Rock Band - Impressions...

webdanzer · Post by **webdanzer** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:51 am

WOW, some great Rock Band improvements out this week!

* (New!) Music Store: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.

* Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans” achievement.

* More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So” or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.

* Improved phoneme recognition: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or “Blitzkrieg Bop”, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.

* Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.

* Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!

* Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only” wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.

Awesome. I love this game.

http://kotaku.com/369896/

Naples39 · Post by **Naples39** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 10:16 am

webdanzer wrote:WOW, some great Rock Band improvements out this week!

* (New!) Music Store: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.

* Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans” achievement.

* More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So” or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.

* Improved phoneme recognition: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or “Blitzkrieg Bop”, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.

* Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.

* Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!

* Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only” wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.

Awesome. I love this game.

http://kotaku.com/369896/

Sounds like good stuff, paricularly on song previews. One question though--what is phoneme recognition?

Danimal · Post by **Danimal** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 11:03 am

Naples39 wrote: Sounds like good stuff, paricularly on song previews. One question though--what is phoneme recognition?

I believe thats the songs that have the "talking" parts, I could be wrong. for example Sabatoge is completely like that.

webdanzer · Post by **webdanzer** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:20 pm

6 song Boston pack for $10 next week:

“More Than a Feeling” (Master)
“Peace of Mind” (Master)
“Smokin’” (Master)
“Rock & Roll Band” (Master)
“Something About You” (Master)
“Hitch a Ride” (Master)

Gurantsu · Post by **Gurantsu** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 6:37 pm

The Boston pack will be mine!

A friend told me that the updates are now live, and that they rock. I want my 360 back!!!

Danimal · Post by **Danimal** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 7:19 pm

The new store interface is dangerous. I was going through it and like "Oh thats that song I like that" click buy.

Ended up buying 5 songs.

Grrrr

Naples39 · Post by **Naples39** » Sat Mar 22, 2008 10:55 am

webdanzer wrote:6 song Boston pack for $10 next week:

“More Than a Feeling” (Master)
“Peace of Mind” (Master)
“Smokin’” (Master)
“Rock & Roll Band” (Master)
“Something About You” (Master)
“Hitch a Ride” (Master)

Sounds awesome.

sportdan30 · Post by **sportdan30** » Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:21 pm

Amazon has the PS3 version, and I assume the 360 version on sale for $148. Might be a good time for me to bite on this game.

http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2008/03/26/dea ... s-on-sale/

JackB1 · Post by **JackB1** » Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:01 pm

webdanzer wrote:6 song Boston pack for $10 next week:

“More Than a Feeling” (Master)
“Peace of Mind” (Master)
“Smokin’” (Master)
“Rock & Roll Band” (Master)
“Something About You” (Master)
“Hitch a Ride” (Master)

Now THAT"S some damn good DLC!

Can't wait to hit the drums to those tunes.
Are those covers or really Boston?

Naples39 · Post by **Naples39** » Wed Mar 26, 2008 4:33 pm

JackB1 wrote:Now THAT"S some damn good DLC!
Can't wait to hit the drums to those tunes.
Are those covers or really Boston?

All masters I think.

JackB1 · Post by **JackB1** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:27 pm

Played thru all the Boston songs last night on drums/hard and what a blast!

"Smokin" and "Something About You" are great fun. None of these songs are particularly hard but lots of fun nonetheless. When I listen to Boston, especially that 1st album, it immediately takes me back to High School days and makes me very nostalgic

Good stuff!

tjung0831 · Post by **tjung0831** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:48 pm

Just purchased "Hitch a Ride" one of my all time favorite songs....man what a great song that was...great guitar work at the end of that song. By the way those are definitely the original tracks for sure.

Naples39 · Post by **Naples39** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 7:32 pm

I DLed the whole pack, and it's good stuff. The guitar on Smokin is tough!

I still think Gimme Three Steps and Limelight are my favorite DLC songs though in terms of fun to play.

Diablo25 · Post by **Diablo25** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 9:36 pm

Naples39 wrote:I DLed the whole pack, and it's good stuff. The guitar on Smokin is tough!

