I reviewed Guitar Hero: Aerosmith for Variety. It was pretty okay, but I found it a little bit indecisive and tacked together. For someone like me who is training, training, I tell you, to be a self-masturbatory plastic guitar soloist and an Expert-mode button-masher (on GHIII, I'm foundering in the last segment of Hard mode), I found GH: Aerosmith a bit too easy.
After turning in my review, I of course went and read other people's to compare opinions, and found I wasn't the only person to note the kinder, gentler difficulty curve, largely due to the fact that Joe Perry is a pretty melodic soloist and not generally German metal twiddly-fiddly. With the exception of Walk this Way, which was pretty awesome to play, I didn't find too many of the songs really juicy and satisfying from the standpoint of technical proficiency.
Though, in the end, spending so much time on GH: Aerosmith for review was forgiving enough that it forced me to finally master using only three fingers unless there's an orange note, a skill I desperately needed to learn to take it to the next level.
Anyway, okay, so, too easy, sort of dull notewise. But then I began to reflect on what my favorite songs to play from GH: Aerosmith were, and I realized that the ones I'm most inclined to revisit are ballads, specifically the cover of Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes." That's probably the easiest song in the game, so it had me headscratching a little as to why I loved playing it. Aside from the fact I especially like the song anyway, is it because Midori looks so cute actually singing along?
It got me mulling the whole contentious culture war between Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The general opinion, to me, seems to come down to a couple key differences; Guitar Hero is squarely a gamer's game, geared at challenging and inflating the button-masher's sense of ego and technical mastery, while Rock Band is a true "band simulator" that's all about the music, man. Activision, says the general consensus, is a sellout extraordinaire, slapping the once-glorious franchise with cartoony trappings and horrible energy-drink metal, while the eclectic, sophisticated musical tastes of the Harmonix team are well-respected.
It's easy to see why Rock Band comes out on top in the court of public opinion -- unless you are hardcore and lower-key collaborative play is too mainstream for you, one supposes. GH purists seem to envision that Rock Band sets clutter classy urban apartments or suburban houses for 30-plus marketing professionals and investment bankers to enjoy during martini parties. The horror.
I'm generally the easygoing type; I found GHIII-era cartooniness to be sorta cute, I'm not in the business of calling anyone sellouts (not in print, at least!), and I understand the Rock Band preference that most of my friends and colleagues maintain -- excepting a surly, kvetchy period of resistant resentment at the game's launch when it appeared that everyone I knew professionally received a free copy except for me.
GH: Aerosmith had just whetted my fake guitar appetite enough to tempt me into spending much of my weekend practicing GHIII songs. I'd expected to be joyful to return to the bosom of Dragonforce, and I did have a rather ecstatic, note-streaking and personal best score-defying run at Metallica's "One." But now, I'm feeling the itch to just zone out with "All the Young Dudes" and "Dream On," a song that encapsulates, for me, high school dance angst over a rather particular memory.
Then I stumbled on this very interesting blog post at Versus CluClu Land (VersusCluCluLand? Versus Clu Clu Land? Versus CluCluLand?! A spiritual sibling to Sexy Videogameland!) wherein the writer got to pick Harmonix's brain on how they select songs and map notes, and I found it rather enlightening:
I talked with a Harmonix staffer about the process, and I was surprised to learn that the most important factor in the process is musicianship. The people responsible for note tracking, she told me, aim to reproduce the way that the song is played on a real guitar to the greatest extent possible within the confines of the guitar controller's limited repertoire of moves.Ah, so the peanut gallery is correct -- Rock Band's priority is to be a music sim, not a finger-contortion sim or a hand-injurer. And while I still enjoy the way that Guitar Hero solos taunt me with their apparent impossibility, and the adrenaline rush I get from gaining in proficiency, rocking out to the ballads on GH: Aerosmith helped me realize that I like pretending to play music, too.
So I've become a little bit sold. And then, I saw these potential track lists for Rock Band 2, noted that in addition to the stunning fiercity of their general win-win awesome, one of my total favorite Interpol songs is on there, and, hey, that's really all it took.
[Header webcomic comes from xkcd, which I just remembered is pretty fab.]
