Slashdot Mirror
Rock Band, Casual Games Headline EA's E3 Offering
The EA focus on family-oriented content, casual games, and expanding the gaming audience echoed the statements made at the Nintendo press conference earlier today. Next Generation has an overview of the EA press conference, which highlighted titles like Boogie and EA Playground. The company's cellphone game lineup also received some attention, and will feature properties such as Madden, Harry Potter, and Bejeweled. EA's ultimate goal is to 'lock up the 200 million casual gamers'. The presentation ended with a long Rock Band session; it was revealed that Metallica will play a heavy hand in the game's lineup. Other tracks shipping with the game at launch include: The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," David Bowie's "Suffragette City," Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive," Rush's "Tom Sawyer," Nirvana's "In Bloom," Stone Temple Pilots' "Vaseline," and Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly."
it was revealed that Metallica will play a heavy hand in the game's lineup
And after the whole Napster deal, we know how heavy-handed Metallica can be.
Ummmm.... is it time to panic yet?
Insert Sig Here
Any word from E3 on a ship date for Duke Nukem Forever?
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
They say Rock Band will ship with "Enter Sandman". Weird. I've never heard of that song. I just hope it's as good as that awesome track I got off of Napster: "3ntar s4ndmn".
The cake is a pie
The game looks quite innovative (surpised that EA has a hand in that) and I really believe that this game will change the way people think about games. After all, Harmonix started as a research group in MIT's Media Lab where they're trying to do stuff like bridge the gap between Second Life and real life. However, I don't think the game will be as successful as it should be.
My prediction is that the game will be released, but it won't be as popular as everyone hopes because of the high entry cost. Sure, I would love to be able to play my favorite music sim with people across the world, but why should I shell out $50-$80 for an electronic drum set or a microphone or a different guitar (because I doubt the SG controller from Guitar Hero will work on this) when I already paid $50 for a Guitar Hero controller that works just fine on Guitar Hero? The casual gamer doesn't want to spend needless amounts of money on peripherals every time you release a new game. Then on top of it, they expect you to pay even more money for extra songs. I don't like this business model and I hope they do something to fix it. Until then, I'll stick to GH3.
You would be hard pressed to find a musician or rock music fan (the target audience of guitar based music games) that has never heard of Rush. Everywhere in the US I have ever lived Rush has received regular airplay.
I'm a Rush fan, but there is a difference between well-known and popular. We all knew the kid who ate paste in school, too; that doesn't mean we liked him. Prog really fell out of favor in/after the 80s, and Rush was viewed as largely appealing to, well, dorks. They seem to have made quite a bit of a comeback in recent years.
And I'm really glad. Their latest album is excellent... much better than their previous one, possibly their best since the late 80s/early 90s. I'm a big prog geek though, so my opinion doesn't really count for much.
I'd like to see prog find its way back... but with bands like Dream Theater now doing dungeons and dragons style lyrics (listen to their new album, if you can stand it) I think that's going to be kind of hard.
At this point, I'd like to see a resurgence of instrumental rock and jazz, but people seem to like their "words", and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon. In the meantime, I'm just happy to see bands like Rush back at the top of their game.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
"Rush was viewed as largely appealing to, well, dorks"
Man, not where I live, I always hung out with people that were in bands, and I dont know of a single person that plays rock music that does not love RUSH.
Most tof the serious RUSH fans I know, are definitly not dorks, and had no problems getting laid etc... but might have a hard time holding a regular job now adays.
I really dont know where you got your idea that RUSH fans were dorks though, somehow I get a mental picture of a guy listening to Winger in high school, and when a guy in a RUSH shirt walks by he thinks to himself "DORKS! Gezzz"
How can it be a rip off if it's developed by the same people (Harmonix) and they still have the original code? Activision bought the "Guitar Hero Franchise" but not the source code. Neversoft had program GH III from the ground up.
I suspect RockBand will Feel more like prior Guitar Heroes just based on that.
