Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House
by Derek Wilson on October 24, 2008 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Multiplayer Support and Online Matching
While it was possible to play online in Rock Band, there are new multiplay possibilities at our finger tips with the second installation. It is now possible to join a band (or have someone else join your band) to play songs on the normal tour. There are pluses and minuses to this new setup, but it is a step in the right direction for online play.
One of the major pluses is that you can play online and still continue to unlock stuff. This is only a factor until everything is actually unlocked, but many other games where things are unlockable don't fit online play into this model very well. Rock Band 2 does a good job here. This, and the simple fact that you can play with your friends, is about where the goodness ends though.
Part of the fun of playing with your friends is laughing at (or yelling at) them when the fail out or save someone. Sitting alone and playing the game, while still very fun, is still sitting alone and playing the game even if other people are playing along elsewhere. It's not a bad thing, it's just not as great as having everyone in the same place. Playing online with your friends is definitely a good option to have. But what if you don't have any friends (or maybe they just aren't online ... yeah that's it)?
The interface that allows you to get started filling in slots for your band online isn't really intuitive. When you are joining your band, you press the yellow button and wait. And wait. And wait a lot. But that's how matchmaking can be at times. Once you finally have another member or two for your band, you can continue on and do whatever you want on your tour.
But you don't know who you're playing with. They could be awesome or terrible. They could like fast stuff or slow. They might not have the 6 or 7 hours free it would take to run down the entire endless set list right now. This little frequently encountered issue results in people frequently quitting in the middle of a set. And this can be really frustrating. You lose fans, you lose time, you have to drop back out and start over if you want to play with someone else online. Yes, talking about what you want to do with the people you've joined does help, but not everyone uses their headset while playing. And it seems like no one ever wants to sing online. If you sit around waiting for a vocalist (at least until more people get the game and want to sing) the delay in getting going is vastly increased.
If you are the one joining someone else's band rather than inviting people to help you with your tour or challenges or whatever, you do still lose fans if you fail and gain fans if you win. But if you decide to quit in the middle, you lose much less than if you stuck it out to the end, thus encouraging you and your band mates to screw each other. A larger penalty for dropping out might help keep people going even when they are down, but it would also unfairly piss off people who have legitimate connectivity issues (or a pet that trips over the power cord -- yes it happens).
And then there's the major complaint. The game makes you fail out no matter what after someone disconnects, this can be incredibly frustrating if someone pulls out at the last song in a set. It seems like it makes you keep failing every time you start the song over after someone has quit as well, though we can't tell if it's just that everyone else follows suit and quits preemptively.
We hope that as more people pick up the game online play and matchmaking will go more smoothly and quickly, but it is a little difficult to predict. If you have friends you can play with online, great. If you want matchmaking and don't mind a little bit of a wait, then that's fine too. But the major drawback to playing online is having people drop out in the middle of sets and thus making everyone else fail out. We wish that Harmonix had gone a different route and allowed a band where someone dropped out to keep playing as if it had started with fewer players.
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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.