FiringSquad
Posted by John JCal Callaham on Tuesday January 22, 2008 - 02:21 AM
Owners of the Xbox 360 version of Harmonix's music game Rock Band can now download three new songs for the game. All of them are tunes from the band Oasis. The songs are Don't Look Back in Anger, Live Forever and Wonderwall. You can get each song for 160 Microsoft points or a pack with all three songs for 440 Microsoft points.
TheGamer Writes "Harmonix has proven plenty of times it can make Rock Band work without instruments."
I mean, yeah, but was anyone saying otherwise? The fact is people liked the plastic instruments rather than pressing buttons on a controller. They enjoyed the simulated experience.
"Work"? No, but to be good? It's absolutely necessary. Not having the accessories is like playing a lightgun shooter with an analog stick sure it works, but one experience is completely unique and fun as hell, and other is torture trying to make do playing in a way it was never meant to be played
I think CHEAP plastic instruments is THE reason why the instrument-genre ‘died’.
People invested in buying the game AND the peripherals, so the guitar, the dj-set, the drum, whatever, and the experience was absolutely fantastic. Great fun, great music, etc.
But then the instruments would break. A button would stop working, or your hits wouldn’t register, and that kind of hardware failure would end in you not being able to play the game as intended, and thus you not getting the scores you deserve.
So, now you had a great game, but a broken instrument, and nobody is gonna buy a new plastic instrument every 3-6 months in order to keep playing the game.
A solution would have been to release better quality instruments (obviously), at a slightly higher price, so you could have kept the new games coming and the genre alive, but sadly, that didn’t happen.
Bust a Groove, Gitaroo Man and Parrapa the Rappa were such good games. Neither needed any extra peripherals
Player 2's long-form feature about kids and video games continues with a look at introducing toddlers to games for the first time.
Music rhythm games dominated the video game market in the mid-2000s. Unfortunately, the genre would fall from grace shortly after finding success.
More like faded away than failed. Failed implies it was new and didnt take off... that is not the case. Rhythm games were hugely popular but the lights dimmed and the show is over.
You would think the current situation would cause a resurgence but im actually seeing more people picking up real instruments and learning to play. My son is one who started out on GH and now he plays real guitar.
I lost interest when they stopped allowing you to use the controller to play with, just couldn't get into playing with the guitar.
Not the sole reason, but over saturation by Activision releasing 5 GH games in one year, charging full price for all of them while only Metallica and GH5 were worth it.
I dont think these games failed at all. People aren't going to keep buying games and peripherals over and over. All songs need to work on either rockband or guitar hero thru updates. Guitar hero live was actually good but rockband with all its songs and same equipment killed it.
I'm sure part of the reason they faded away, at least over the long term, was that you couldn't download them digitally.
"Don't Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall, just great songs." Also I love "Don't go away" and some others....
Ya, This is a great pack.
I am starting to hate weekly DLC though. My Billy Bucks are taking a tremendous hit off this game. Keep it coming, but I might need DLC rehab. So many songs it's painful.
You pay $60 bucks for a game and for the next couple months you have to pay for songs that probably would have been in it had DLC not existed. DLC on the 360 and in some respects on the PS3 is a joke. I guess I'm just old school and remember a time when developers offered this stuff for free as a thank you for buying the game. When you paided for something it was an expansion pack which was almost like getting another game not a few songs.
I can't wait to get home and play these.
This game is still "yet to be released" in england. I hate having to wate an extra 4 months for the exact same version you yanks get... it cant be that hard to change the region encoding.