I’ve been slow to jump on the music game bandwagon. As a musician and a music educator, I definitely appreciate developers trying to get gamers excited about music, but at the same time, I’ve been extremely picky as to which games I get excited about. Elite Beat Agents was great. Dance Dance Revolution and all the various karaoke games are a blast with friends. Electroplankton was a neat little sequencing “game.” Wii Music was a good step towards teaching improvisation.
But what about guitar games? Konami’s taken a crack at it, Activision’s been going at it, and guitar games are essentially Harmonix’s calling card. I hadn’t quite been convinced of any of the guitar games from these developers, aside from the novelty value of The Beatles: Rock Band. That changed last week, when The Tanooki was introduced to Rock Band 3. I was sold, instantly.
I want to start these impressions by pointing out that the aspects of Rock Band 3 that excite me the most are also the ones that are non-standard. They’re completely optional modes and peripherals, some of which will only be sold separately. That being said, it addresses my main beef with previous guitar video games, which were inadvertently convincing some gamers that a 10-button Stratocaster Controller was just as good as the real deal. It’s different enough that it reduced the incentive to learn to play a real instrument. Rock Band 3 fixes that, and goes the extra mile to do so.
First up, the Pro Guitar Mode will allow for the use of new guitar peripherals to the Rock Band games. We got wind of Mad Catz’ Fender Mustang a few days before E3, and it’s essentially the Rock Band guitar you’re used to, but with 10 times as many buttons on the fretboard. The best part? That’s just the middle-of-the-road controller. Rock Band 3 will allow the use of a brand new Squier Stratocaster guitar controller. It’s a real guitar, folks. Six strings? Check. MIDI support? Check. 1/4″ output jack for you to plug into an amplifier outside of the game? Heck yeah, check! Forget color-coded action buttons arranged by relative pitch, you’ll be playing actual notes on a real guitar. To accommodate the Squier Strat, the new user interface for Pro Mode ditches the falling colored panels for what can only be described as guitar tablature (or “tabs”) moving on rails. You’ll see fret numbers travel down each guitar string, and you’ll even see the chord names along the left side. If you know your chords, it makes the song easier to play. If you don’t know your chords, this will help you gradually learn them!
The only potential downside I saw was that by the end of the demonstration, the Squier Strat had seemingly gone out of tune. Since the guitar was being used to play along with the game while also being played through a standard guitar amplifier, you heard both the in-tune version coming from the game alongside the out-of-tune guitar. I sure hope the game comes with a built-in guitar tuner as well as a lesson on tuning, because my musician’s ears can’t stand to hear something so awful.
The new keyboard peripheral certainly deserves some attention as well. The two-octave keyboard (25 keys, C to C) is designed as a keytar, so you can play it as such, or place it on any platform to play as a traditional keyboard. In your standard game modes, you’re not going to be required to be a master of all 25 keys. The keyboard is divided into 5 sections — the first four sections each span roughly half an octave, C to E or F to B, with the fifth “section” being just that top C. When those colors rain down on screen, you only need to hit any one of the notes in the corresponding section of the keyboard to get by. It’s when you get into Pro Keys mode that you’ll literally see all 25 keys on screen and be required to play along as accurately as your difficulty level demands. The musicians out there should be drooling right now. Piano technique can be tricky, even with only two octaves to work with, and this provides a perfect opportunity for Harmonix to include tutorial modes to give crash course piano lessons (or “tips”) in hand positions, which I really hope to see.
For a musician, seeing the inclusion of real instruments being played the way they were meant to be played should be enough to convince that this game is the real deal. However, as a gamer and as a music teacher, the real value is in the software. With the experience from developing several music titles over the years, Harmonix decided to create this game from the ground up to make existing modes easier to use (you can now search and sort your entire music library much more efficiently… it’ll come in handy for those 2000 available songs by RB3‘s launch) and new modes such as the new career and tour modes just as fun.
The game implements the new hardware seamlessly as well. As I’ve already mentioned, the Pro Guitar mode uses what are essentially moving guitar tabs on top of the familiar interface. The Pro Keys interface is based on the same design, clearly indicating which of the 25 keys you’re expected to press. With the keyboard addition, the game allows up to seven players: two guitars, one keyboard, one drumset, and three microphones to support vocal harmonies a la The Beatles: Rock Band. You’ll be able to add and remove players on the fly in the middle of a song if needed, and you’ll be able to change the difficulty mid-song as well.
We’ll have more info on Rock Band 3 in the coming weeks and months leading up to the game’s holiday release, but most of you should plan on getting some friends together this winter and rocking out in a video game unlike any you’ve ever seen. You might want to plan on saving a bit extra as well — even though your previous Rock Band controllers will work with this game, you’ll still need to buy at least the game and keyboard. On top of that, I expect the Squier Stratocaster guitar controller to be sold separately and cost quite a premium, just like we saw with Rock Band 2‘s Ion Drumset back in 2008. Nevertheless, it’ll all be worth it. Harmonix and MTV Games have really outdone themselves with this one.
