Archive for 2007

I’m watching news about the upcoming Harmonix game Rock Band very closely. I have Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero 1, and Guitar Hero 2. I’ll be getting Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80′s in July, and I’m thinking about what to do this fall. This fall will see both Guitar Hero 3 and Rock band make their debut, after the split of Harmonix from Red Octance and Activision.

First off, there’s some cool multiplayer stuff that, given their history with Frequency and Amplitude, I fully expected to see:

the game will have four unique campaigns for guitar, drums, bass and vocals in addition to a “full band game” that it’s explained “is designed to allow for one huge co-op playthrough” which can occur online for offline – or apparently a combination of both.

The guitars will have a very interesting design:

guitar and bass have ten frets – “five for the regular sections of the game and five for the newly designated solo sections – the guitar features a five-way switch letting you apply five different sound effects

Unfortunately, the game has a mode for vocals too. I’d prefer to listen to the original singer, so maybe I won’t get the microphone peripheral and make my friends choose between guitar, bass, and drums. But the vocal mode does seem interesting:

Singing is described as more in-depth, with a phoneme detector picking up “individual vowels and consonants you say. Build up enough highly judged phrases and you’ll be able to sing free-form. If you do well enough in free-form, then you’ll trigger the vocalist’s version of star power.”

Drums will also be fun:

“You use actual sticks and hit one of four coloured pads in front of you, in addition to a kick pedal attached to the drumming unit. Drummers will also have the ability to do fills etc. in their own little free-form section, do well and you’ll trigger the drummers version of star power”, the post explains.

Thing game looks to be a lot closer to Frequency and Amplitude than to Guitar Hero. Which I like. So I think that if Rock Band’s peripherals have a reasonal cost, I think I’ll be checking it out. The question then becomes whether to bother with Guitar Hero 3.

Rock Band revealed through leaked info

Follow through to this link to find even more. Like the fact that “Musical fret-boards are now transparent so you can see more of the background visuals. Guitar is on the left side of the screen, Bass on the right and drums down the middle. Vocals scroll from right to left along the top of the screen.” etc. Cool stuff.