Rock Band

On Rocking Out

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Blaugust Post #26

I’m quite likely to pick up Rock Band 4 whenever that comes out, the announcement that my instruments and previously purchased tracks will continue to work was somewhat influential here. Even with varying skill levels, it makes for a very fun party game. The expansion of the single player mode helps too. They’re dropping pro guitar mode, but I never used that in RB3. (According to metrics they released, I’m far from alone.)

On Rocking Out

At the same time, Guitar Hero Live is coming out this year, and I’m not sure who the target audience is. It’s guitar-only, uses a different controller than all previous games, and abandons the colorful atmosphere of previous Guitar Hero and Rock Band games in favor of showing a live audience. When you add the tracklist included with the announcement to this, I can only conclude that it’s for someone who isn’t me. (They’ve since added tracks that I’d be more interested in playing, as well as vocals. There may be hope for this one yet.)

On Rocking Out

It’s 2008 all over again, but I’m OK with this. I suspect we won’t end up with mountains of unsold guitars in stores this time.

#Blaugust Day 26: I’m a Rocker. I Rock Out

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I've never thought of myself as particularly musically inclined. More generally I've never had a high opinion of my own creativity. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that a lot of that is just my own insecurity. Everything I create tends to seem trite or derivative because I'm fully aware of what my inspirations were. There's also the fact that I tend to be more comfortable following established guidelines than having complete creative freedom. I think that's a lot of why I don't really have any difficulty with Blaugust, but the rest of the year my blog has tended to wither. I definitely lean more lawful than chaotic.

In any case, one of the game series I've been a big fan of for a while now is Rock Band (and Guitar Hero before it). I know it's not 'actually playing music' but it's a lot of fun, and I'm actually pretty good at it. I play guitar on Expert difficulty by default, and it's only the very hardest songs that give me any trouble.

#Blaugust Day 26: I'm a Rocker. I Rock Out
I'm lookin' at you, Steely Dan. You know what you did.

Rock Band 4 is on the way, coming out in just a couple months. It's only on the current generation of consoles though, so if I want it I'll have to finally break down and purchase either an XBox One, or a PS4. By default I lean toward the PS4; I'm much happier with PSN than XBox Live, and historically XBox exclusives tend to be shooters I'm not interested in anyway. But there's a catch. All of your purchased tracks for previous Rock Band games work with Rock Band 4, but only in the same console family. All of my tracks are on the 360. And that's a lot of tracks.

I had been extra torn about this because the other upcoming current gen game I actively want is Kingdom Hearts 3, which I had thought was going to be PS4 exclusive. Looking around however, it looks like it was announced on Xbox as well (though as a port from the PS4 version, so....). So it looks like I'll be getting an Xbox One. I don't know if it'll be right when Rock Band 4 comes out; I'll likely wait until around Christmas to see if I can find a good deal.