E3 2010 Impressions: Music Games

If you’re looking for information about the rhythm games shown off at E3, stop in here for everything you’d want to know.

Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (Neversoft/Activision)

Activision didn’t really have public displays this year, so many people were unable to get their hands on the new Guitar Hero title; fortunately, I was able to get an appointment for Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock early on Thursday. This is Neversoft’s last Guitar Hero title before the reins are handed over to Vicarious Visions, and they’re trying to make it a memorable one by taking the series back to its roots.

One of the major features is the Quest mode, which is replacing the standard Career progression with things like a proper story. A rocking demigod has been encased in stone by an evil force, and now you need to play as some classic Guitar Hero characters (Johnny Napalm, Axel Steel) and unlock their rocker powers, transforming into Warriors of Rock. You’ll play through eight different chapters, reminiscent of venues in the older games, and you’ll continually play as different rockers, unlocking new rocker powers.

The powers are a focus of the quest mode, and they’re all designed to help you get your multiplier up for lots and lots of stars, which will be how you progress; there are no scores in quest mode. One character can have a maximum multiplier of 6x as opposed to the standard four, while another person’s power gives them a minimum 2x multiplier; once you unlock their warrior-ness, the powers upgrade themselves. Each character also has special setlists tailored to them in their chapters; Johnny Napalm, the punk rocker, features punk music like the Offspring or Buzzcocks.

As you progress through Quest mode (narrated by Gene Simmons of KISS fame), you’ll be able to play with any number of instruments to increase your star count; once you unlock the final power (all the others combined) and play with four players at once, you can see star counts of up to 40 stars per song, as opposed to the previous maximum of six. Rocking out with four people while your multipliers go completely insane is quite the fun experience, and they do go insane.

Apart from the new Quest mode, there’s what Neversoft is calling Quickplay+. In addition to the normal playing of songs with whoever and whatever instruments, each song in the game has 13 different Guitar Hero 5-esque challenges to complete, and each one gives you even more stars; there are a total of 30 different challenges a song can have. Not only do the regular songs have challenges, but DLC and imported tunes will as well, for thousands of challenges to check out and stars to earn.

There’s also something new called Power Challenges, where you can pick two powers from Quest mode and apply them to yourself, in order to get as high a score as you can on a separate Power Challenge leaderboards. Speaking of leaderboards, you can now “target” particular scores on the leaderboards; selecting a score instantly takes you to the song, and the game will tell you how close you are to your target score as you play. If you manage to beat someone’s score, you can send them a neener-neener message and challenge them to try and best you back. You can also sort songs in more ways, including an alphabetical sort within another type of sort, like genre; on top of that, the game can recommend you songs to play or download, based on what you like to play most often.

So how is the soundtrack, one of the most important parts? From what I’ve seen, this is one of the best game soundtracks we’ve seen in years, with tracks like “Wish” by Nine Inch Nails, “Psychosocial” by Slipknot, “Interstate Love Song” by Stone Temple Pilots, “Money For Nothing” by Dire Straits, and even epics like “Bohemian Rhapsody”. In addition, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine has written a new song for the game’s final climax, “Sudden Death”, which features truly insane guitar work even for him. While Guitar Hero 5 disappointed me with its soundtrack, I’m very excited to check out the tunes on this new game. Overall, Warriors of Rock is looking like it’s going to be an excellent entry in the music game genre, trying to bring back the simpler fun of the original titles, and I think it has a good chance to succeed.

Rock Band 3 (Harmonix/EA)

While the new Guitar Hero game is celebrating the state of the music game, Harmonix is trying to push it places it’s never been before with the upcoming Rock Band 3. There are plenty of big things to talk about with this game, and I’m going to start with the new instrument, Keys. Keys are awesome. They’re difficult to get used to, at first, but Harmonix has put together a fairly easy-to-read interface that makes a lot of sense to anyone who’s studied a keyboard or a piano. I never tried normal mode, but you’re basically playing one of five to seven keys in a certain color range, like guitar; even during Pro mode, though, the interface is easy to get used to, and I found myself playing quite decently even on my first try, with the exception of the ending piano solo for “In the Meantime”.

Speaking of which, Pro mode! Harmonix has done what everyone joked that they would do, but never thought they actually would: you’re actually playing a real guitar, a real keyboard, and real drums, more or less. Pro keys mode is pretty self-explanatory: the controller is a full two-octave keyboard, so when they show you a specific key in a specific color range, you play it (the chart scrolls left and right to get both octaves on there). If you learn a song on expert Pro mode keys, you have learned the piano part for that song; sit down at a piano and you’ll play it back perfectly if your muscle memory is good. That’s not just some sound bite, that’s how the keyboard works, I can vouch for it. It will take a little bit of a time investment, I think, just so you can relate the spacing of the keys on screen to the spacing of the keys on the actual keyboard; I found myself looking down a bunch at first.

The pro drums work fine as well, and require less of an investment; you just need to grab yourself some cymbals and you’re good to go. Pro drums mode will force you to play either a drum or a cymbal, using a special cymbal icon instead of the standard Jolly Rancher you’re familiar with; I got to try my hand at that as well, and I didn’t feel it was too difficult to distinguish a cymbal from a drum, but I do have a lot of experience with the drums so my opinion may not be the best. Either way, you can play Pro mode on any difficulty, not just expert, so you can work your way up to the full drum part if you like. My only major concern is something brought up by prominent Rock Band player azuritereaction, which is how exactly Harmonix would chart a section where you play, for instance, a floor tom and a crash cymbal, each of which would require the green gem.

