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Courtesy of South Park:

This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me: I have an addiction to music rhythm games. (I know what you’re thinking – no shit). I played no other game besides Guitar Hero from Jan 06 until Guitar Hero 2 came out in Nov 06. I have a $1000 Roland drum kit that I only use for playing drums in Rock Band 2 (and a little bit in GHWT & GHM). I’ve wired my own custom overdrive pedal to my fake guitars. I even bought the music game that wins the award for worst covers: Rock Revolution.(when I found a copy for $20) So of course, I bought Rock Band Unplugged for my PSP. It was $40 at Best Buy.

Interface

The interface design is exactly like that of Rock Band 2. The same sounds accompany button presses, it uses the same fonts, same colors etc. If you’ve played Rock Band 2 then the interface will be very familiar. This is a good thing. It easy to take for granted how good the user interface to Rock Band is until you’ve had to use the awful mess of an interface from Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Songs

The game comes with 41 songs on disk with 10 songs available as DLC on the release date for $2 each. Most of these song are on-disk songs from Rock Band 2 or Rock Band DLC. There are a few new songs like the Jackson 5′s ABC and What’s My Age Again by Blink 182. If you’ve gotten tired of playing the on disk songs from Rock Band 2 then you’ll be disappointed in the set list for Unplugged.

I bought one DLC song from PSN via the WiFi connection on the PSP. This worked flawlessly and the song was integrated right into the game just as it is in Rock Band 2.

Gameplay

So how do you actually play this game without a fake guitar, fake drums or a fake real microphone? Well, there are 4 tracks for each instrument that correspond to the left, up, triangle and circle buttons. You push these buttons to strum/hit/sing each track. (well you don’t sing on vocals, you just try to match the rhythm of the vocals).  Since this is a band game you play every instrument one at a time. Pressing the right and left trigger allows you to switch to a different instrument track.

There are three different ways to play the game: warmup, survivor and quickplay/tour. The method that you play in quickplay and tour are obviously the way the game is intended to be played.

Quickplay/Tour

I’m a fairly good Rock Band player so I assumed I would be able to jump right into the game by playing at least on the hard difficulty level. Well, that was a bad assumption. I failed the first couple of songs I played on hard. The game doesn’t rate your performance the same way that Rock Band and Guitar Hero do. You play each instrument in phrases, the key is to full combo a phrase which keeps that instrument playing automatically for a while and lets you switch to another instrument. The only time you can’t switch to another instument is during a solo (any instrument can have a solo). This can become frantic. To keep your overall phrase streak going you have to be able to switch to another instrument quickly. I would often miss the last note of a phrase because I would switch too quickly, or, I would miss the first note in the phrase of the instrument I switched to. To add to this maniac switching, you have to be able to get ‘into’ the rythym of the next instrument immediately. It’s tough to get used to this track switchin at first but after playing the game for a while it becomes second nature.

The star rating system seems much harder in Unplugged than in Rock Band. Missing 3 phrases almost guarantees that you will only get 4 stars even with good use of overdrive.

World Tour works the same way that it does in Rock Band 2. You start out with access to a few gigs in a few cities and as you play you increase your access to other gigs and cities. You do this by accumulating stars, fans and money and hiring different staff members such as agents, promoters etc. There are ‘make your own’, random and song specific set lists to play through on your way to the top.

I’ve played through about half of the tour mode, first on medium, then moving up to the hard difficulty with brief excursions into the expert level. I’m having fun with the game but there is something off about the timing. I’m not sure if it’s the timing window, or if the scroll speed is too slow or I’m used playing Rock Band 2 with a slightly skewed calibration but I have a very hard time with hitting notes early in this game. On the expert level it’s very difficult for me to ‘see’ the pattern when there are lots of notes. This is where Harmonix always disappoints me. Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero World Tour both have adjustable hyperspeed settings that let you adjust the scroll speed of the notes. This also spreads the notes out and makes them easier to see. Even though Harmonix relented and added a single speed Breakneck speed option to Rock Band 2, there’s no equivalent option in RB:Unplugged. I don’t think I will be able to play most of the songs in this game on expert because it’s so hard to make out the pattern of the expert note charts.

