Who's played this game? I had such a great time the other night playing it. We played for nearly 6 hours straight....which after seeing that you can download other songs to play, I thought to myself how cool would it be to be able to download funk/soul songs and play those. Imagine playing the Meters, Motown stuff, Funkadelic, James Brown, etc? Maybe just a dream, but let's hear some stories from other strutters that got their Rock Band on.
I also noticed that on their website they sell some of the shoes and belts my Dad and I designed which made me smile a bit.
A friend of mine got this a few days ago and we've been playing it a bit. I play the drums and he plays guitar. I really enjoy playing the drums since I used to really play the drums back in the day so the game is fairly second-nature to me. The only hard part is getting a feel for the rhythm of things like drum fills, and then correlating the colored notes on fills to the colored pads really quickly on the fly. I'm used to reading drum tablature and figuring out rhythm from that, but a bunch of colored notes scrolling down the screen is a whole other world. But getting the main rhythm of a song down isn't generally that difficult and keeping time isn't a big deal. Honestly, the hardest part is that I try to play notes that aren't on the screen. I'm only playing on the "Hard" level because I'm really still trying to get a feel for the fills and moving around the pads and all, and they don't put all the drum parts into the song. For instance, on some songs they'll only have the bass drum hit on the quarter notes even though it's really hitting more often in the song, and my drumming instinct makes me want to hit the bass drum on every note really in the song, so I'll screw myself up point-wise by playing too many notes.
As far as downloading songs, there's some stuff that you won't find originals of simply because they need multitrack masters to do the game properly. I'd be willing to bet that with a lot of the older stuff there aren't multi masters since 1) some of that stuff was recorded when you had maybe 4 tracks at most and 2) some of that stuff was recorded with the musicians all in the same room so at best you're talking about a ton of bleed between mics. They could re-record the songs but those are never as good as the originals. The reason most of the songs on the game tend to be from the 70's and later is because that's really when you started having multitrack masters with each instrument having its own track. Even back in the late 60's they had to bounce down multiple instruments to fewer tracks because if you had even 8 tracks you had some fancy equipment. Licensing issues aside, one reason you wouldn't likely see Beatles songs, for instance, in a game like Rock Band is that even at the time of Sgt. Peppers they were only working with a 4-track machine.
That said though, there's still a ton of cool music they can port to the game, so we'll see. I do think genres outside of guitar-based rock lend themselves to Rock Band more than Guitar Hero since Guitar Hero is all about blazing guitar parts and that's not really a big component of R&B or funk. In Rock Band the guitar isn't nearly as involved and with the drums there (not to mention vocals) you can include rhythmically-based music and have it work a lot better.
Bottom line though is that the game is hella fun and you really feel like you're playing in a band when you're collaborating with friends. I honestly found Guitar Hero III to be too difficult to really be fun, but Rock Band is a blast to play. Oh yeah, I'll also say that playing the drums will make you break a sweat because you're really playing the drums. There's no shortcut to actually using all your limbs.
