I played Rock Band at a friend’s house a while back and really enjoyed it. I had trouble with the guitar, but played it as a lap guitar and really had fun with that. The drums were my favorite part.
I would just get Rock Band, but since I’m the only one who’ll play it (my husband is very bad at rhythm games and hates them) I’m leaning toward Guitar Hero as a cheaper option.
I have a PS2, PS3 and PC. Which one would you recommend to buy, preferably used, as I don’t want to spend a ton of money (another minus for Rock Band)? I’d have to get a controller and the game of course, which I think I can now buy separately at used game stores. Is the Guitar Hero 1 & 2 pack a good deal if I can find a decent guitar?
Graphics aren’t terribly important, as this is more about the neato controller than how cool the little dots look as you try to match them.
If money’s an issue you might disagree with me. I started playing Guitar Hero 1 and played a lot of Guitar Hero 2. Haven’t really played Guitar Hero 3, but I got Rock Band and I love it to death. The microphone is pretty fun even though I can’t sing worth a damn. I think playing the drums might be the most fun videogame I’ve ever had, extremely challenging and rewarding. I was great at the guitar in GH1 and 2 (5 starred all but the hardest songs on expert). I also play guitar in real life. That said, the harder expert songs in Rock Band on guitar kick my ass. The bass is also a lot more challenging and less boring than it was in GH 1 and 2 (again, can’t speak for 3.)
The drums are unbelievably challenging, I’m finally slogging my way through the hard songs, and don’t know if I’ll ever be able to 5 star everything on expert on drums, I end up sweaty just playing through (Don’t Fear) the reaper on Hard, I can’t imagine how hard they get on Expert.
Rock Band all the way. The only plus I see to Guitar Hero 3 from the demo’s I’ve played at Best Buy is that when you battle on guitar you can do cool little “attacks”, like break one of their strings or reverse the buttons.
If you have any questions just let me know.
Another thing I forgot to note. I have a widescreen plasma Sanyo HDTV. With Guitar Hero’s 1 and 2 I really couldn’t play them on the TV because of the lag. Yes, there’s a calibrate lag function, but all it does is correct the audio, but not the video, and it was a real pain to get used to. Again, I don’t know about Guitar Hero 3, but Rock Band put together a 3-tier lag correction utility that works perfectly. I’m suspecting Guitar Hero 3 didn’t.
You can read about it here: http://community.rockband.com/index.php?do=/public/blog/view/id_497/
A friend of mine is an actual drummer, and on early exposure he says he agrees with what they were saying when the game first came out: if you can five-star this game on expert, you can pretty much play the drums for real, and at a high level.
If you’re looking to get into it as cheaply as possible, you should definitely pick up the GH1/2 double pack and check out the video game stores for a used PS2 controller. They’re both fantastic games and will keep you busy for a long while. GH2 is by far my favorite in the series.
Rock Band is amazing and is currently king of my console time but you might have difficulty locating a copy before the end of the year anyway. On my system (Xbox 360) the Guitar Hero controllers and any USB mic will work with Rock Band. If the same is true for the PS2, you could pick up Rock Band and a drum controller next year when the instruments become available separately and save some cash that way.
Good point - Using the headset instead of a mic is cool because that way you can sing and play drums or guitar at the same time if you’re so brave. However, there are parts of a good amount of songs where there are no lyrics and you have to tap the microphone in time as if you’re playing a tambourine or a wood block. I’m not sure how this works if you’re using the headset.
The headset doesn’t seem to take the place of the microphone for me if you plug it into the headset jack in the drums, so you have to plug it into a controller. I’m thinking maybe there’s a button you can press on the controller to mimick the “rhythm tap”, but I haven’t tested that out yet.
I agree. My brother is a drummer and we’ve been playing the game all week. According to him, if you know how to play a song on actual drums, playing the game on expert level is actually the easiest because it doesn’t skip beats or fills.
As a guitar player, expert is somewhat easier on some songs. By shear luck, I manged to rip through the intro to Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive flawlessly on my first attempt. That song is much harder to play on the game than in real life.
