Rock Band

Given that I want to play some Zelda today, I will postpone my long-promised remaining year-end update entries and instead provide my belated review of the video game Rock Band, which I spent a good amount of time playing with the old gang when I was visiting Pasadena during the holidays.

First of all, the game is very fun as a group activity. Because I don't like most of the songs on the set list very much (and some of them seem to repeat excruciatingly often for songs that are not part of my paradigm*), I wouldn't want to spend too much time on the game on my own. (If there were more songs that I like a lot, my opinion would be different.) Rocking out with friends, on the other hand, is a different story entirely. (Though even then I heard some of the songs a lot more than I wanted to. I think this makes it ideal for me to play a good amount of time for some stretch and then put it down for a while so that I can spend some time not hearing certain songs. There are a lot of downloadable songs, so depending on the new stuff that gets added to that collection, I expect that some more stuff that I like will show up.)

I mostly played guitar when I was visiting, so I used my modest skills that I accrued from that to start on medium and do better on medium level than I had before. (Hmmm... iTunes just started playing "Buddy Holly", which is one of the downloadable songs that I like. Now I am thinking of doing this on the drums, because I had a lot of fun on the drums with this song.) I even got 100% a couple of times, which I think I had only done once before. By the end of my visit, I was trying to practice on hard mode but I was having a lot of trouble making the jump. I did pretty well on some songs on hard, but got my ass handed to me on others. I created a guitarist character (a perky goth named "?Lynx?" who specializes in pink --- with things like long bright pink hair, a mini skirt with pink skulls on it, and so on) with whom I have impressed nobody but myself. (But I think it might be fair to say that I "impressed" a few people.) I hope to eventually post a link to a picture of my creation. (Yes, I am alluding to Weird Science.)

I had the most fun on the drums, which I started on the easy difficulty level. I am now reasonably comfortable on medium for the lower-level songs, but I was able to do some of the upper middle level songs on this difficulty as well. I am really looking forward to doing some more drumming when I next visit my friends in Pasadena.

Another thing worth mentioning here is that one of the hallmarks of a great game (or great anything else) is that it gets you thinking about things in a different way than you did before. In this respect, Rock Band is a tremendous success. First, it has increased my appreciation even for songs that I don't like (with respect to the skills required to make them). In principle, this could get me to start liking songs that I didn't previously like, but this hasn't actually happened. If a song doesn't sound pleasant to me, a greater appreciation of how difficult it is to play doesn't make it sound any more pleasant to my ears. Second, when I hear a song I have recently had a tendency to wonder how good it would translate to being in this game. I am doing things like listening for "rock beat" and so on. So, although I am still waiting for the game "Synth Hero" that will probably never be released, here is a list of five songs that I would really like to see in Rock Band. They aren't necessarily the top five I would like to see there and there is only one of them that I consider even remotely likely (can you guess which one?), but they are all parts of my paradigm and I would very much enjoy playing them:

Sunglasses at Night
Land of Confusion
Take On Me
Enjoy the Silence
Tarzan Boy (I couldn't avoid mentioning this one and keep a clear conscience)


* Songs that are part of my paradigm (like the one discussed on this page, to mention a random example), on the other hand, can pretty much never be played often enough. :) Not that I have a history of this or anything...