spacing hack

yelyah

solo piano 20101218

My copy of Rock Band 3 arrived yesterday.

I played a whole bunch yesterday and so far here are my thoughts:

  • the new pro mode justifies the purchase price for me. I play on a real electronic drum kit (as opposed to those designed specifically for games like Rock Band) and it's always bothered me that I'm playing "wrong". Like I play the hihat and crash cymbals on tom drums instead of their appropriate hat/cymbal. I've made attempts to play the appropriate things in appropriate places but it never stuck.

Part of the problem was that the crash cymbal is to my left on a real kit and is the farthest right pad in rockband and is also displayed that way. So basically, the display says "go right", I have to think "go left", which mostly wasn't a problem until the blue pad got thrown in there. This was also partially a problem with the hats - played as a tom, the hat is to the right of the snare -- played at the appropriate location, it's to the left, which also runs counter to how Rock Band displays it.

Second was that I would have to eyeball a part and process what the appropriate pad was (like is this green a crash cymbal or a floor tom part).

Pro mode resolves my second issue because now the tom/cymbal parts are properly separated and that's been enough motivation to go ahead and just tough out the right<->left brain confusion for everything else.

  • BAD VERY BAD. They removed the 50% and 60% practice speeds. I have no clue why. To me, they don't seem to gain anything with this move. Unless, they were dumb enough to generate new audio for every single practice level - so separate files for 50,60,70,80, and 90, as opposed to just 1 file that's been timestretched appropriately. I was hoping they'd add MORE practice levels. There are plenty of expert level songs where I've wished that there was a 40% level. I'm really hoping that this is something that they could add in a patch.

  • ANNOYING. Yeah, I went through this before with RB1->RB2, but it annoys the hell out of me that I have to pay for my content twice. I believe it was $5 to export your RB1 songs. RB2's cost is up to $10. I'm sure I'll eventually fork over the cash, but I've got enough songs right now between RB1 and RB3 to make me happy.

  • keyboards. Finally! Right now though, I don't have any way to play them and I'd really rather get a chance to see what the gameplay is like personally before I spend even more dough on this game.

Do you play Rock Band?