Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House
by Derek Wilson on October 24, 2008 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Song Difficulty Ratings
With the original, the difficulty category of the song didn't always do a good job of conveying how hard the song would be for any given instrument. Some songs are just difficult on one instrument while others might be hard across the board. It is just a fact of music that writers don't normally consider the difficulty of the music they create (except in as much as it needs to possible for some musician to play it).
Rating the difficulty of each instrument in each song on a scale of zero to six and putting the song in an overall difficulty class seemed like a really good idea. Except Harmonix did a horrible job of rating difficulty per instrument. Because of this the difficulty ratings mean absolutely nothing.
Everlong. Great song. A beast on expert drums.
It is true that different people are good at different things, and thus sometimes it will be easier for one person to play something than it is for another. But even so, it escapes us just how the ratings could be this useless.
Well, there are a couple cases where you know what you are getting. With a rating of zero, the song isn't going to be that hard to play. If you are looking at five devils, it is incredibly likely you'll need to practice quite a bit as it is going to be hard. But everything else is a crap shoot.
Honestly, people tend to like playing songs they like, so difficulty rating isn't a make or break feature. But if we are going to get it, there is no reason not to do it right. As it is, its just a disappointment.
As it isn't really clear how these songs are rated, we can't really comment on how things went wrong. But we do have at least one suggestion for how things could be done that might help.
It might be helpful to have different difficulty ratings for each difficulty level per song. The difficulty doesn't always translate when you move to a different level. Everlong is a perfect example of a song that is almost simplistic on hard but really deserves its five devil rating on expert. Actually getting this information to the gamer might be difficult, but unless the information is useful, it doesn't matter how accessible the data is.
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Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Umm I don't think rockband implies talent.I have no musical talent, and nor to I desire to obtain any musical talent. I can't even read sheet music when someone was teaching me, and it didn't bother me in the slightest bit.
The point of RB is fun. That's it. I used to think that all of these types of games were lame, until a friend brought over Guitar Hero 2. We played it until 3 am, and afterwards I realized that these games were fun (until you had to play lame songs, which is still a fault).
And I agree that this game is to music as FPS is to Military Training; after an intense CS session I certainly am not ready to head to cs_iraq and preventing the terrorist from setting us up the bomb!
explovewhisper - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Rock Band was released on November 3, 2009 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles, supports all existing Rock Band instruments https://nhacchuong68.com/Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Good article...I love RB and RB2, although I will admit with some of the songs I just think "WTF is this song doing in here" and here are SOOO many songs that I want to play on there that are not available.
I wish that there was some way to import songs into the game and define the tracks (or even let the game automatically decide that, although that'd take a lot of programming and remove a profit area from Harmonix with DLC), because frankly even the songs that are on DLC aren't the ones that I want to play. Sure some are there, but not the ones that I crave to play. And I am sure that there are plenty of other people in the same position as myself, and I am also sure that plenty of other people would not like the songs that I want. Thats the joy in everyone having their own invidial tastes (Rammstein is the band that I'd love to see more than anyone else on there for example)...
I remember 1 song on RB2 on expert on guitar was seriously just the green button at a certain interval that was not difficult at all (a lame rappish type song)...it didn't belong there at all! I fell asleep playing it on expert :-/
I don't play the drums often, but I will admit that the pedal from RB1 does frustrate me and the lack of an adjustable chair makes playin git uncomfortable (long legs makes it hard to hit the bedal properly because my knee will be bent at a less than 90 degree angle), so I pretty much just play guitar (or base). It is still fun though and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Jason
webstorm1 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I have a PS3, and there is an option to queue songs for multiple song downloads. You can select Download in the background, so you don't have to wait for any song to download before moving on. Then you just go to the game navigation menu (can't remember the exact name, but it's the one you would use to actually start a game from) and select each song after it has downloaded to install it. I'm guessing this is an Xbox 360 limitation in the online service, so it may even be fixed if anyone cares to do so.Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I couldn't quite figure out on page 1 what the author was trying to say for "You what you would if you..." slightly under the picture.Jason
Gary Key - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Corrected now, had a HTML tag error there...Devo2007 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Instead of saying "The Premium Drum Kit" I think you should specifically mention that it's the ION Drum Rocker somewhere in the first half of page 5 -- it made things rather confusing when you kept saying "Premium Drum Kit" and then randomly referring to the kick pedal as the "ION Kick Pedal."DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
thanks for the advice. i updated the page.Diosjenin - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I have to thank you for the thoroughness with which you've dissected the drum kit(s) in particular. I don't actually own either 1 or 2, but I've played the first one a few times and the critiques you gave of the first set I feel are quite accurate, so I certainly trust the critiques you give of the new one(s).I do have to ask - is there an option to designate the hi-hat as the leftmost 'drum' rather than the one second from the left on the non-premium kit (where I presume you can just switch the pads)? If there's an option in either 1 or 2 to change this, do let me know, but I haven't ever played on a system where that's been the case, and not being able to play with my right arm crossed over my left remains my primary qualm with the drum setup as a whole - even above the horrible bass pedal feel and construction...
DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
you can't reassign pads and must rely on what the programmers defined for each song.this is definitely the most frustrating thing for me. having the flexibility of the premium kit here is nice as you can, for whatever song, make it "right" usually by switching the plugs in the brain for the yellow and red pads.
it still just makes me want to buy a real electronic drum kit and a kickbox though.