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Edit: The MTV Multiplayer Blog now has a write up of using GH:WT drums with Rock Band too.

I’m still of the opinion that Harmonix make the most fun music software, and a lot of veteran players agree with me (except Eurogamer, who said GH3 was ‘better in every way’ than GH2, which IMO is total nonsense). However, Red Octane tend to make good hardware - personally although I own both I much prefer the Rock Band Strat to the GH3 Les Paul, but I know I’m in a minority there even among RB fans. The GH:WT drums have been getting some very good reviews, despite a few sensitivity issues which sound like they’re being addressed (Activision is going to allow you to download a PC-based software package that you can use to tweak the sensitivity on the drums, which is pretty damn cool).

Therefore, given the cross-compatibility between the instruments now - on PS3 GH:WT drums don’t work on RB2 yet but that sounds like it’s being fixed - what would be the best route for drum hardware, assuming Rock Band 2 is going to be your main choice of software? Does the cross-compatibility really work in practice, and is it the best route even if it does?

Firstly, here’s a video of someone using GH:WT drums with RB2:

Sounds like it works pretty well, the hardware is obviously good and it functions in RB2 mostly the way you’d expect. Maybe a little confusing in the mapping, since it’s designed for a different game, and it’s a real shame that only one cymbal does anything (the hi-hat); the crash cymbal doesn’t work. Also he mentions like most people that the weak point of the GH:WT drums is the pedal, since it’s plastic rather than metal like the RB2 pedal, and some people find it moves around a bit too much. I’m guessing that mods will appear for that though, just like they did for the weaknesses in the RB1 drums.

An alternative to get a comparable version of the functionality is to use the RB2 drums and mod them with cymbals. The RB2 kit has 3 cymbal inputs, and several companies produce optional add-ons (Mad Catz officially, other companies unofficially), like this (this is the official set):

The difference here is that you’ve had to buy the cymbals separately, but all 3 of them actually work with RB2 instead of just the hi-hat as with the GH:WT drums. but, of course it costs you a little extra (although that could be offset by not having to buy a pedal reinforcer since RB2’s pedal is already metal).

Personally I don’t think I’ll switch my modded drums just yet, which work well, unless they die - at which point I’ll have to consider whether to go down the RB2, GH:WT or Ion drumset path. But for those buying hardware soon, assuming RB2 being the main software you use, the pros/cons would seem to stack up like this:

Obviously the Ion is out there on its own, but when comparing the RB2 and GH:WT kit it’s actually closer than I thought. I expected GH:WT drums to be a no-brainer, but the fact that in practice only one cymbal works with RB2, plus the fact that you’ll probably want to mod the pedal anyway, makes it a much closer race.

My conclusion - I think if you’re not the modding type, then the GH:WT drums would be a better bet out of the box - even if only one cymbal works with RB2, it’s still raised so will probably make it feel more realistic than RB2’s kit out of the box - and presumably you just hope you don’t snap the pedal (and experience with RB1 suggests some might). However, if you’re looking for more long-term and are willing to do a little modding and add the cymbals to RB2, I think the RB2 kit looks a little better, because you can get up to 3 cymbals working the way they should and the mapping from software to what you play is clearer. Also, although within the game the cymbals just duplicate the pads to retain compatibility, in the drum trainer they are all separate inputs (so a max of 8 separate inputs compared to 5 on the GHWT kit when used with RB2); kick pedal, 1 snare, 3 toms, hi-hat, crash and ride cymbals) so if you’re looking to learn how to play drums properly it’s a pretty good bet if you don’t want to splash out on a real drumkit (or the Ion). There’s also the possibility that in future Harmonix games they might start adding gameplay elements for these separate cymbals too. I think if my RB1 modded drums die, that’s what I’d go for, unless I’m feeling flush enough to go large with the Ion kit, because I don’t mind spending a little extra to mod my drums (as I’ve done already). As ever, you may prefer otherwise but hopefully this adds a little more concrete information for you to base that on.

Damn - the Christmas glut hasn’t even started yet, and there are already too many games for me to play. I’m at the stage where I don’t actually have to wait excitedly for any games, on account of the fact that I’ll be so distracted by the current set of games I don’t have time to play properly that the new ones will still turn up early enough for me to have trouble accommodating them.

