Playing With America

Today I decided to test out the online portion of Rock Band to see if Harmonix really did manage to live up to their promise of providing a lag free experience with no delay for anyone while playing the game. For the most part, they nailed it, as the experience of playing with other people (at least in North America) seems about 95% problem free, with the occasional hiccup such as people’s own connections dropping out on them, or the inevitable Bail Out when you’ve been playing too long and it’s time to take a break.

I’m not entirely sure exactly how the hierarchy for finding other people to play with works. If you’re not playing with friends who are all agreeing to jam together and are simply waiting for an invitation, then you use a “search for other players” option. When this happens and other people fill the spaces up, you might be the “leader” or you might not, I have no idea what determines this. All I know for sure is that the leader is the one that actually controls which songs are going to be played. Sometimes I got to be the leader, other times, we found ourselves simply being band members.

It was an interesting experience. The Wife has currently created her singer to look a like a bit of an Ice Queen/Gothic Lolita/Maid type. I think that the folks we were playing with (who judging from the number after their names were likely sharing a console the way we were) immediately saw the Wife’s singer and figured, “Oh, so someone thinks she’s a girl, eh?”

As a result, they went for a band called Flyleaf with song, I’m So Sick, which is quickly coming be one of the most dreaded songs for vocalists in the game. Witness:

Much to their surprise, the Wife nailed it, and after that they went through a series of increasingly more difficult songs trying to shred her vocal cords, until they got to Metallica’s Enter Sandman and somehow failed to realize that they might not actually be good enough themselves to play it, causing their own failure out of the song within seconds of beginning, before the Wife could actually get a chance to sing. Not that it really would have mattered, I’ve seen her nail that song on Expert too. Over the course of the evening this same exact pattern would end up repeating multiple times; the new players–if they were leader–would see that the vocalist was female and without fail, they would go straight over to I’m So Sick to see whether the song could be passed or not. Either the people who do this just want to see if the singer is really a girl or not, or else they’re kind of mean-spirited and want to put a girl through one of the tougher songs in general just for having the audacity to be a girl playing a boy’s game, I’m not sure which. That’s the only really strange, consistent behavior we found during our playtime during the evening though, this obsession with making girls sing that song. Quite often once the song was passed, a lot of female vocalist songs would be subsequently chosen.

On the whole, it’s a neat experience, and if you get a good bunch of people, it’s pretty amazing watching them in action. We managed to get ourselves tagged as Band Leader for a while, and we had a wicked drummer on occasion that was just cruising through Expert in a truly frightening manner.

I’m really just looking forward to folks I’m already friends with with PS3s to get with the program and pick this game up. Playing with decent strangers is a lot of fun, but I can only imagine who it’ll be playing with friends around the world.

And one of these days, I’ll have to actually make a non-Rock Band related post and talk about that trip to Maine in more detail…