs by the end of the night.
The microphone is also pretty cool. Similar to karaoke games, the microphone measures the pitch of your voice, which is shown as a horizontal bar at the top of the screen. The lyrics of the songs are scrolled past and you have to match the pitch of the song, and a small arrow show how much higher or lower you are compared to the desired pitch. Singing was fun for songs you know the lyrics to but a little more of a challenge for ones you’ve never heard before. On easier modes you can pass by just humming the right tune when you don’t know the lyrics.
DESIGN:
The game while basically the same as Guitar Hero, offers some cool features that make it unique and still fun to play. Rock Band has “Overdrive” the equivalent to Guitar Hero’s “Star Power”, which is a meter that fills up when you successfully hit special notes. Once the meter fills up you can tilt the guitar up to, or in the drums case do a small solo and hit a final note correctly to unleash the overdrive and get a score booster for a limited amount of time. And for the microphone you just have you make noise when the vocal bar turns yellow. And if everyone saves up there overdrive you can release it all at once to get a huge score multiplier.
Another cool aspect were the stars you collect throughout the game. In each location around the globe there are 3-4 venues where you can play your songs and depending on how well you play you earn a certain amount of stars. When you get enough stars you unlock new locations around the globe and various things you need for a tour like roadies and a private jet. It is a cool feature that makes you want to keep doing better so you can get cooler and cooler things. Rock Band is a game that has a lot of replay value with the large amount of songs and downloadable content in the future. It’s a great social game and always more fun when playing with other people.
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