One other thing that’s hard to get used to is the use of chords. They’re not too hard to play when they’re seperated across the PSP (e.g. Left+triangle chord) but when they’re on the same side, they’re very difficult to hit and still maintain your streak. This is especially true when trying to hit the triangle-circle in the middle of a complicated note progression. My thumb doesn’t want to bend that way quickly. My inability to hit some of these chords will also keep me playing on the expert difficulty level.

Overdrive is used in a similar manner as Rock Band. You can use it to try and get a better score, bring all the instrument levels up if you are having problems, or use it to bring a failed instrument back into the band.

Warmup

Warmup mode is accessed through the extras menu and allows you to play any instrument for as long as you want. There’s no need to worry about switching tracks. This is the closest thing to playing the way you play in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

Band Survivor

This mode is played similar to the Tour & Quickplay modes except that there are no phrases. You can’t put an instrument on autopilot by completing a phrase. If you aren’t playing an instrument its rock icon starts sliding towards the bottom of the screen and hence towards failure. You end up switching a lot to whichever instrument is closest to failing out.

Extras

Harmonix included the No Fail mode from Rock Band 2 and also added an ‘Unlock All Songs’ option. These are welcome additions, particularly the “Unlock All Songs’ option. (They do, however, disable saving of scores etc when enabled).

Online leaderboards are missing from the game. This would be a nice thing to have but it’s not a deal breaker. You can still see your high score and star level for each song in quickplay. Unfortunately, Harmonix still hasn’t bothered to differentiate between difficulty levels when showing you these score. You can’t tell whether your 4 star score on a song was played on easy, medium, hard or expert. I don’t understand why on the third version of Rock Band they still haven’t added this feature.

Summary

Overall I’m having a lot of fun playing this game. I don’t think my PSP has been used this much in years. Except for a few fairly minor issues, Harmonix has created another very good game.

I played the ‘Extended Play’ version of the game last night and it’s much better than the normal version. The questions come at you faster. That Chris dude barely talks. So for me it was much more fun. There are no prizes however.

I played the beta version of 1 vs 100 on my Xbox360 tonight. It’s a game based on a TV gameshow. I generally like trivia games so I thought I would like this one.

When the game started it put me and three other people together in a group. In this group we could see each other’s scores and talked to each other. (assuming we had microphones). This certainly makes the game more interesting but I don’t know how they choose who’s in the group. One of the other people in the group was actually on my friend’s list but the other two were not. About half my friend’s list was playing so I don’t know why I wasn’t in a group with everyone on my friend’s list. I’m guessing it’s because I joined late and the others on my friend’s list were already grouped together.

In any case, having people playing on your friend’s list definitely made the game more fun. This could not, however, overcome the game’s shortcomings.

The main problem is the game is based on a TV show. The pacing is way too slow. The host, Chris, is a typical annoying game show host. We spent too much time listening to him prove to us that he was actually live. The game also pauses for commercials. This is not as bad as actually watching the game on TV but, having lived with a DVR for 10 years now, I have no patience for advertisements. I particularly lose patience when the whole game pauses for 30 seconds so you can stare at a Sprint logo.

The trivia questions themselves were too pop-culture centric, but I guess that is to be expected sort of game.

While I didn’t particularly like the game, I think this is a good demonstration of a what the Xbox combined with the internet can do. I appreciate the idea and technology behind it.

I don’t see myself playing this much (or at all) in the future. Well, I won’t unless the prize for winning is seeing Chris get smacked in the mouth.

If my Xbox360 only played Rock Band 2 that would pretty much be fine with me. As proof that I play this game way more than I should, I just got a billion fans (yes with a B). Just to give you an idea of how much of a loser this makes me, it took me about nine months to do this. (playing drums and guitar mostly; some vocals-no reasonable person would call what I do singing).