First, the link. Halloween is only months away, so if you have a 5-6 year old, consider these costumes when your child is trying to talk you into letting them be a firefighter or a princess AGAIN.
("Trick or treat" sounds a LITTLE like "exterminate", doesn't it?)
Also, I've been playing some Rock Band online multiplayer. When you can 95%+ songs as a singer on Expert, I've found that's pretty much like being a healer in an MMO. There's no chat (come on, PS3, even Mario Kart Wii lets me choose phrases from a rotating menu so that we can have some sort of rudimentary communication system) so it's hard to tell, but I do get a fair amount of friend adds after playing as a singer.
There are some fairly well-established proto-communication techniques at work in PS3 Rock Band, though. One of them was told to me by the good Dr. Heimlich, which is the idea that you waggle up and down on the difficulty setting menu when you don't want to do the song the leader has chosen. It's also interesting to watch (or be involved in) the delicate negotiations that occur between the two people using the guitar to see who plays guitar and who plays bass. That's usually a pause-move to the one you want-wait to see if the other guy moves there too sort of affair. I actually prefer most of the bass lines so most of the time I would imagine the other person relieved at 'getting' to play guitar when I indicated that I wanted bass, although I did get overruled a couple of times. Frankly, if you can play on Expert on the guitar, I'm fine with you taking whichever one you want and I'll play the other one on Medium.
But still, frustrating to play and have no way to communicate other than by waggling on menus, just out-and-out leaving the group, or adding someone as a friend if you enjoyed playing with them. Seriously, how hard is it to add a menu of prefab phrases? Please? Otherwise, it's pretty fun, especially when you get to watch someone kill songs on Expert, which I normally only get to see when I play with the aforementioned Dr. Heimlich.
And yeah, though there are a lot of power players there playing on Hard or Expert, there are a lot of people who play on Medium, too, which makes it less embarrassing when I want to play guitar or bass and have to play on Medium if it's anything higher than the first two difficulty categories.
It's a good time, really. As soon as we get our drum pad replacement (It broke on day 60 of its 60 day warranty, which EA is now enforcing! Yikes, that was close!) I might give them a go, though I still find the placement of the first two drums disorienting. But that's the subject for another whiny post.
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2 comments:
How does singing on that work? I mean, I have a halfway decent voice (not as good as yours, granted) and I know how to read music, have decent timing and pitch, etc...Does it judge you based on the quality of your voice or is it more mechanical, concerned only with pitch, volume, timing, etc.?
Sadly, being able to read music will not help you, since there is no mode of the game that shows you the notes on the staves. (Which is asinine.)
It's mechanical, making no value judgments on tone as far as I can tell. Volume also doesn't matter. It's all pitch, syllables, and rhythm only. It shows you a scrolling line that moves up and down at the notes go up and down, just a relative idea of where the melodic line goes. Almost anyone who can sing at all can pass most of the songs after learning them on Medium, most people who have any proficiency at all I think can pass just about everything on Hard, and then people who know what they're doing and can hear and hold the right notes can pass almost all, if not all, on Expert.
It's the sort of thing, since it's $170 and the hardware issues with the instruments are still being ironed out, that you'd probably want to find someone who has it to try it before you buy it.
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