Fable 2 just came out, which I’ve played for all of an hour or so on account of being away all week, and now catching up with what I missed while away. I still have Rock Band content to catch up on since I’ve been avoiding playing lots for the last 2-3 weeks while my back healed, and I didn’t trust myself with the drums. I’m 10 hours into both Okami and Professor Lanyon and only managing about an hour a week tops on either of them. Geometry Wars 2 still tends to devour my teeny-weeny time slots (having finished the clever Braid). And in addition there’s a few things out now that look good; Dead Space looks great (if a bit of a rip-off of System Shock 2, but then if it does it well who cares), Fallout 3 looks like it turned out surprisingly well, although I’m still a bit dubious about it given how much the also-highly-rated Oblivion put me to sleep, and I still haven’t played GTAIV, or Dead Rising which I keep meaning to find on eBay sometime. In the next few weeks I’m going to be bombarded with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Mirror’s Edge, and goodness knows what else. I’m almost relieved that Little Big Planet is exclusive to PS3 so I don’t have to factor that in. Almost.

Help! I can’t handle this much gaming! How does anyone find the time for MMOGs?

Finally - after a lot of speculation about whether it was a mistake that a 360 advert announced that RB2 was out in the UK in November, it’s been confirmed for 21st November (on 360 anyway). Definite purchase! The hardware apparently won’t be out until early December, but I’ll be buying the solus anyway.

Also we finally know who ‘won’ when it comes to securing the rights for the first Beatles tracks in a music game, and it’s MTV / Harmonix. I can’t imagine how much they had to pay, or what they had to promise, but it’s definitely happening. I’m personally not a huge Beatles fan, I think they made some great songs but are idolised far too much - I can think of a number of bands I think were just as important in the last 30-40 years, and I really don’t subscribe to the view that the Beatles are the best band ever without question, and will be forever - some fans seem to verge on religeous fervour in this regard, which is a little scary. In fact I find the whole suggestion that one band could be ‘the best ever’ offensive. It’s like saying one painter mattered more than any other in the history of art - total nonsense.

While I’m pleased to hear the ‘better’ team got the license here, what’s concerning is that the galloping hubris / idol worship that seems to regularly orbit the Beatles seems to have affected how they’re going to develop this game. They’ve announced that this is a brand new game, not a Rock Band pack, crafted specifically around the Beatles in a ‘unique and innovative’ way. This sounds like it might be at risk of ‘rubbing its own rhubarb’ to me - I trust Harmonix to make great music games, but will they end up being constrained / railroaded in terms of design here, to the detriment of the gamer? Only time will tell.

It appears that despite many people having their hands on the game, the ever-present review embargo appears to be stopping most from commenting so far, but IGN appears to have been the first of the game enthusiast sites to get a review of Guitar Hero World Tour posted.

I don’t go by scores personally, I advise you to read the full review. It’s only one opinion so far, but to me, there are a couple of elements that make it sound like Neversoft may have missed some fairly important points again. By far the most important thing I saw in this review is that in ‘band mode’, it only takes one person failing to immediately bomb everyone out of the song. They say there’s no option to ’save’ people like in Rock Band 1, and of course Rock Band 2 added ‘no fail mode’ which I can see us turning on, particularly in party mode. It simply sucks for everyone when the whole song fails in multiplayer because one person gets into trouble - the person failing feels bad, and everyone else gets their play interrupted - much better just to get a crappy score at the end (in practice in RB1 you can’t get less than about 70% because any less than that and you’d have failed beyond the ability for others to save you). Harmonix listened to the fans on this for RB2 - and since RB1 has been out for a year I would have expected GHWT to learn from this too and include RB2’s no fail mode, but in fact it doesn’t seem to even equal RB1 since you can’t ’save’ others. Quite an odd decision - but then the GH3 designers somehow thought boss battles were cool too.

One thing I do like though is that you can activate star power when you want with the microphone (not sure about the drums). When it comes to ’saving’ people this is an issue in RB1 - although the no fail mode will get rid of it.

Unsurprisingly there are some people complaining in forums about instrument failures already - drum pads not working properly, guitar slide bars being erratic, that kind of thing.  I’m not really sure why people thought GHWT’s peripherals would be immune to the same teething problems RB’s had - even though Red Octane have a large amount of experience, anything new always has a few rough edges, especially when you’re talking about mass production. It’s way too early to tell if this is just a small proportion or a larger pattern but it’s not really news - it would have only been news if things had gone perfectly.

So, not a great start on the review front for GHWT; I can’t say I’m that surprised considering the disappointing GH3, but we’ll see as the review embargo lifts what other people thought. I have to say that embargoing reviews until after the release date of a product is a little suspect.