15 comments:
The comic in question is XKCD.
Thank you, cyranix!
The fact that Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 1 & 2 have started this brand new platform war bugs me more than anything else I think. I don't mind multiple entries in the franchise so much. Trying to sign up bands for exclusive contracts makes good business sense, but it utterly sucks for players. That, artificially locking out Rock Band guitars from playing in GH3, and making the drums in World Tour incompatible with Rock Band tells me they don't particularly care about the people playing. They just want their money. The difference between how Activision treats their customers and Harmonix is almost comical, if sad.
Granted, anyone looking to play Rock Band outside of North America seems to be getting screwed in one fashion or another. But still...
After a weekend spent playing Guitar Hero 3, I have to ask: What in the world is enjoyable about playing punishingly hard note charts that seem to be put together willy nilly by a beat tracking robot as opposed to a genuine human being?
I've played GH 1-3. After playing Rock Band and being able to actually enjoy a music game on Expert (holy crap, I can actually get through an entire song!), it's really hard to go back to the plastisine visuals and arbitrarily put together note charts of GH3. GH3 is a music game for hardcore gamers that hate/are apathetic towards music, something you don't seem to be.
I didn't know that Interpol was going to be featured in Rock Band 2! That is absolutely exciting! Interpol is definitely one of the best bands around, as I'm sure you know. However, I prefer "Obstacle 1" as my favorite song; I pray to God that song makes the cut for the next RB.
She puts the weights/into my little heart/and she gets in my room/and she takes it apart
As a poor, backwards soul who struggled to get past the Joe Perry battle on medium, I can't side with those who say the game is too easy. But I was disappointed that only half the Aerosmith songs I know were included.
By the way, no game without a coke-snorting minigame replicates the experience of being in a band.
Harmonix does try to make the song feel more like playing it than Activision, but that does not mean they are totally successful. Freebird on expert sometimes feels off, like they added extra notes. And the lack of open string strums changes the feel of a lot of songs. But they succeed better than Activision for the most part. GHIII is unnecessarily hard much of the time.
Hi Leigh,
Thanks for giving my little blog a shout-out! She's a young go-getter with a lot of poetential, and I have been a huge fan of your own writing. I had two further thoughts on what you wrote here:
1) I don't know exactly what the note-tracking process is like over at Neversoft, but I am led to believe it's roughly the same as over at Harmonix. In an interview for 1up i have been totally unable to track down, one of the lead designers of GHIII said that the developers at Neversoft were huge fans of the series but that note-tracking was a huge stumbling block. What got them past, he said, was bringing in musicians who understood how the songs were played on guitar.
2) i think the brewing war between the franchises partially reflects the fact that the original GH appeals so much to both the hardcore and casual crowds. I think the folks at Neversoft are hardcore gamers first and foremost, who wanted to offer the players some really difficult challenges to surmount. (did you see the achievement list for that game?!) I think Harmonix has been going in the other direction, dialing back some of the challenge and aiming to just provide lots of new songs for people to play.
I think part of Rock Band's appeal, too, is that it's something fun to do in a group. Guitar Hero, at least presently, is at most a two player game. And at that point, it takes on much more of an air of competition: it's very much two people playing the same thing and trying to do it better.
Rock Band, on the other hand, has a fantastic group dynamic. It's clearly made to be done in a group. It's got multiple parts, so everyone's doing something different and putting it together into one result. Players help each other, the stronger bringing the less experienced back if they fail out. And one of your friends has to embarrass himself by singing.
Guitar Hero's a game you play alone on your couch. It's the kind of game you plug away at. Rock Band is the one you bring to a party.
is "self-masturbatory" redundant?
Yes.
Generally, yes, it is, but technically it's not, as it is possible to masturbate someone or something other than yourself.
In this context, I intended to be explicitly self-referential, emphasizing the solitary nature of the pursuit.
SO THERE.
(grammatical complaints on SVGL will almost always be flippantly and stubbornly rebutted, best to avoid them)
The subway is a porno / The pavements, they are a mess / I know you've supported me for a long time / Somehow I'm not impressed
Interpol DLC PLEASE!
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