The most amazing thing, by far, is the introduction of Pro guitar. There are going to be two Pro guitars available from the start, for around $150 each, and you can put your finger on any fret for any string; either there will be a button there, or there will be an actual guitar string. Either way, you also have six strings to strum, and the game can detect quite well what you’re doing. As with the other Pro modes, you can play Pro guitar from easy to expert, and once you’re on Pro expert guitar, you’re playing the real guitar part.

Instead of five lanes on the screen, you’ve got six strings, and each icon coming down has a number on it indicating what fret you need to be pressing down on. This is something that will definitely take me a little while to get used to, but the end product is you learning how to play guitar for real. Take that, jealous YouTube commenters! Not only that, but the guitar controllers can function as actual guitars if you plug them into an amp; you can actually play the guitar in-game, and on an amp, AT THE SAME TIME. Harmonix is seriously stepping up their game with this new mode, and I can’t wait to give it a try, though the high price point means I might have to.

Besides that, we have other additions, notably three-part harmonies as featured in The Beatles: Rock Band. The game has a variety of achievements and goals scattered throughout all the game’s modes. The tour mode has been revamped, so you can go online and play through a complete tour of maybe only a few hours, depending on how much time you have; the tour can actually be completed, and there are several you can try out depending on your mood. When you’re in quick play mode, not only can you combine as many search options as you want (“DLC classic rock songs from the 70′s that allow you to play Keys” is now a viable filter), but you can put together setlists and save them, then hand them off to other people. Like on Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, Rock Band 3 can recommend you songs to download and buy based on how you rate the songs you play (one to five lighters).

The last useful addition is what they’re calling the “overshell”, which is a system for each player to adjust individual options, dropping in and out if they want, without forcing everybody in the game to go back to a specific menu or something else similar. A little window will pop up at the bottom of the game, allowing you to select options there while other things happen around you on the screen. As a frequenter of Rock Band parties, the ability to stop some guy on the drums from sending everyone back to the main menu while screwing around is very welcome; the rep giving the demonstration said the same thing, actually.

So we’ve seen the gameplay; does the music complement it just as well? Yes, it does. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is in this game as well, but there are plenty more great tunes like “Get Free” from the Vines, “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake, “Dead End Friends” by Them Crooked Vultures, “Walkin’ on the Sun” by Smashmouth, “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne, and plenty of other songs you always heard but never knew the name to but you loved them anyway. Harmonix has never disappointed before, but they look like they’re really going the extra mile for Rock Band 3. Not to mention the nearly 2,000 downloadable songs that will be available once the game launches; nobody who plays Rock Band 3 will ever be able to complain about an inadequate setlist. There’s almost nothing about the game that I’m not looking forward to, and you can expect more about the game from me in the future.

Power Gig: Rise of the SixString (745 Studios)

After talking about the Pro modes that Harmonix is bringing to Rock Band 3, this review game round-up would not be complete without talking about Power Gig: Rise of the SixString, which I stopped by and tried out. There’s only a few songs known on the setlist, but they’ve got some good tunes, like “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour, or the inimitable “Layla” by Derek and the Dominoes. The setlist won’t support poor gameplay, though, and unfortunately, Power Gig hasn’t given me a whole lot of hope.

The guitar does indeed have six strings on it, and if you were to plug it into an amplifier, you would be able to properly shred like it was a normal guitar. The demos available, though, didn’t really light my fire. They didn’t even utilize the guitar to its full potential; you basically put your hand on any string along one of five colored frets, then strum any string when the color hits the strum line. If this sounds familiar, good, because this is exactly how Guitar Hero plays; the demo booth didn’t show even the slightest use of the six strings on the guitar. I’m told that the final game will be utilizing all six strings and proper frets (and I believe it to some degree, there were way more colors than five on the fretboard), but when Harmonix is showing off a superb video game guitar experience elsewhere in the LACC, you need to bring your best, and Power Gig didn’t.

Instead, they brought a nightmarishly bad set of drums. I’m told the drums are in the “alpha” stage, and that had better be the case because they were terrible. You don’t actually hit any pads; you set a drum device on the floor, and then you air drum over one of four colored pads on the device, which will sense where your stick is and activate the proper drum. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, but I found that I had a number of problems getting the machine to register some hits, like the green or blue pads; at other times, it would hit too many pads, and I would go slightly mad.

Even if they did work perfectly, though, it’s built on a flawed premise, because air drumming hurts. When you don’t have a pad to hit with your stick, your wrist has more work to do, because you have to stop the drumstick and pull it back also, a job which you normally share with a drum or a drum pad. As a result, you can’t play as well without pads there, and you’ll tire out more quickly, which certainly was the case with me. In their current form, the drums are completely flawed, and until they’re revamped completely I can’t see myself enjoying them nearly as much as the Rock Band drum kit I have on hand now.

To be fair, the singing does look like it works alright, but I didn’t get a chance to try it. One and a half out of three, though, is hardly a power player in the rhythm game genre. Power Gig has a way to go before it’s a game worthy of a large monetary investment, and frankly I don’t think it’s going to be able to catch up to the powerhouse game Harmonix has up their sleeve.