[edit]Well, a few more reviews are in now and it appears IGN was on the lowest end of the scale so far. Still, the text of every review still seems to indicate that the band mode / party play is the weak point, due to the instant-fail,  clunky interface layout and less interesting band career mode. So, it looks like it depends on your play style - as someone who never really plays these music games alone (unless I’m practicing), co-op and party play are the #1 priority, so weakness in this area is a turn off for me (just like it was in the horribly broken GH3 co-op play, although this doesn’t sound as bad). Although the extra songs would be nice, on balance I think I’ll save my money and spend it on RB DLC instead. Those who haven’t taken the RB plunge yet might be good to get the hardware though, assuming the failures reported so far aren’t systemic.

Well, Harmonix confirmed the list of 20 ‘free’ DLC tracks included in the Rock Band 2 retail bundle, and here it is:

The 88 - “Sons and Daughters”
Authority Zero - “No Regrets”
Between the Buried and Me - “Prequel To The Sequel”
The Cab - “Bounce”
The Chevelles - “Get It On”
The Cocktail Slippers - “Give It To Me”
Dealership - “Database Corrupted”
Endeverafter - “I Wanna Be Your Man”
The Ghost Hounds - “Ashes To Fire”
Hollywood Undead - “Young”
Kutless - “The Feeling”
The Len Price 3 - “If I Ain’t Got You”
Lesley Roy - “I’m Gone, I’m Going”
Opiate for the Masses - “Burn You Down”
Semi-Precious Weapons - “Magnetic Baby”
Shaimus - “Like a Fool”
Thenewno2″ - Crazy Tuesday”
Tickle Me Pink - “The Time Is Wrong”
Underoath - “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
X Japan - “I.V.”

The first surprise that the entire list is made up of lesser known bands - a lot of people, me included, assumed that Harmonix was keeping some headliners in their back pocket to undermine some of the GHWT marketing; perhaps the inexplicably missing tracks from the recent Nevermind DLC for example (Come As You Are and Smells Like Teen Spirit, the two most recognisable tracks, were not part of the Nirvana release). But no, the entire list is staunchly ‘indie’, and it’s annoyed and delighted people in seemingly equal measure.

Firstly, the downside: everyone knows and likes headline bands and signature tracks. In a ‘party’ situation especially, almost no-one picks tracks they don’t know. That’s a shame, because there’s some real gems even in my current listing that occasional players just pass over in favour of playing the same few tracks they know all the time; I do try to counter that by picking different songs when I’m doing vocals even though that’s tough when you’re less familiar. Playing in the World Tour mode with friends resulted in them commenting on tracks they’d never heard of but ended up really liking. But, the fact is when people drop in for a quick party game, there’s a good chance they’ll resist playing anything they don’t already know, so most of these 20 songs will probably never get played in that setting, making them less useful.

On the plus side though, I’ve started listening to these tracks and I already like maybe 70% of them, and a couple have been really excellent. Harmonix have said in the past that one of their goals is to introduce people to new music, and by doing this they certainly tick that box - after all, where else but in a ‘free’ 20-song set could you pack in things people wouldn’t have heard of? Regular DLC from less well known bands tends to be cheaper in Rock Band, but there’s nothing like ‘free’ to really disseminate music.

It was always fun in the first 2 Guitar Hero games to play tracks from small bands the Harmonix team and their friends were members of, like Freezepop and Honest Bob And The Factory to Dealer Incentives, bands I would never have encountered outside indie gigs in Boston, and this track pack follows firmly in that vein. After getting over the initial shock of the fact that I didn’t recognise most of the names on this list, and after listening to some of the tracks, I’ve come around to the positive camp on this. There’s a really good range even in the small number of tracks I’ve listened to so far, some speed metal, pop/rock, blues/funk, indie, punk - so I’m sure most people will find something they like in here; I certainly have. While headline bands would have been an instant PR win, in the grand scheme of things it’s nice to be randomly exposed to some unknown music every so often - after all how would you find new bands you like otherwise?

Ok, so my suspicions about the reasons behind Rock Band: AC/DC breaking the usual customer-friendly mould of Rock Band appear to have been confirmed:

The reason “AC/DC Live” can’t be purchased at your local EB Games or Best Buy is because of the deal that AC/DC had already struck with Wal-Mart as an exclusive distributor of their upcoming album, “Black Ice.” The negotiations with AC/DC over the track pack required that Harmonix become part of the existing Wal-Mart agreement.

Even more damning is a quote from Angus Young to the Telegraph:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums,” said Young. “Way back in the Seventies, we drew these figures on the back of an envelope for our record company. We showed them how much they earned from us if we sold one million singles and how much they earned if we sold one million albums. The difference was staggering . . . If we were on iTunes, we know a certain percentage of people would only download two or three songs from the album - and we don’t think that represents us musically.”

