What can you tell us about Band Hero on DS, and how does it compare to the home console versions?
David Nathanielsz, Vicarious Visions: Band Hero for the Nintendo DS Lite is the first full band portable game experience on the DS. It’s a major innovation step forward on the handheld — bringing both drums and singing to the DS!
The game comes with both the Guitar Grip — like the one used for Guitar Hero: On Tour — and a brand new Drum Grip for playing drums. The Drum Grip is a silicone sleeve that slides over your Nintendo DS Lite and has four large drum pads on the front. The pads give a really nice bounce back response that makes the drum play very fun and addictive. The set list for the game has 30 master tracks – which is more music than ever before on the DS and virtually all of the songs are exclusive just for the DS version of Band Hero. The set list has a great variety of artists and music for everyone, including artists like Black Eyed Peas, The Rolling Stones, Lily Allen, Queen, Pink and The Pretenders.
Every song is tracked for drums, voice, guitar and bass so you can play all four different instruments in the single-player mode, but the real fun comes when you get some friends together and play as a band. You can play up to four players in local wireless play, with any instrument configuration you want. So if everyone wants to play drums in the band, they can! There are co-operative and competitive modes and a new game mechanic called Stage Stunts that’s used to gain star power, help out your bandmates or screw over your opponents in competitive play.
We’ve also added an extensive Rock Star Creator to Band Hero DS so you can customize your entire band to look just the way you want. There are hundreds of outfits, body parts and accessories to kit out your band with.
We put a ton of effort into blowing out the Hero experience on Band Hero for the DS this year. It’s a huge game, with loads of brand new features and options and the exclusive set list. And with the Fan Request options that’s accessed when you connect the game up to Band Hero Wii there’s even more to play if you have both the DS and Wii version.
Do you think music/rhythm games ever leap forward from the basic "falling gem" gameplay? How do you see the genre evolving over time?
I think they will. We've been adding things that help improve the overall experience of the "falling gem" game. Party Play for example helps open up the games accessibility and really helps people get in there and enjoy the game quickly. But the Wii and DS versions of Band Hero have added a couple of twists that go beyond the standard gameplay. The Wii has Roadie Battle and the DS has these Stage Stunts, which are mini-games that the player can get into mid-song. That kind of stuff is really fun and gives us a glimpse of where we could be going with these types of games in the future.
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