Over the past couple days, the folks at Harmonix have been blowing my mind with the new stuff they've announced for the upcoming Rock Band 3. You can read all about it here, but the highlights are these three major new additions:First, the Harmony Vocals capability added in The Beatles version of Rock Band (and continued in the recently released Green Day installment) is coming to the main game. This was tons of fun in Beatles, and while they're a great band to take advantage of Harmonies, using them in sophisticated ways, it's still going to be awesome to open that up to more than just two bands.
Second, they're adding a keyboard controller to the game. It's optional, and you can actually just use a guitar controller's five fret buttons as the keys -- if you don't want to buy new plastic instruments for your living room, you can use what you have. More variety of music. More players can play at once now (seven, if the song has all four instruments and three singers with Harmonies!). More new gameplay to master.
Third, they're introducing a "Pro Mode" that is essentially the answer to "why be good at the game and not learn a real instrument?" Now the game will be that bridge to learning the real instrument. The actual keyboard controller has two octaves of keys, and when you play a song on it in pro mode, the notes you have to play will actually be the notes you'd have to play on a real keyboard to play the real song (albeit compressed into a couple of octaves). A full integration of cymbals into the game will bring the same level of authenticity to the drums (all you're missing is a high-hat pedal).
...and the most insane/cool of all, an optional new guitar controller that actually has six strings you strum, and 17 frets up the neck, with buttons for each string at each fret. (That's 102 buttons in all!) Pro Guitar, as you work through its increasing level of difficulties, will actually be guiding you to the proper hand positions on a real guitar required to actually play the song. Perhaps this could push me to pull that guitar of mine back out of the closet and actually working toward playing it again.
Plenty to look forward to.
5 comments:
This is great... but I wish the game came with some sort of midi I/O box that you can plug your real instruments into.
Isn't this the next logical step?
Plug in your real keyboard, your real electronic drum set, your real MIDI guitar...
This shouldn't be all that hard to wire together.
After all, you're "playing" the real thing when you're singing, so why not give you the option to do the same with the rest?
FKL
Why, you're in luck! The game doesn't COME with this MIDI box, but they have announced they are releasing one. It will work with any MIDI compatible drum kit or keyboard. You plug that into your game console, and your device in the other end, and then your real MIDI instrument will function as a game control.
Wow! That was easy... ask and you receive.
And I'd like a million dollars!
Well, it was worth a shot.
Hmmm... apparently I use HTML notation brackets when I do (crickets).
Wow...
Had I known it was that easy, I would have asked sooner!
FKL
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