Doesn’t represent you musically? What you actually mean is that restricting customer choice works for you financially, because if customers could only pick the songs they actually liked you’d make less money. My only dilemma is which box to check on my ‘why bands ignore their customers and don’t list on download sites’ form: is it the ‘Arrogant snobbery’ or ‘Money-grabbing shill’ box in this case? I think I’ll check both.

Any band that thinks they are somehow ‘above’ the people that buy their music and feel they can disallow customers from buying it the way they want have their heads firmly wedged up their own arses, and deserve everything they get when people download their music for free.

Yes, this is a rant; I hate this kind of attitude and I’m also cranky from not being able to play drums for over a week thanks to my back

Wow, Fable 2 is getting some pretty impressive reviews (both Edge and Eurogamer loved it). I was already expecting to get it, but the reviews have convinced me to pre-order. I love good (western) RPGs, particularly when they come loaded with character and Fable 2 seems to deliver that in spades. It sounds like for the first time in a while, a game fronted by legendary Peter Molyneux may actually live up to the hype. That’s not to say ‘his’ games haven’t been good in the recent past (and of course he doesn’t really crank the code anymore, he has a team to do that now), just more often than not they’re a bit overhyped and overrated - particularly Black & White, which I thought was a collection of really clever technology desperately crying out for a more entertaining game to inhabit.

Part of the problem is that when your back catalogue includes classics such as Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper (personal favourite) and Theme Hospital, and don’t mind talking frankly with the media, you can quite easily get into trouble with over-inflated expectations. Judging by the reviews it sounds like Fable 2 may be the first game originating from the Molyneux stable in 10 years to fully deliver (or nearabouts) on the jive-talking promises. Kudos to the team on a great job.

I’m a little disappointed that the reviews so far seem to have ignored the co-operative element, but maybe that’s down to the fact that the online co-op is due to be patched in at release (although why couldn’t they find a local mate to play with?). My wife and I will be playing through it completely co-operatively and it would have been nice to hear more about that.

Knowing my luck though it won’t arrive until after next weekend, and then I’ll miss a week because I’m travelling.

I’ve been learning to play accoustic guitar for a little over a year now, and although I still dispair at overall quality of my playing sometimes, I can still acknowledge that I’ve made a lot of progress, considering I started from zero. My renditions of Stairway to Heaven, Ziggy Stardust and Wonderwall are at least recognisable, if not hugely flattering.

During particularly busy periods it’s hard to find the time to practice, which has sometimes led to a frustrating cycle of starting to lose callouses, finger strength and muscle memory, and then having to spend time building them back up again, which makes you feel like you’re not making any progress. So in the past few weeks I’ve been making an extra effort to find 30 minutes to play every day, even if that means delaying getting back to that work issue that’s bugging me for a while, and that’s definitely helped with my consistency.

I’ve got to the stage where I think I’d like to have an electric guitar as well as the accoustic, so I can start trying out a few different styles. This is a generally more expensive proposition of course, and I’d like to get a decent one that will last me for a good while. While my skills don’t justify buying a seriously high-end instrument, I’m certainly willing to spend a decent amount to get a quality ‘axe’ that will last a few years and grow with me.

I was in town today so I popped into our local guitar shop to play with a few. I liked the visual style of the Gibson Les Pauls, but actually when I played them, I preferred the overall feel of the Fender Stratocaster. I also really liked the Ibanez ARX which seemed kind of half way between the Les Paul and the SG.

Any opinions from more experienced guitarists (not difficult)? I have a couple of months yet before I plan to buy and I’m intending to drop in to try a few more out in between.

Oh, and in the land of make-believe instruments (which is considerably easier), my wife and I passed a couple of milestones last night. We’re starting to both play on Expert now, and we got our first set of five gold stars (which requires everyone to play on Expert and score above a certain threshold), and I also got this:

Looks like a bug has been discovered in Rock Band 2 that can randomly reset your band’s progress under a certain set of curcumstances. So far it appears that it only happens if you play the career mode with a certain combination of accounts - notably a player with a Live-enabled account, and a player with a non-Live-enabled account.

Here’s hoping they fix it before the UK release, although I actually don’t think I’d suffer from it anyway, since Marie & I both have Live accounts, and when other people play they don’t use their own accounts, they just jump in as ‘Player 3′ or whatever; so far those combinations sound like they’re immune to this bug.

