Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Rock Band was the big arrival in our house this Christmas eve and its now been enough time to share some real thoughts on it.

Overall Rock Band is way better than Guitar Hero III. Lots of small things are better- more customization of the look of your avatar, more variety of songs. The big thing is that it moves things into a very social arena. Given the addition of voice, Rock Band has the potential to become the new karaoke, but rather than just signing along with your friends, you can do the guitar, drums or bass parts along with someone singing. The New Years after most folks had left a couple of friends stayed and we had great fun messing around with various songs.

They have also done a great job with the downloadable songs. Every Tuesday since their launch there have been 3 to 5 more songs, and they have done a decent balance of classics and newer stuff. There have been so many downloads that this already shows up some really big weaknesses in the XBox Live marketplace- it is becoming a real pain to browse through them, the description box is so small you need to wait for it to scroll to really see what the song is, and they don’t have the ability to do audio previews in the marketplace. Still, this is in serious danger of costing me $100-$250 a year if they can keep it up, and in an industry seeking ways to generate real revenue for music and artists, that should be gold.

There are two places where Guitar Hero III is still better. First, the overall feel of the guitar playing seems slightly better there- maybe its just that I got used to Guitar Hero first, but I feel like I get more places where Rock Band is just showing me missing notes for no reason. Also (go figure) the “solo play” for Guitar Hero is somewhat better, with the cool “boss battle” sequences, while the Rock Band solo play is just a list of songs.

Early production of the Rock Band guitar controllers apparently had lots of issues with the strum bar. Mine broke after just a few days but the EA return policy could not have been better. I just went to an online site, gave them a credit card # (just for a deposit) and they sent me a replacement in two days. I put the old one in the box and sent it back to them. No cost to me, very low hassle. Stuff breaks, but EA should be commended for having such a great approach to fixing it, and especially for letting me deal with it all on the web without having to talk to a support person.

Rock Band has the potential to be really huge. Its a bit expensive to get into it ($170), but the potential to be the karaoke “party game” replacement is huge, both in terms of being really fun and in terms of their potential market for the download songs. My advice would be to make sure they keep this scenario in mind as they produce new downloadable songs and game updates- make sure there are good modes in the game where its all about fun performing together, fun stuff to sing along with, etc. It would be great if they could do an update where you could have two microphones so people can sing along together, a better marketplace, better ways to browse the list of songs you own, etc.

I got Guitar Hero a week ago and I have to admit that its very addictive. I play a real guitar, but while the game can be frustrating when the rhythm is off or too artificial, its still very fun to crank through the songs. I’ve found that its also good exercise for my hands- I probably get really lazy playing the real guitar, especial with my little finger and it forces me to work them all pretty hard.

The one other complaint is the controller seems flaky and cuts out when you try to hold longer notes, especially on the middle (yellow) button.

In any case the other similar game, RockBand looks awesome too. Guess I’m going to have to put that one on order. The catch is its very expensive since it includes a controller, drums and a microphone.

LucasArts announced a Wii Lightsaber Game. This could easily push me over the edge to purchase a Wii. The bad news is that Amazon is still out of stock- seems like I better get moving now to get one before the Christmas rush will have them really sold out.

I don’t have a lot of time for games, but I do have to admit that I’ve been sucked into World of Warcraft a bit. Compared
to some previous massive-multiplayer games its pretty friendly towards people who only play a few hours a week. Since I started
my friend Chris has lapped me- I was halfway along advancing a character and he
created a new one from scratch and got it to 60 weeks before me.

The game has a current level limit- 60. My goal the past couple of months has been to get to 60 before the new
expansion came out, and sure enough last night I finally hit that goal! The expansion looks pretty cool
although selling an extra $40 box seems very old-school for a game that delivers new bits to me every month over the
internet. I assume they do this for shelf space or something during the holiday season, but it still seems a wacky thing
to do with their existing userbase (who are so far generating some of the biggest annuity revenue of any game ever).

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