(no subject)

[dot_fennel]

I played Rock Band 3 alone, with the keyboard, for an hour or two last night.

Overwhelming very first impression: This feels like a dashboard, not a game. Even the firstboot experience ("oh okay, I have to calibrate, and pick a bandname, and choose default characters") is way more like the exciting-yet-slightly-boring feeling of setting up a new tech toy than like the first 5 minutes of a new video game. Not that, in retrospect, the previous RBs weren't like that-- they were. But this time the designers knew it, so it became obvious to me. Except for...

Second impression: I take it back, this is like the beginning of John Cooney's Achievement Unlocked. The in-game awardments* are called Goals, and there's one for calibrating, one for picking a band name, one for playing a song, one for visiting the store... and at least at first, many of these are also Achievements (i.e. the XBox OS awardments), so every time you do anything, you get two different-styled popups. It is ridiculous.

Okay. Gameplay.

Expert keys: I ventured a guess that I might as well jump in at the highest regular difficulty level. I immediately almost failed because I didn't realize how the controller worked-- the keys are divided into five colored sections, and I assumed the deal was "hit any key in the red section for red", etc. But no, you use five adjacent white keys; realizing this, the song became easy.

Looking closer, I noticed the colors don't even go in the right order (red is leftmost, for example). I guess it's assumed you don't need to look down to play green-red-yellow-blue-orange** on a controller where the layout of buttons corresponds exactly to the picture on the screen. The color markings are for...

Pro Easy keys: This was what I was looking forward to anyway; might as well try it. The first song, Need You Tonight by INXS, had only one note, played about once every other measure. I picked a different beginner song, and it was nearly as boring. Let's try...

Pro Expert keys: For good measure, I also went up one tier of songs in difficulty. OMG NOTES. The game seems to play a whole chord if you hit even one note in it, which means random flailing produced a few desired sounds amid the plinking error noises, but okay, no. I ended up going into Practice mode and playing one verse of a song (I forget which) over and over again until I had it perfect. After that, I had my proprioception calibrated enough to sometimes look at the screen and play notes at the same time, which let me play Pro Expert (still on the easiest songs) for the rest of the hour.

I don't remember difficulty-titration being this much of a pain before, which speaks well of the whole 'Pro' concept. Pro Easy isn't the difficulty above Expert; it's Easy difficulty, with all the simplification and note-spacing that implies, on a much harder instrument.

The gap between what I can sight-read on Pro Keys and what I can get through with practice is FAR bigger than it has been after two hours with any other new plastic instrument. In other words, it seems like there's an element of *learning music* that wasn't there before, however realistic the controllers are or aren't.

This demands to be played with friends. Annoying that both of my guitar controllers have broken in the past month or so; I do want to get one of the insane Pro Guitar things, which can technically be used for GRYBO, but I don't know whether it makes sense to do that in terms of ease or fragility.

* This is what the XBLI game Hypership Out Of Control calls them. I like it.

** Another coinage, I don't remember where from: "GRYBO". Useful, now that there are controllers that speak GRYBO, controllers that speak something else (Rock Band Modified MIDI?) and controllers that do both. But I mean, we'll see if it catches on.

Comments

[badlittlemonkey.livejournal.com]

Pro Keys == great fun. And even moreso than in "GRYBO" (heh) RB, as you said, there's that element of learning -- feeling that I'm learning how to play a song instead of just hitting the correctly colored keys at the correct time. (I haven't had anywhere near as much time with the Mustang 104-button guitar yet, but it from my little experience there it felt like it'd be much the same way.)

Now I just have to get a keyboard for home instead of getting a few minutes here and there to play at work...