NGB Wrote: "The stage lights burn hot on my face as I clutch the guitar, my left hand carefully positioned over the neck, right hand ready to hit the strings like my life depended on it. The crowd are restless; they don’t know what’s coming next. I do. I’ve seen the set list. This one’s a show stopper, one that they’ll remember for weeks to come. I level my breathing, nervousness setting in as the singer starts up. “Carry on my wayward son! There’ll be peace when you are done…” Don’t mess this up, I think and then – the drums strike, signalling to the rest of the band to begin. My fingers press hard onto the buttons of my guitar and I… wait, buttons?!"
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
Harmonix, best known for their work on the Rock Band franchise, has announced that they're becoming a part of the Epic Games family.
Harmonix, the developer behind Rock Band and Dance Central, reveal some new gameplay footage for the upcoming DJ song-mixing game.