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Guitar Hero Developer Announces Rock Band
figgen writes "Gamers and music fans have been waiting on details for the next Harmonix project, now that the company has been purchased. The development team behind Guitar Hero announced Rock Band via USA Today. The title is coming to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and will expand on the concept by adding singing and drumming into the mix. 'With MTV as a partner, Harmonix was able to sign deals with the major forces in the music publishing industry and has access to the master recordings of music from popular artists. Electronics Arts is also involved, and will use its global reach to help distribute the game.' GameSpot had a chance to sit down with Harmonix's Alex Rigopulos and EA Partners' David DeMartini to talk about the upcoming title."
I can't read TFA from work, but does it mention what the single player options are? The coverage on GamesAreFun.com indicated that the proposed solution to not having enough people locally to form a band on a regular basis is to do so online. That's good and all for those people who like online play, but all the friends i have who might be interested in playing a game like this are local, and when they're not available i'm not really interested in trying to find random strangers on the net to play with. So is there a single player option or are you just out of luck in that case?
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1) I'm a non-PS2 player that heard about Guitar Hero and knew it was highly regarded without ever playing it. I had never heard of Guitar Freaks until after I had played Guitar Hero. So there's a marketing issue, at the very least.
2) Apparently, other guitar games lack the over-the-top stereotyping of the characters presented in the game that GH has. I've not played any of the others, but I would assume that the "fun level" just isn't the same without the atmosphere GH builds.
3) Guitar Freaks uses a different control scheme (and from what I gathered from the description, IMHO, it's probably "clunky").
I'm worried about the singing aspect. While it's lots of fun to use a simple row of controller buttons to trigger pre-recorded power chords and sound like a pro, there's really no way to amateur-proof singing. I am not a fan of "Karaoke Revolution," or just plain Karaoke for that matter.
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You're trolling, but I'm gonna bite anyhow.
Yeah, the music lessons and years of practice don't enter into the equation at all, eh? Not everyone is a musical god and can just look at an instrument and play it. The non-musicians of the world sometimes actually enjoy to pretend to make music in a game environment.
Games are for having fun, and Guitar Hero really hit a chord (haha) with some people. They obviously expect that Rock Band will, too.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You can pick up a guitar, and learn to play in a few years of actual practice or you can have fun with Guitar Hero after 2 or 3 minutes of figuring out the controller.
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Serious question. How do they expect to make this work?
I'm a fan of the Guitar Hero series, my wife loves it too and her girlfriends really enjoy the Singstar series of games. We were discussing a 'Band Hero' style game a few nights ago while they belted out some crap pop songs, but how is this going to work, honestly?
Two people playing Guitar Hero takes up a whole lot of screen real estate, as does a pair of people singing together. How are they going to combine the two and somehow add drums to the mix?
I'd love it to happen, but honestly I don't see how this is going to work terribly well. Even on our gaming display (not massive, but 42") it would get very crowded, very quickly with instructions, guides, scoring, etc..etc...etc..