sluggo
3241
Yet another vote for Sin Wagon!
sinfony
3242
I should clarify: challenging on drums.
wumpus
3243
So it looks like those Spongebob songs were not, in fact, an April Fool’s Joke.
Also, I find the Toby Keith less objectionable than the Spongebob for some reason.
Try Love Spreads and Hammerhead.
So, for that one person that was curious, my PJ reissue arrived today with Rock Band download code intact. I played the three songs once through on hard guitar, and they were pretty much what you’d expect: mandatory for fans who’ve had this preordered for months, “you paid how much for a cd?!?” for everyone else. State of Love and Trust has always been a favorite, and I love how a recent version of Alive has subtle differences (and big ones that would certainly be controversial for some with respect to the ending solo). But Brother is the standout of the pack for me so far, probably because it’s the song that I’m least familiar with and it has a great variety of pace.
SoL&T is 4’s on everything except vocals, Brother’s highest is 4 on guitar and all of the rest around 2, and I don’t think Alive is much different from the other version in terms of difficulty. But they all felt a little harder after being spoiled by GH:M’s note windows. But not a difficult pack by any stretch of the imagination. Much like Ten, it’s quality without absurd challenge.
Thank God. I always got the feeling it was removed for interface reasons rather than usability.
Bullshit. If Harmonix doesn’t want to devote the time to these features because they have higher priorities, then they should just say so. But implying that whiny, crybabies should just man up and master the songs is insulting. Name me one “awesome rock musician” who is forced to perform a song that they can’t play during one of their shows.
Penalize me all you want if I skip a song, but when you start sucking the fun out of the game in order to “keep it real,” then you’re headed down the wrong path (and this is coming from a Harmonix fanboy).
Oh, and if the company wants me to continue buying DLC, then it might behoove them to take a break from modeling the true rock star experience and give me better sorting options. The defaults work great for 60 tracks, but, as Sones noted, they’re not so hot for hundreds of tunes.
And while I’m on a tear, allow Tour Bands to be used in Band Quickplay!
Twiddly Dee?
There’s quite a few already.
Sin Wagon, Funk 49, most of The Who songs, Sorrow, Love Spreads, Excuse Me Mr, a few of the Pearl Jam songs, and a great many others I can’t remember off the top of my head.
Of course, this does kind of depend on what you find “challenging”. If the only thing you find challenging are super-fast, kick pedal heavy songs then you’re going to be stuck with Metal. If the more technical songs challenge you, then there are plenty of other options.
sluggo
3248
I was at the Teasdale talk as well and took issue with the setlist comment as well.
At first, Teasdale was glib about people wanting to exclude songs from random setlists. He got sarcastic and pointed out the word RANDOM. “People are upset because random setlists … are RANDOM!”
But part of the point of that section of the talk was learning from your userbase, and he said a light went off suggesting the issue wasn’t that the setlists were random, but that it was a difficulty problem. If you gave people different levels of “random” – like simple mystery setlist, challenging mystery setlist, etc – that basically solved the problem.
And here, I think Teasdale totally missed the point. It didn’t solve the problem for a few reasons. First, is that people enjoy songs in different ways. I like playing Blackened on my own, but no one ever wants to play that in a party setting. And when you have the potential for a song like Visions lurking about, people will just stay away from the Challenging Mystery Setlists altogether. It’s not enough to build these setlists based on your definition of difficulty – you have to accept that there are songs that people just don’t want to play and give them a way to omit them from the random sets.
Definitely – I want to blacklist songs because I loathe them, not because of the difficulty.
Both in my case. Sometimes a song is just too hard for me though I like it, but I personally find “Green Grass and High Tides” an overlong and boring exercise in guitarist penis-flexing. A good song it isn’t.
Me too. That said, if I want to blacklist a song because of difficulty, let me! It’ll make my game better because of it.
I never want to hear Fall Out Boy again, much less play it.
