Tag Archives: Games

Guitar Cam – Take One

You can safely file this under the “things that dominate small corners of my brain” department.

Rock Band + Flip Mino HD + poster putty = this:

The focal point is in a bad place, and the buttons on this thing are too loud. All I did was take the Mino and slap it on the headstock of the fake guitar with some putty. If I wanted to take this all the way, I’d design some kind of a mount for it to elevate the camera and get some angle on the buttons, and then a counter-weight for the body of the guitar (it added a not-insignificant amount of weight to the headstock).

Let's Get Ready To Rummmmbllllle (via Penny Arcade)

This E3 has been difficult to observe usefully from afar, because merely watching doesn’t convey the data it used to: so much of the offering is directly experiential. People are waving things, or they’re waving their arms in front of things, or they’re looking at magical screens that shit is popping right out of. It would be like if a person came out and started talking about chocolate, and then ate some chocolate, and then walked off stage. That is not data. There’s so much conjecture that whatever you come up with is almost hopelessly attenuated.

This is very true of what I’ve seen of E3 from here. Motion controllers, insanely expensive 3D setups for your living room, and other insanity are ruling the day.

There will be more posts on this—of course—but hardware aside, the games that are being revealed make me very interested in the next 12 months or so.

As a bonus, the comic from yesterday is quite vulgar but also quite funny, and is a very apt description of what the three major press conferences were like at E3.

(via Penny Arcade – Let’s Get Ready To Rummmmbllllle.)

Rock Band 3 Squier Stratocaster plays both real and virtual guitar… at the same time (via Engadget)

As unfair as it is, what initially gave us hesitation about Mad Catz and Squier’s Stratocaster Pro guitar controller was that, well, it’s Fender’s second-tier brand. Despite these prejudices from our youth, Harmonix pretty much sold us on it with one pretty badass trick: the ability to simultaneously play Rock Band 3 on Pro Expert and rock the same tune through an amplifier.

Watch the video to see it in action. This is a crazy step forward for music video games and could be a downright interesting way to teach people how to play guitar.

(via Rock Band 3 Squier Stratocaster plays both real and virtual guitar… at the same time (video) — Engadget.)

Rock Band 3 Reveal (via USA Today)

Really, the main focus of Rock Band 3 development was finding new ways to experience the music and actually doubling down, if you will, on our investment in compelling game play.

“We are adding a new instrument (a 25-key, fully functioning MIDI keyboard) and we’re adding a whole new mode, which is designed basically to answer that staleness factor.”

The result, he says, is “an experience that is both accessible to players who are just getting into this thing, and builds something for the hard-core player who is maybe a little bored with where music games are.”

This is one of the weirdest places I can think of for this news to be broken, but this has me so re-excited about music games. Stuff to look out for:

  • Drop-in, drop-out game play, change instruments or difficulty levels without having to back out to a menu.
  • A way to filter the songs in your library (which is getting huge in the Markel household).
  • Three-part harmonies.
  • 25-key keyboard instrument added.
  • Pro mode, with new guitar controllers with actual strings, drums where the cymbals are different hits than the drum pads, and two-octave keyboard tracks.

That screaming sound you heard was my wallet, begging for mercy.

(via ‘Rock Band 3’: What’s new, what’s notable – USATODAY.com.)

Pixelated Playing Cards

I will own some of these.

Mario Trump cards trump most other cards — Joystiq.