I still think Gimme Three Steps and Limelight are my favorite DLC songs though in terms of fun to play.

I'm a big fan of Limelight also.

Post by **ScoopBrady** » Mon Mar 31, 2008 5:22 pm

Tomorrow Still Alive is the downloadable track and it is free of charge!

Jack, I'm right where you were a month ago trying to beat Run to the Hills on Hard with the drums. Man it is kicking my ass.

webdanzer · Post by **webdanzer** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 10:40 am

So I finally managed to snap my kick pedal over the weekend.

Do you really need to have a hold of $150 put on your Credit Card to get just the pedal shipped out 2 day?? That's almost the price of two full drum sets!

davet010 · Post by **davet010** » Tue Apr 08, 2008 9:24 am

Not quite an impression, but the pricing in Europe has now been confirmed

£130 for the instruments

plus

£50 for the game

So £180, or $350 to you guys.

EA can shove that, for a start

Naples39 · Post by **Naples39** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:27 pm

Albums are coming!!

http://kotaku.com/381271/rock-bands-fir ... armonix-qa

Today, Harmonix has officially announced the first album that will hit the Rock Band store: Judas Priest's Screaming For Vengeance. Arriving April 22/24 on Xbox 360/PS3, this10-track album will cost $14.99 with individual tracks being offered for $1.99 apiece. Then in May, The Cars' self-titled record will become the second full-album release from Rock Band. The Pixies' Doolittle will follow in June.

We will have a specific announcement about that coming up soon regarding some work that we have coming down the pike with The Who in general that I think people are gonna be pretty happy about...and in general what you're gonna see sorta deep dives with particular artists, where with some artists...of the appropriate stature, you'll see us doing more than whole albums, potentially even entire catalogs.

What kind of schedule will album release be on?
For album releases, in particular, there isn't a set schedule like an album a month...we do want to release albums regularly...generally, the amount of content we release in a week you'll see growing over the course of the year substantially.

JackB1 · Post by **JackB1** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 9:58 pm

PRIEST!!!!

I will buy that album for sure. I played the heck out of it when it originally came out.

MizzouRah · Post by **MizzouRah** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 11:22 pm

My guitar has never really worked well. Really nice how easy it is to get it replaced.

Kissrox · Post by **Kissrox** » Thu Apr 24, 2008 7:48 pm

I'm sure this has been answered but I don't want to read through all 16 pages...but does the GH III Wireless Guitar work in Rock Band. I think I read no somewhere once but I love the style of the GH III guitar more than the Rock Band wireless guitar.

Naples39 · Post by **Naples39** » Thu Apr 24, 2008 8:13 pm

Kissrox wrote:I'm sure this has been answered but I don't want to read through all 16 pages...but does the GH III Wireless Guitar work in Rock Band. I think I read no somewhere once but I love the style of the GH III guitar more than the Rock Band wireless guitar.

Not sure about PS3, but on 360 GH guitars work with Rock Band. Give the Rock Band guitar a chance though--it feels awkward at first but I'm betting once you get used to it you won't want to go back to GH guitars (I don't).

MizzouRah · Post by **MizzouRah** » Thu Apr 24, 2008 9:09 pm

I'm with Kissrox, the wireless guitar from GH 3 is much better than the one from Rock Band.

Brando70 · Post by **Brando70** » Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:12 pm

MizzouRah wrote:I'm with Kissrox, the wireless guitar from GH 3 is much better than the one from Rock Band.

I actually go back and forth. I have the GH II guitar. I like that one better for songs with fast riffs like Queens of the Stone Age because the strum is more responsive. But when there are a lot of fretboard shifts, I like the RB one because my fingers tend to get less lost.

I also dig the RB one for bass since its bigger and feels heavier.

webdanzer · Post by **webdanzer** » Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:34 pm

Brando70 wrote: I actually go back and forth. I have the GH II guitar. I like that one better for songs with fast riffs like Queens of the Stone Age because the strum is more responsive. But when there are a lot of fretboard shifts, I like the RB one because my fingers tend to get less lost.

I do the same (though with the GH III Guitar) for the same reasons, Brando.

...Though I'm usually playing drums.