PAX 07: Rock Band Impressions
More after the jump...
OK, so those of you who have been reading Gaming Nexus since E3 2006 or before may remember me talking about a guy named Jim Zubkavich, or just Zub. He is a friend of Shawn Sines who crashed with us that year, and has a deep, burning love of all things music, especially singing. He also happens to be one of the funniest people I have ever met, and not the least bit shy about having fun in public. So when we needed two more players to fill out the Gaming Nexus rock band quartet during our scheduled time to play the demo, he was the first person I thought of. Zub is a project manager and artist for UDON Entertainment, and was working at their booth at the Con, so it was only natural that he join us on stage as our frontman along with one of his co-workers, who was dressed like Ryu of Street Fighter fame (UDON works on a lot of CAPCOM stuff).
Now to get to the point: Rock Band is going to be an instant smash. It supports up to 4 players, playing up to 4 different instruments: Guitar, Bass, Mic, and my personal favorite, drums. As with other karaoke games, the mic is 100% real, while much like Guitar Hero, the guitar controls are still just rough approximations of playing guitar, even if the controller body designs are more reflective of actual guitars.
The drum though, are where it's at. I was in Jazz Band in high school, and as Seniors we were allowed to dabble in other instruments on occasion. Since then, I have always been interested in the drum kit, and in my opinion, Harmonix has really done an excellent job with the drum controls. The set has 4 "drum pads" to play, along with a foot pedal that represents the kicker on a bass drum very accurately. The foot pedal is even adjustable on the controller to be played with either the left or right foot.
Much like Guitar Hero, you press the button on your controller thats color coded to match the note displayed on the screen. On the drum controller, each drum has a different color outlining the pad, and the bass drum pedal is represented with a line across the drum notes. It's different enough from the rest of the notes that you don't wind up confusing it with the notes played on the pads.
Zub chose our first song, as he had to be able to sing it, and he selected "Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi. What was fun for me, is that this song features the drums a good bit and actually starts off with just the kick drum. By the time you're halfway through the song, you've played all four pads and (depending on difficulty) sometimes two pads and the kick drum at once. In addition when you play well enough for a while, the game rewards you with appropriately timed "drum fills" where you can play ad lib without damaging your score.
We got through that first song very well, and everyone really enjoyed it. In fact, we were all excited to change roles and play again on the side game while someone else took over the main stage in the Harmonix booth. This time I took over the vocals as we performed "Are you gonna be my girl?" by Jet. While we didn't set the world on fire this time, and I was told my vocal fills(which work the same as the drum fills) sounded something like a fire alarm going off, we did manage to make our way through the song. In fact, our Ryu-impersonating drummer in his first time sitting down at the drums chose to attempt playing at the hard difficulty setting, and failed out of the game three times, but the rest of us were doing so well on easy and medium, that we brought him back into the game twice.
When we finished the second song, the reviews were unanimous: Rock Band Rocks. Of course none of this even takes into account the fact that most of the tracks in the game are original masters by the original artists, and that there's still a ton about the game that none of us have even seen yet. Just merely playing it twice was enough for us to know how good this game is really going to be.
In short, this game is going to be one of the big hits of the 2007 holiday season and beyond.