I wonder what effect this will have on the sales of GH3. I love GH2, and have two controllers, but would hesitate to buy the next one if only a few months later I could get a game that would allow more friends to join in and probably be twice as fun. Especially, as the cost of adding the drums and mic will not be trivial.
Fuck yeah... been listening to the PT for years now. They've become a surprisingly large inspiration on my own work. I don't care for his voice much, but his vocal harmonies are something to be studied. I don't have their new album yet, as I'm sorta wanting to go back to jazz/fusion and classical material for a bit, but I hear its great, and I'll eventually pick it up.
Although, PT is a lot like Marillion, who have been doing great shit forever.
Oh, I was also on a big Flower Kings kick for about a year there. I was really liking the fusion direction they were taking on in Space Revolver and Unfold the Future. Unfortunately, they've COMPLETELY turned on it, and are back to doing meloncholly, sappy, retro stuff. I'm pretty upset because they really filled a nitch between jazz and prog that not many bands do these days.
Speaking of which, my newest find is Hiromi, a young Japanese jazz piano chick whose stuff sounds like a cross between Chick Corea and Dream Theater.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Heh. Winger wasn't a bad band either (though Kip Winger is no great singer). Beavis and Butthead was pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the demise of their image. You lose a Winger, you gain a Zombie. I'm not sure it was a good tradeoff in the long run, musically, but at least we've gotten a couple of decent horror movies out of the deal.
You're right, there's definitely appeal in the musician crowd. I think that's true for a lot of very complex music. As for Rush's image, it's the same situation as Yes, ELP, etc. The demographic became the D&D crowd when finely-crafted music became unstylish. Watch -SLC Punk- sometime for an amusingly graphic example.
You make some good points, although my beef is that everything on Vapor Trails sounded the same, and it was also reflected in it's extremely high compression, which kept everything at the same volume. That's NOT what progmetal is about, progmetal is about the peaks and valleys, the tension and release.
BTW: Counterparts, a template for ProgMetal? Dream Theater and Fates Warning were already around for quite a few years before that, and DT came out of the docket with a bang with WDADU (even if it didn't sell very well). And I don't understand why you hold Signals as being one of their greatest, Subdivisions, Analog Kid, Weapon, Loosing It are incredible, but everything else on there I find unlistenable. Hold Your Fire is definitely one of my favorites (hint, my original handle was "Prime Mover") as are Presto and Roll the Bones, but I'm also really fond of Perminant Waves too.
Honestly, I've always prefered when bands would eventually move out of their D&D days. Dream Theatre had D&D lyrics for their Majesty demos, and some of WDADU, but even by that time, they were pretty obvious alegories that could be applied to anything. Fates Warning, IMO, only got good after they dropped their D&D lyrics, around Perfect Symmetry... although the only album of there's I think is AAA grade was APSOG, which is one of my favorite albums ever. I'm of the feeling that most bands' best material is mid-career... that's when they tend to start experimenting with a lot more subtlety without going overboard on the mellodrama. My favorite DT album is Six Degrees, for instance.
Yes were etherial and transendental... but their lyrics were nonsensical. Flawed? Most definitely, but they were successful in that they were primarilly about the drama the words provoked, not in telling a litteral story. Great band, a personal favorite.
Okay, the point is, prog has really shitty lyrics, we know that. The music is 90% about the instrumental stuff, but sometimes lyrics have a tendancy to hold back the instrumental material.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Rush is a BIG exception, Rush has great lyrics, Peart is a god. Even though I completely dissagree the Ayn Rand school of thought, Rush definitely is able to make great lyrics out of it. But aside from them, I really don't listen to progrock/metal for its lyrics. Genesis had some witty things back in the day, same with King Crimson, and once in a while DT pens some decent words, but even those I wouldn't call "excellent". Folk music probably has the best lyrics out there, but I'm not interested in the instrumental side of Folk, so it doesn't do much for me. Compared to pop or country, yeah, prog's got some decent stuff, but in the grand scheme of things, most of them come from a musical background and not a litterary one.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.