Rockin Cooperative interactivity

I go to play some rock band last week.
It Sierously Rocked.

Seriously.

We’d planned to look at some other Wii games for the evening, but made the mistake of starting Rock band and 5 hours disappeared. Then another 5 the next night.

Rock Band excelled above Guitar hero thanks to cooperative play and the different instruments adding variety. Also the interface to choose a song has many more options than the scrolling menu; there are cities with venues where you choose to play a given song, make your own set list, or play a mystery setlist. Other ‘challenges’ like ‘battle for the Merch Girl’ unlock, duh, a merch girl, with a funny paragraph and your band makes more money for the rest of the tour. Unlocking a van, a bus, and then a plane allow for more cities, more venues and more songs. And they have GOOD songs! Not the boring old rocker things of heroic guitar and otherwise boring lyrics and tune.

But enough gushing, what about the interactivity? First working ‘together’ to play the song just makes it more fun. You time your ‘super charge’s’ (just like star power) to go at the same time as others the bonus combines, so instead of just 2x points, it’s 4, 6, or 8x (if you have all for instruments supercharging at the same time). This multiplier applies to everyone’s point earning, so even if the singer is just humming along during the guitar solo, the singer can ‘super charge’ and let the guitar get extra points. This is far more fun than the points themselves, which are just numbers and don’t have much point of reference, other than the ‘stars’ earned for the song, enough points gets you 5 stars. When the last note is a long guitar and the counter is nearly at 5 stars and everyone’s cheering on the guitar player to use the wammy bar and get those extra few, it is a sight to be hold.
Lastly, if someone fails, screws up too much, another player can supercharge and get the failer back in… but only 3 times. If the failed one is in failure state too long the song fails.

Individual instruments are very standard to Guitar hero (they had to have cloned the code). Drums you just hit the ‘drum’ head, which are color coded. Singing is a little different, and personally I wish they just had real notes sometimes instead of this graph thing, but it works. Text is way too small, even if the words don’t matter.

So yeah, it rocks.

Oh balls. I thought class was at noon again, why do I do that? Well, an extra hour in the lab, time to rough in that advent calendar…