Rock Band: FImp is Fun

Got to play one song's worth of the drum set with Rock Band on PS3 early this morning at the 24 hour Wal-Mart. It's great fun, as everyone and their brother already knows. On Medium difficulty, this ex-percussionist was able to get through the song without too many embarrassing mistakes, though mostly because the drums themselves are very generous about your timing.

I'd enjoyed Guitar Hero, though not enough to buy, and the formula translates to the drums very well. If you're wondering, it really is just Guitar Hero on the drums, where you're smacking the right one of a set of quads according to the icons on the screen. At times, you have to hit more than one. The limit for me so far was two at a time, which makes sense.

I didn't try much improvising a la Parappa, where improvising was the best way to really jack up your score, and since I wasn't familiar with the UI, I didn't know if my few riffs were helping much or not. Crossing the sticks just made me look like a dork. The mad scorefest that was the end of the song was a lot of fun, though I'm not sure the one-year old watching me knew what to think.

Unfortunately, the way the game had you bang the drums was pretty Ringo, which is to say it wasn't a very original arrangement and will likely convince another generation of hacks that all there is to playing drums is slapping at 'em as hard as possible, with the snare joining the high-hat every other beat. I'm hoping the two tougher levels have something a bit better than this quick demo's rim-smacking.

Still, is there a better social game out there right now? Rock Band puts the kabosch on anyone trying to argue to me that Mario Kart is worth inviting over the over-twenty [year-old] friends for a night o' fun. Rock Band extends the fun from air guitarists in Hero to has-been drummers like me. Cool.

So why isn't this out for the PS2 again? Curse ya', Sony!

(Update: It's a little difficult to find the PS2 version's due date. It's apparently Dec 10th, moved up to hit the sweet Xmas season spot. This is the first game I've been partially excited about playing in some time, WoW addiction excepted.)

Labels: firstimpressions, ps3

--ruffin at 10:41

link

Comment [ 2 ]

Comments on this post:

To front page ➠