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Wednesday 5 March, 2008
Gameplay 2:
The social aspect of this game is what makes it so fun to play. 4 people can play together, independent yet connected, and they interact in the gameworld. When you have 4 competent players, you can talk to each other, coordinate when to activate "overdrive", or just sing along during the choruses. With the ability to create a character that looks like you, dress it however you want, and make it look a little ridiculous. You also get to save money from your band's performances to buy instruments. Then when you're playing a gig together, you can all have color coordinated outfits, matching leprechaun tattoos, or the same hairstyle. This is a great game for parties because everyone wants to play when they see someone playing, and you can rotate pretty easily, allowing a lot of people to enjoy a Rock Band experience.
Rock Band uses the ability of next generation systems to access the internet by allowing players to download new tracks every tuesday. The set list is ever expanding, making it a longer game, giving people more songs to beat more regularly, and allowing the players to submit requests on the Rock Band website. This type of interaction with a game wouldn't have been possible as little as 5 years ago. It certainly seems like a great model for future games of this type.
Design:
The game mode "Band World Tour" is exactly that. It allows you to take your band, which contains 2 to 4 human players, to about 15-20 different cities to play different sets, earn fans, and make money. There are so many sets to play that you could be playing this game for a very very long time. While you can beat the game and see the credits roll after a good amount of playing (100-200 songs), you can keep going and going, eventually reaching a set called the "Endless Setlist", which contains every song that was originally on the game. This is a great design idea, as it lets you keep playing for a ridiculously long time.
The most aggravating thing about Rock Band is the hammer-on system. When there is a string of notes that is very close together, you can hammer-on to them without strumming. However, it is extremely sensitive and difficult to do in Rock Band. You end up missing a large number of notes you shouldn't necessarily have missed. If I were to remake this game, I would improve the hammer-ons because they should at least be consistent with the hammer-ons in Guitar Hero 3, which has made it extremely easy to hammer-on. This design aspect makes the easy songs incredibly easy, but the hard songs ridiculously hard because you can't get through the long hammer-on sections.
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