Today was my day to test out the Rock Band drum kit. The biggest challenge for me here was setting it all up. Now everyone’s gaming space is different, but for me, I have a 52″ LCD TV, and directly in front of it, a couch and a coffee table. So the very first thing I had to do is drag our rather substantial coffee table out of the way. Then I needed someplace to sit. Really, if you’re going to do this drum thing seriously you’re probably going to want to invest in an adjustable stool. A quick Google search tells me you can spend anywhere from $20 to $200 for a drum kit stool.

Well, the best I could do in a pinch was a plastic Adirondack chair. So I dragged that into the living room, and spent some time fiddling with the arrangement of the drums and particularly with the drum pedal. Since the chair didn’t adjust, I ended up pushing the drum kit pretty far away from me in order for my foot to feel comfortable on the pedal (to where it felt almost like the gas pedal in my car). Anyway eventually I got something workable set up.

My first experience with drumming was pretty frustrating. I admit I’m no musician, but I can at least tap out a steady beat, and on Easy mode there’re a lot of places with long strings of evenly placed notes to hit, and I kept messing them up. Finally in frustration I called in the girlfriend for a second opinion, and she had the same kind of troubles. Finally I remembered that there’s a “TV Calibration” feature in the game. We’d had no problems with guitar or singing, but I tried it anyway. I just had to tell it I had an LCD TV and it calibrated automagically (there’s an option for a manual calibration as well). And that did the trick. I went from getting 2 stars to getting 4 stars immediately after the calibration.

Drumming is fun but requires a lot more real talent than the guitar does. And even though the drums aren’t as loud as I’d feared they would be, I think I was still subconsciously trying to hit them ‘gently’ so as not to disturb the neighbors. I think that’s ok for Easy mode, but if you watch the YouTube video below you’ll see that to get good you have to be willing to go for it.

I honestly think most Rock Band Drum Kits are going to end up gathering dust, at least with the casual players. I’d love to have a practice area where I could get a stool and set up the drums and not worry about bothering the neighbors, but that isn’t really practical for me, and I don’t think it will be for most people. And the reality is that I don’t see myself dragging furniture around after a long day at work just so I can relax with a little Rock Band. Right now you can get Rock Band in two configurations: the game only, or the set with drums, guitar and mike as well as the game. If that has changed by the time you read this, think long and hard about buying that drum kit.

After dinner, I picked up the guitar again and played some more of the solo Rock Band ‘career.’ I guess I’ve played through about 20 songs so far. One of the big differentiators between Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band is the play lists. I found Rock Band is pretty middle of the road for my tastes. There aren’t a lot of songs I just love, but neither are there many that I hate. GH 3 is more about the ups and downs. There are songs in that game I just adore, and some that are just horrible noise to my old ears. Now this is going to be really subjective, and I’m an older gamer. Suffice to say I’m really happy when I run into Rolling Stones or ZZ Top, and a lot of the bands I encounter in Rock Band I’ve never even heard of.

Of course ultimately you’ll have played through the careers and you’ll just be playing for fun, and at that point you can start buying downloaded songs, and cherry pick your favorites, so long-term I’m not so sure this is going to be a huge factor.

I’ll also reiterate that the learning curve in RB is a lot smoother. I’m still getting 4 or 5 stars on all the songs (and managed a 100% once). Over in the GH 3 camp, there are still “Easy” mode songs that just destroy me (Slayer, anyone?).

So I’m still standing by my preference for Rock Band. Oh, I did find one ‘gimmick’ here, and that’s “the big rock finish” which is a freestyle section at the end of some songs…you basically just mash notes as fast as you can to generate a huge pile ‘o points at the end of a tune. I could really do without this section since it generally ends up sounding likes two cats fighting in a 50 gallon drum. But it still isn’t as awful as the GH 3 Boss Battles.

Anyway, here’s a great video of someone rocking out like mad on the RB drums. It’s pretty long, but if you can, watch it at least until they cut out the game audio; it gives you a good idea of how loud the drums are.

I put the Rock Band drum kit together today. It’s big. It looked pretty big in the store but in my living room it seems to expand. And it really seems like it’ll require a stool; I don’t think that playing standing up is going to work for very long, or very well. The drumkit stand seems like it’ll break down pretty easily, but the ‘drum heads’ are all one big, rather large, piece, so I’m a bit concerned about storage.

