The Tour Continues
The Wife being able to sing at Hard and Expert on Rock Band is really helping things move in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The latest tally of our progress now shows that out of 18, 561 bands currently competing on the planet, we are now #43. Maybe it ain’t the top ten, but hell, it’s a lot further ahead than I thought was possible.
Also, we just got a Bowie 3-Pack today that includes Moonage Daydream, Heroes and Queen Bitch. Heroes in particular is quickly growing into a favorite of mine for the guitar, because that riff is just Damn Catchy. The fact that the Wife is just as much into this game as I am is both a pleasant and vaguely disturbing surprise, but to paraphrase The Exorcist, “The power of Rock compels you!”
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Competing, Wayne, competing?
Am I wrong in thinking that by engaging in a competition with a group of other players around the world you risk spoiling the beautiful purity of Harmonix’s game? Surely it’s only a matter of time before this lighthearted tallying becomes much more serious and the taunting–the terrible horrible taunting–begins!
I kid, I kid….
While it’s undeniable that there is a competitive aspect to the leader boards–the very name itself is a no brainer–I would have to say that it’s a different beast from what Neversoft has done with Guitar Hero. The key point is that Harmonix has introduced competition in a non-intrusive manner that doesn’t sacrifice the music for the sake of victory or bragging rights.
For example, in multi-player, star power works in very, VERY different ways, clearly showing the difference in mind-set between Harmonix and Neversoft. When you use Star Power in Neversoft multi-player game, it is used with hostile intent, to damage/beat your opponent, which is in line with Neversoft’s traditional, video-gamey roots. When you use Star Power in Harmonix’s multi-player game, it is used to either boost everyone’s score, or, tellingly, to “save” someone that has failed the song. In Rock Band, failing a song doesn’t mean the song is over, it means that someone else in the band with Star Power can engage that to save you two more times. The game uses a “three strikes and you’re out” system to control how often someone playing really badly can stay in the game with a group. So as far as Star Power goes, Neversoft has deemed Star Power to be a more hostile, attacking ability, whereas Harmonix sees it as something that helps people.
The other key point is the music itself. Harmonix’s note-charts have come through once again, and the songs are amazing to play, because you really feel like you’re playing the song. They haven’t artificially inflated the difficulty of songs simply to give people a feeling of accomplishment over how they’ve made their fingers dance, they just went ahead and picked Really Damn Hard Songs and trusted that that would be sufficient. You don’t see single notes turned into three note chords, you don’t see silence having single notes to play simply to trip up fingers, and you don’t see musical progressions that don’t make much “sense” scale-wise, but are clearly designed to cause finger acrobatics. At least at the Expert level, since I have no idea how GHIII songs play on Easy.
Although to be fair, the taunting has already begun on Rock Band. The obsessive compulsives that need to win ASAP have already done their job; there is at least one band on the leader boards with 50 million points, meaning that they’ve probably been playing about 6-8 hours every day since the game came out last week to get up that high that fast. And yes, they ARE calling every one else pathetic losers for not being as accomplished as they are, and they, in turn, are being called pathetic losers for giving up so much of their lives to the game.
But the nice thing about this is that this competitive aspect isn’t forced. I can play multi-player, I can ignore it. I can look at the leader boards, or I can ignore them. I can’t get away from the boss battles in Guitar Hero III, that’s forced on me. Neversoft decided it was more important to have people get beaten than it was to have them enjoy the music and they lost me with that decision. I’ll still probably get the game for myself down the line, because the chance to play “The Metal” is too tempting to resist.