Harmonix, the leading developer of music-based games, and MTV Games, a part of Viacom's MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA, VIA.B), today announced that Rock Band now has more than 1,000 songs available for consumers to play within the Rock Band Music platforms for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation® 3 computer entertainment system and Wii. Featuring the music of more than 390 bands, the Rock Band platform is, without question, the industry leader in providing the best selection of interactive musical content, songs and artists.
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.
I love Rock Band, and this is one of the reasons why.
I like Guitar Hero, but Activision is so busy trying milk money out of the franchise by saturating us with games that they seem to be sacrificing quality. But that's just my opinion.
I find the songs that ship with Rockband mostly suck, Guitar Hero always ships with a much better song selection. But Rockband has way better, and more DLC. The GH DLC is usually pretty lame and there are only 3 songs each week. So RB can have better music than GH, you just need to pay extra.
...but the songs are a rip off.
If you cuold buy them for the PS3 and they could also be used on the PSp version of rock band then that would be a start. I would also like to be able to use the songs on my mp3 player.
don't get me wrong, I love Rock Band but buying songs is too expensive.
Living In NZ, we're still waiting to get RB2 :(, we do have beatles and lego though.
The first time we got one of the non-english songs during a set we just cracked up laughing, needless to say we didn't do to well on that one.
Definitely agree that RB has the better DLC, downloaded a few female vocalist songs, as I don't do singing (more for others safety ;).