On the plus side, they aren’t as loud as I’d feared they would be. There’s a Rock Band demo kiosk in the local Best Buy, and those drums are pretty darned loud. The sticks are regular drumsticks, and the drums at the store are plastic so the whole time someone is playing they’re bashing plastic with a wooden stick. Loud and unpleasant. But the drums that I got have a rubberized surface and aren’t too bad as far as noise goes. I still don’t think I’d practice my RB drum solos in the middle of the night though, out of respect for other folk in the apartment building.

As I mentioned in my last post, as of about 2-3 weeks ago I’d never played one of these games. Guitar Hero III was my introduction to the genre. Today I experienced Rock Band for the first time and I thought I’d compare the newbie experience.

Both games offer tutorials, but Rock Band’s guitar tutorial is longer and more informative. However if you fail the tests, you have to listen to the whole explanation before trying them again. In Guitar Hero if you fail you can just retry the test right away. Some guy named Izzy narrates the Rock Band tutorial and he’s fine. In GH3, the “god of rock” and some other character take turns. They’re pretty corny, but y’know, it’s just a tutorial; I guess its not a big deal.
Continue reading “Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: Day 2, The Newbie Experience”

I’m a Johnny-come-lately to this whole world of ‘virtual guitars.’ I finally picked up Guitar Hero 3 a couple of weeks ago, and today Rock Band arrived. I’d found it really confusing, trying to decide which one to get. So in the end I got both. Great economics, huh? I thought I might capture my impressions in a series of posts, in case anyone else is trying to pick one of the two.

These posts are based on the PS3 versions of the games. I’m not going to go into a whole big thing about console preference. I have a PS3, an XBox 360 and a Wii, and my personal preference is for the PS3 over the XBox 360, mostly because its a lot quieter when its running, and because I don’t care about online multiplayer.

Guitar Hero III w/Guitar Controller will run you about $100. The Rock Band bundle is $170 and comes with a guitar controller, drum set controller, and a microphone. Right there, you have a compelling reason to go with Rock Band if you’re living in a multi-gamer household.

On the PS3, the controllers are not interchangeable at this time, though as of this writing there are heavy rumors of a patch that will let you use the GH 3 guitar controller with Rock Band. My understanding is that on the 360, the GH 3 controller will work with Rock Band, but not vice versa.

Let’s compare the two guitar controllers. This is a definite ‘out of the box’ comparison. I haven’t actually played Rock Band as of the time of this writing. 🙂 But the differences just struck me so I wanted to capture them right away.
Continue reading “Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: The Guitars”

I picked up Enchanted Arms for the XBox 360 today. Put about an hour into it. What follows are my initial ‘gut level’ reactions. Warning: some spoilers for the very early parts of the game:

OK here’s my 1 Hour Review of Enchanted Arms.

First, let’s get this out of the way. You start with 3 classmates. Atsuma is the protagonist, and he’s kind of a slacker type. Toya is the smart, suave one. And Makota is the fretful one. Makota is also gay and totally in love with Toya. It isn’t clear if Toya returns the feeling yet. With the English voices on, I found Makota *extremely* annoying. He has a really over-blown ‘queen’ accent, if you know what I mean. Like a sleazy stand-up comic doing a gay guy. I quickly switched to the Japanese voices (with English subtitles) and find them much better. The English Atsuma played the character pretty ‘serious’, and the Japanese Atsuma is pretty over-the-top and crazy. Odd that I can say that, not knowing a word of Japanese, but you really pick up on it.

The game has a pretty slow start. If you talk to everyone, and you enjoy anime, then you’ll have fun. If you just do what you need to do, it’ll just seem weird. You start in class. Then you have to go to the cafeteria. Then you have to buy your lunch. Then you have to go feed your dog. Then you need to get out of the school. Dull. But add talking to people and you’ll meet the diet girl who is in despair over whether she should buy the cheap fattening lunch, or the expensive healthy lunch, given her low funds. You’ll meet girls in love with Toya and get to hear Makota try to defend his turf. You’ll meet a club (The Anti-Atsuma Alliance, or 3A’s) devoted to keeping tabs on Atsuma to protect the rest of the school from his slackerly ways, and so forth. I found this all amusing, and since I was reading the english subtitles I could click through it all really fast.
Continue reading “Enchanted Arms 1 Hour Review”

Warrior Woman is an interesting read over at Primotech. A young gamer decided to introduce his 53 year old mom to his XBox 360 to try and test Peter Moore’s assertion that “even your mom will be playing games here.”

What really makes the article is that the test subject is an articulate and thoughtful woman, and that she was willing to take the topic seriously. She didn’t play these games for half an hour…she spent a few weeks playing them. Anyway, well worth a read.