I’m not a gamer or anything- just a 40-year-old mom of two teenaged gamer boys. I LOVE this game, seriously. Where else can you grab a microphone and sing your guts out, and not only are your teenaged boys not horrifyingly embarrassed, but they are actively encouraging and applauding you? I can’t sing in real life, but in RBII I* rock*.
I especially like to sing *Alice In Chains *’ Man In The Box and Radiohead’s Creep. Did not know that they were coming out with The Offspring- will definitely have to get me some of that.
Who knew that music from the early 90’s would help my teens and I to bond, but it sure has!
Okay, dopers, I’ve created a band called “The Straight Dope”. I know, highly creative. I haven’t quite figured this out yet. I think you have to request to be a friend, then I accept, and then I can invite you to play in the band or something.
So send me a friend request if you’d like (“Atlastripped”), and we’ll try it out whenever a couple of us are around at the same time.
. Singing I’m not sure yet - my friend says RB2 has much easier singing on difficult levels but I haven’t played it yet.
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It sure seems to be so far for me, anyways. My husband and I had about 90+% of RB1 completed on expert with me on vocals and him on guitar, and I have far fewer songs I struggle with on RB2. However, we’re doing mostly hard on RB2 while we learn the songs, but it’s still rare for me to dip below the low 90%'s on most songs.
I finally figured out how to get my RB1 drums to register all the strikes on my red and blue pads. I just put a clamp on the top of each poad and now I can play the 16th+ notes that come up in Expert.
All in all RB2 is better than RB1 but I really wish you could ban certain songs from showing up in mystery setlists. I can kill 95% of the songs on Hard but the ones I can’t beat I just can’t beat and it aint changing (I don’t have time to waste spending time in practice mode on a video game). So when At the Gates or Won’t get Fooled Again drop randomly in at the end of an 8 songrandom setlist I get killed and it sucks.
Everlong on expert is ridiculous. I want to see someone 100% it on Expert. I Can’t even get .5 through it.
Oh, also, after I ported all my RB1 songs over I found that my fills have a HUGE delay in them. The rest of the drums gon fine in time with teh beat but the freestyling fills always have a large delay in them now. I can play in freestyle mode with no delays but the fills during songs have bad delays on them.
I haven’t seen that. I had a delay that was due to the Dolby Digital processing. I turned that off, and delays are pretty much gone.
I agree completely about the need to remove some songs from the random setlists. I’m always scared to pick a random setlist on Expert, because I don’t want to play four songs and then find out the fifth is ‘Green Grass and High Tides’ (I imported my RB1 songs into RB2). So I wind up having to play those setlists on hard, and some of the songs are just ridiculously easy and boring then.
When my wife (aka tygre who posted earlier in this thread) and I were going through the RB1 tour I accidentally picked Expert for a random setlist. The last song of the setlist was freakin’ “Last Train to Clarksville.” Whoever designed that one for Rock Band was EVIL.
I heard from one of my student workers that you can delete RB1 songs from the RB2 cache if you did the import – I have not tried this, but it’d take care of the GGAHT problem, if it works.
What do people have against Green Grass and High Tides? I think it’s fun. Edit: Come to think of it, I passed it on hard, not expert. I’m guessing that’s where the complaint comes from…
Anyway, I have my new headset and my xbox connected to the interwebs. I want to try to get an SDMB band going. Anyone interested in giving it a try this evening?
By the way, we ended up buying the ION Drum Rocker this week. It’s taking some time to reprogram our brains, but I suspect in a week or two we’ll be back up to our old skill levels.
Our Rock Band party (pre ION) last week was a success! We had new three guys over, two of whom we’d never met before (my husband invited a coworker who brought along–with prior permission–his roommate and best friend). With those three guys and two of our gamer friends, we had seven people. Several were brave enough to sing. Pizza, beer, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, snacks, and great fun.
(Plus, one of the guys thought I was super cool for being a gamer. :))
(And I don’t like GG&HT because it’s ~10 minutes long).
Setup is fast and simple. You’ll spend about half your time just getting the drum pads and cymbals adjusted, though, but since it lets you put the drums at the most comfortable position for you, it’s worth taking the time to get them just right. The set is, not surprisingly, bigger than the core drum set. The cymbals are nice and responsive, and using them actually feels more natural. The hardest thing right now is re-learning how to play, because the high hat (yellow) is above and to the left of the snare (red), but the notes are still the same on the screen (red/yellow/blue/green). So when you see the red notes, you have to remember to hit it with your right hand (assuming you’re not playing with your hands crossed), not your left. I’m used to the bass pedal being tied to what my right hand is doing, not my left.
The core pads are still there and still in the same order, so you can completely ignore the cymbals if you want. The bass pedal is much more responsive and less tiresome, and it’s all metal and feels very sturdy. It’s louder, though. Makes a sort of clicking noise. The drum pads are really terrific: larger, have great rebound, and quieter.
You guys are killing me. It comes out for the PS3 on Sunday, but we’re having a bunch of people over Saturday evening, and I’m praying someone screws up and puts it out for sale early. We’ve got GameStop, Best Buy, Walmart and Target all within a mile of our house, so it’s not impossible…
God, I want the ION drumset. But I think the PS3 doesn’t get it until December.
I found Rock Band 2 for the PS3 on Wednesday at Meijer’s (a midwest cleaner, better Wal-Mart), which worked out perfectly as I was buying supplies to host some out-of-town friends.
