estemshorn wrote:raynebc wrote:Harmonix was the only one innovating anyways.
Yeah, the past few guitar heroes weren't really innovative, they were just different songs on a different engine with a different storyline. Okay, maybe WoR had the whole warrior powers thing which was pretty cool, but it wasn't really innovative like the pro modes are.
Oh, you mean the pro modes that half the people who bought the game can't play because they keep on pushing back the release date of that god damn midi adapter?
So far RB3 as been a huge disappointment for me. The setlist is full of songs that sell and is practically devoid of challenge when compared to RB2. Pro Keys sucks because it's too easy on Easy/Medium and too hard on Hard/Expert: it's a huge curve from medium to Hard. Huge.
Meanwhile WOR returned to it's roots and delivered one of the most challenging setlists yet while still retaining some good variety.
I was a huge Rock Band fan, I adored 1 and 2, but really, I don't see where the innovation is in the series. 2 really didn't add too many new features. It just kind of refined the system, which was fine, it was an undeniably solid entry, but really the most innovative part of the game was probably the song selection screen.
Rock Band 3 has innovation, sure, but most of it is really rough around the edges. Keys is disappointing because it IS guitar, Pro Keys sucks because of how it was implemented and half the mechanics weren't explained (seriously, none of the tutorials address the board swap thing), Pro Drums is allegedly a solid addition but I'd hardly call it innovative since every expert drum player on the planet was hoping for something like this, and harmony vox was carried over from TBR. They also rendered practice mode useless by removing BNS and eliminated versus multiplayer (SERIOUSLY, WTF).
Meanwhile Guitar Hero added no new instruments, but rather added new modes of play that made a stale system interesting if only for a bit. Also, I must commend the GHTunes this time around. You have lots of control over just about everything including the actual chart.
One of my favorite features of WOR was how accessible the leaderboards were. When you go to pick a song, you see the scores of your friends right there without having to go anywhere else. This alone is pretty minor, but the cool part was that you could actually run the song with that player's score as a goal. You got a little progress bar that showed how close you currently were to beating his score.
To me this was awesome because it made boring songs fun. The level up system rewards those who play EVERY SONG in quick play. I'm someone who generally just plays challenging songs, but I found it easy to level up because there was the added challenge of trying to beat my friends scores. But the best part about this is that it simulated a multiplayer experience without having to have the other player online. It was like on-demand pro-face off, or boss battles even since you could restart without the obvious repercussions of being able to restart during an online Pro face-off match.
I've also been steadily disappointed with RB's DLC selection and RBN is too loosely moderated for me to be buying out of there very frequently.
