Experiments In Tug of War

For the first time today, we dipped into the “duel aspect” Rock Band. There’s a mode called “Tug of War” which caught us by pleasant surprise. For one thing, it allows both competitors to choose their difficulty level, which seems fair. For another, it actually works almost like a “sing off” in that a meter appears on the left, and as the song begins, vocalists trade phrases, handing each other off in turn, but both singing during the chorus. Depending on the performance, a cursor, sitting in the middle of the meter, gravitates towards whoever is doing the better singing. Whichever singer said cursor is closer to at the end of the song is considered the winner.

Finding vocalists to sing with is pretty hard since it’s not a very popular choice among Rock Band players, with many folks buying it for the drums and the guitars and having an almost phobic reaction to the thought of a microphone stuck near their mouth. We ended up playing with one of the “usual crowd” that the Wife has been befriending online since she started playing, and it was kind of a slaughter, since the other person was an admitted non-enthusiast of the singing portion, and mostly did it out as favor to test out the mode.