Shadarr
3253
If you never want to play GG&HT again, delete it. That’s what I did.
My problem is that there are songs I can’t play on Expert, and if one of those songs comes up I fail the whole set and get pissed off. If they just let you adjust the difficult between songs, it would solve that problem. It wouldn’t solve the Visions problem, but I don’t think Harmonix is ever going to admit Visions is a problem.
Yeah, but sometimes I want to play songs in some settings or not in others. Like eighty percent of Doolittle. The trick is that sometimes you want songs to keep around for playing by themselves but you know they won’t be good for a group, or much fun outside of a particular set of songs.
Why not both difficulty switching and song deactivation (or even weighting as well)? As has been said again and again, there is no conceivable reason other than Harmonix being fucking stubborn about it (or some bizarre “love it or delete it” contract clause in the licensing) . The worst is with songs that are good and multipurpose but trapped in a pack with other songs that you don’t want to see as often. Thanks for punishing me for supporting your product without nitpicking.
It’s like we’ve had this discussion a million times and these people still don’t get it. The game’s band mode is worthless for many veteran players until they correct this deficiency. At least GHWT makes no bones about being a glorified quickplay list.
Cyrano
3256
Ahh. That makes sense. I’m not being sarcastic, but I’m drawing a blank on rock drumming that’s difficult other that The Who and metal. Maybe The Police? Rush?
Shadarr
3257
Yeah, I stopped buying entire packs after the Cars album, because I was faced with the choice of either deleting the whole thing or having a bunch of crap keep coming up in mystery sets. So as a result, I now only buy the songs I really want. That’s losing them money.
You’re right that they’ve hamstrung their own band mode feature. I created an entire band of custom characters, assigned them to instruments, and I never get to see them because I can’t use them in quickplay. Adding stars to quickplay is a good thing, but they need to address the fact that mystery setlists are like russian roullette.
It really depends on what types of patterns give you trouble. If it is off-beat base notes then Funk 49 can be tough. If it’s fast double kicks then try Tell Me Baby or Sorrow. If like me you have trouble with fast rolls which include kicks then it’s Jesus Christ Pose or Cool Thing. If you have trouble with kicks + left hand then Love Spreads will give you trouble.
Personally my favorite drum DLC songs in the game are Hammerhead, Funk 49, Well Though Out Twinkles, Siva, and Tom Sawyer. The first 4 because they are fun without being crazy difficult, and Tom Sawyer because it’s freakin Tom Sawyer.
I’ve got all the Rush. Somehow forgot about all the Who stuff in there, I’ll probably give that whirl.
The one type of pattern that’s guaranteed to give me trouble is a series of kicks with off-beat hits or fast rolls on the rest of the kit (think Won’t Get Fooled Again and Colony of Birchmen, respectively). So I tend to eschew those sorts of things, although Colony of Birchmen and Kool Thing are two of my favorite songs to play in the game. My usual quickplay setlist goes something like Siva, two or three Rush songs, Birchmen, Blackened, Constant Motion, and Panic Attack. The biggest problem is that of that group of songs, and the songs of similar difficulty, Siva is really the only one that I can get other people to play when I’ve got a group over. Most people I play with tend to want to play the stuff they know, which unfortunately tends to be a total bore to play. I don’t think it would be difficult to remedy this situation; if they can release a raft of the goddamn Grateful Dead, I don’t see why we can’t also get all of Siamese Dream.
wumpus
3260
Hey everybody,
You wanted him, you begged for him, so we’re giving him to you! Your favorite ’80s heartbreaker, Risk Astley, is finally making his way to Rock Band. Joining the much-anticipated “Never Gonna Give You Up” are Parry Gripp’s “Hamster on a Piano” and DJ Dragostea’s “Dragostea Din Teil” (aka the Numa Numa song). We will be announcing the Wii DLC for next week later.
Ok so THIS is the April Fool’s Joke, per official Harmonix forum post. Not Spongebob.