The moral of the story would seem to be not to use non-Live accounts with Rock Band 2. I’m not sure why you would anyway, if your machine is connected to the internet, since a ’silver’ Live account is free anyway (and it’s still a ‘Live-enabled account’ - you get leaderboards & gamerscore tracking but not multiplayer). Still, a nasty bug if you happened to get caught by it.

Looks like the new Rock Band site is going live as we speak, they have a placeholder page up right now. The new site will allegedly let you take photos of your band to share online, get (real) T-shirts branded with your bands logo and other fun (yet entirely pointless) things. Obviously I’m looking forward to seeing that.

Since I’ve been taking a rare weekend off, I took the time to download the latest batch of XBLA demos to check out the latest slices of (hopefully) juicy bite-sized gameplay. The results were mixed.

Braid

I’d actually downloaded the demo for this a while ago, but at that stage I’d been pretty short of time, and on getting frustrated with a particular section I had tossed it aside and gone with the far more immediate Geometry Wars 2 instead. But, I came back to it, and when you’re in a more relaxed state and can take the time to ponder the game, it’s actually very good. An interesting platform-puzzler with a nice central idea (the manipulation of time), very solid game design, and a nice art style. Personally I’ve yet to appreciate the genius of the narrative, which seems a little overly self-indulgent to me right now, but people have been applauding it for where it ultimately culminates so I’ll just reserve judgement on that for now. We’ve bought it anyway; it’s certainly interesting enough to justify the purchase.

Mega Man 9

I’ve never actually played a Mega Man before, and 10 minutes with this convinced me I hadn’t been missing much. Quite why Capcom would choose, in 2008 with the full glories of modern technology at their fingertips, to replicate the graphics and sound (and I use that term in the broadest possible sense, ‘poorly modulated noise’ would be more accurate) of the NES with quite so much authenticity I don’t know. I really don’t see the point of creating a new product and making it look and sound like the emulation of an old one - surely if the gameplay is that good, smoothing off a few rough edges and making the sound not shred my eardrums would not be a heresy? Next, you discover that the difficulty level is such that it makes Ghosts and Goblins look like a cake walk. I didn’t even get to the end of the first level before grinding my teeth to powder. Maybe if you grew up with the NES and Mega Man (I didn’t, the NES was never officially released in the UK and I don’t remember even the later ports of MM being very  popular), maybe you’ll find this nostalgia captivating. Although to be honest, my experience of going back to old games (such as through the Wii Virtual Console) has been profound disappointment and shattered memories; it’s generally best to just remember your old games as fantastic, rather than to re-experience them, IMO. However, many reviews have said MM9 is great, so I will have to assume that someone out there likes this game. I personally found it to be a stupidly hard, annoying platform game with some of the worst graphics and sound I’ve sat through in a long time, and about as entertaining as paying someone to randomly stick a fork in my leg. But I guess there are people who are into that kind of thing too.

War World

Oh dear. The first thing I noticed is that it makes what I thought was a fundamental set of incredibly basic demo errors, which in themselves would make me toss it away. Firstly, although the full game allows you to choose from around 10 mechs, the demo only lets you use one. Assuming there are differences that would nuance the gameplay, any developer with half a brain would imbue the demo with 2 mechs to test at least, to allow the player to see what the kind of differences might be. Secondly, the demo is limited by time - you can play for no more than about a minute before you’re kicked out, making any kind of evaluation of the game almost impossible. If this was a quality game, hobbling the demo like this would be absolute stupidity on the part of the game developer. However from what I read, the game is a bit rubbish so perhaps not letting you see much of it in the demo is a blessing. What struck me most of all in the tiny slice of time I got to experience it was that they got the scale all wrong. If you’re going to make a game about robots, they have to be big robots. The smallest one should be as big as tall as a 2-storey house, minimum. Instead, they’ve taken the bizarre decision to make the robots only slightly taller than Bob Hope, meaning that it comes across as just a poor UT3 knock-off with robot skins. Inexplicable.

Duke Nukem 3D

Talking of nostalgia, this was fun to put on for about 10 minutes. Duke is of course basically Doom with a sense of humour, some more interesting weapons & environments, copious one-liners stolen from Evil Dead and They Live, and strippers. Certainly entertaining in short bursts, and it provoked fond memories of the deathmatch games we used to have in our youth (there were a number of hilarious pipe-bomb incidents in particular that resurfaced in my memory on seeing familiar parts of maps). But, the world has moved on - it best serves like an old family album, reminding you of the good times - so much of this kind of game relied on the technology (wow, we can look up and down, sort of!), it’s not really enough anymore to hold your interest for very long.

So, Braid is recommended, everything else only if you’re a masochist or have nothing better to do with your time and money