I’ve got all the GH games on PS2 and bought an XBox 360 specifically for Rock Band. The drums have not disappointed. It’s a great study break to wail away for a few songs. The drums are built pretty sturdy and haven’t shown any real signs of wear yet – although the current trend with these first-generation drum kits and guitars is high failure rates from normal use. EA has a good replacement policy from what I’ve read. They express-mail a replacement instrument with a box to return your broken one in. They’ve also started giving away free non-Rock Band games with every replacement.
RB is much more fun as a group game, but I still love drumming solo. The downloadable content is great too. I just got the Police pack. Can’t wait for “Who’s Next” to come out in 08.
What sort of issues are people having with the guitar? We’ve played pretty infrequently since we got the game - I’d guess at maybe a total of three hours per week - but I’m noticing that the strum doesn’t always respond anymore. Particularly on very fast passages of repeated notes, about one of every five strums isn’t recognized as such.
Strum was working pretty good, but sometimes it seems the game is a bit of from the sound (I hear you can correct this though). I mostly down-stroked all the notes but there were times where I alternated up/down because my hand was getting tired. Nonetheless, it was fine.
Anyhow, the problem I’ve had with Rock band is the first guitar was broken when we got it. Luckily, we had a GHIII and GHII guitar to keep us plugged in while EA sent us a new one. We get the new one, and it’s worse than the old one. Star power (or whatever the Rock Band term for it is) doesn’t work, stupid strum bar works even worse than the last one. What a pain in the ass. Thirdly, my kick drum pedal final exploded. Cracked straight in half. Maybe played the game a total of ten times. I don’t pound on it or do anything abusive, but when you play songs like Maps or Paranoid on Expert, you’ve just got driving eighths in the kick, so it does take a lot of abuse. Reading the online forums, it seems like lots of people have had this problem.
So, while it is a great game, I do have issues with the hardware.
I have Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2 (I got GH2 first), and I have played the songs in GH3 in Frets on Fire (a freeware PC game that you can import GH tracks into). I have not played Rock Band yet, but I have played a number of the Karaoke Revolution games that use the same system for singing.
I’m probably going to get Rock Band eventually, but I don’t think I’m going to bother with drums. I’m not a very good drummer, and from what I’ve read the drums in Rock Band are very challenging - enough that someone who can play the drums well on the Expert difficulty level should be able to play real drums fairly well. My main reason to get it is so that I can play guitar while my wife sings.
If you aren’t particularly interested in singing or playing drums, I would pass on Rock Band unless there are songs in the track list you really want to play, because I have heard that the guitar parts are not very challenging and a lot of the songs don’t have much guitar in them. I would recommend picking up Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2. I would not get GH3 until you have played GH2 to the point that it’s not challenging anymore, because the difficulty in GH3 is MUCH higher than in previous versions, across all the difficulty levels - I play GH2 on Expert and have beaten all but two songs on that difficulty level, have 5-starred every song on Hard, but in GH3 there are songs that are way beyond my skills. There are songs on Hard that I’d have difficulty beating, that are equivalent to the toughest tracks in GH2, and some tracks are even a bit challenging on Medium. Guitar Hero 3 is really made for people who have mastered the earlier GH games.
The strum bar on my first guitar gave out on me too, it stopped recording downstrokes most of the time. EA 2-day Fedex’d me a new one along with a box with shipping prepaid to send the old guitar back, no questions asked. The drums have already gotten a lot of use between me, my friends, and my two room mates and the kick pedal is still working great.
The hardware may not be the best, but their return policy is about as good as you can hope for.
Yeah, we also get a credit for an EA game as well. They know they fucked up, so they damn well better have a good return policy. Apparently, we can’t submit a request for a second guitar controller until they get the first one back. I’m curious to hear what they say about the kick drum controller. I’m thinking of finding a way to fix up a real kick pedal somehow into a controller. Unless they make the pedal out of metal, I just think I’ll end up breaking it again in a few weeks, anyway.
Just wanted to let folks know that Harmonix confirmed today that they’ve shipped the PS2 bundle of Rock Band to stores, so it should be available at a retailer near you tomorrow, just in time for Christmas. There are scattered reports of people finding the bundles in Target today, even.
