Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House
by Derek Wilson on October 24, 2008 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Instruments: The Drums
The Rock Band 2 drum kit is definitely an improvement over the Rock Band 1 kit. Unfortunately, the area that needed the most TLC, the kick pedal, really isn't that much better. While disappointing, we definitely prefer the RB2 kit to the RB1 kit.
Looking down on the RB2 kit.
Both kits uses pads (called triggers) that the gamer hits with drum sticks in response to the game. The pads are statically mounted on a frame with an XBox 360 controller in the center. There is one kick pedal that sits below the pads and is use by lifting it up and pressing it down to simulate playing a kick drum on a real kit. While the RB1 pedal is flimsy plastic, the RB2 pedal is slightly reinforced.
This is the new pedal. Much like the old one.
One of the weak spots, however, is the hinge that attaches the moveable part of the pedal to its base. This is where one of our RB1 pedals broke (The other pedal broke in half), so while the RB2 pedal will be less prone to a certain type of breakage, it is by no means much of an improvement in terms of absolute strength of the pedal. It does seem that they made the pedal a little "softer" (the spring doesn't seem to push as hard) so there may be less stress on the hinge, but this does sacrifice the feel of the pedal slightly.
Squishy spring feels like slamming your foot into dry sand on the beach. Not satisfying.
But we still like the RB2 kit more, and here's why.
Mmmm ... Tasty bouncy rubber covered pads. Not perfect, but much better than the first attempt.
First, the pads feel much better. They are more responsive and at least a little quieter. The tone of a stroke (that's what it's called when you hit a drum with a stick) on the pads is much lower pitched and much easier on the ears as well. It's less distracting and allows the music to be less affected. The framing feels a little more sturdy than the RB1 kit as well, but we never really had any trouble with the the original kit in that regard so it may not be that much of an issue.
Can you see the bubble on the red pad? What's up with that?
And while there are some advantages with the new kit, there is a bit of an issue with the pads as well. Either the top layer of our pad shifted a bit and bunched in the middle or the softer rubber used stretched and dimpled in the middle. Which ever thing happened, we've got a slight bubble of rubber on our red pad. And this was only after a week or two of usage, as we switched to the ION kit as soon as we received it.
Other bonuses are the fact that the pads are somewhat pressure sensitive and the RB2 kit allows for the addition of cymbals for the yellow, blue and green triggers. Though these symbols count as the same color and you can hit either to play the game, when doing fills or playing in the drum trainer or freestyle modes, hitting the cymbal pads will produce cymbal sounds. The yellow blue and green pads act as toms and the yellow blue and green cymbals act as cymbals (hi-hat, ride and crash respectively). The ION kit comes with cymbal pads, but it stands to reason that because the RB2 kit has connectors for such devices that there will be an add on available at a later date.
The cymbal additions would be great for some things, as putting the yellow hi-hat cymbal to the left of the red snare (for right handed gamers) would put it in the position most drummers are used to. The advantage of this, however, is totally destroyed by the fact that the game sometimes changes the mapping of different cymbals and toms to different colors depending on the song and/or difficulty level. This means the hi-hat isn't always the hi-hat (sometimes the snare is the hi-hat) and sometimes the ride is actually an open hi-hat (which is even more frustrating).
The down side of pressure sensitivity is that it isn't all that sensitive. The range of volume is from sort of loud to loud and not much in between. While it does make for a little tiny bit of dynamic control, it simply does not add anything to the experience. It is a step in the right direction, but we need whole lot more flexibility to get excited about this feature.
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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.