Tag Archives: music games

Time to Rock (Band)

No light show tonight, just drums.

Preview: Rock Band 3 Pro mode

Rock Band Pro mode is all about potential. It’s about the individual player’s potential to move on up to the next, optional level of difficulty in the game, and, eventually, the player’s potential to make real music with a real instrument. And as Harmonix reps told us, it seems “designed to show the potential of what the music category can do in gaming” — if anything can answer that question of whether music games can translate to the real world, this mode will do it.

My anticipation for the new challenges inherent in Pro Mode is at a ridiculously high level. It’s like taking Expert in Rock Band 2 and then pushing it over a cliff.

But it’s a really awesome cliff.

(via Preview: Rock Band 3 Pro mode | Joystiq.)

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).

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.)