Remember when you used to suck at Rock Band? You do again.
Since the release of Guitar Hero in 2005, guitar games have stuck with a simple gameplay formula – five colored buttons on the neck of the guitar and a single "strum bar." By letting players feel like rock stars without having to practice, this control scheme allowed music games to catch fire. Rock Band revitalized the genre at a crucial moment by adding drums and vocals, turning it into a social experience. But even that game didn't stray from the fundamentals.
Two new games released this month attempt to break the mold. Power Gig: Rise of the SixString comes packaged with a real guitar that works as a game controller or plugs into an amp. Rock Band 3 will work with a real Fender Squier Stratocaster guitar that will ship in 2011, but for now it has a less-expensive controller with about 150 tiny buttons that simulate guitar strings. It also features a new instrument – keyboards. And the game's pitch-accurate Pro modes are nearly identical to playing the real things.
In short, if you've already mastered Expert mode, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
The new titles come at a crucial time, when sales of music games are flagging.
"If Rock Band 3 doesn't sell, the Little Plastic Instrument genre is finished, as well," said analyst Bill Harris in an e-mail to Wired.com.
"Activision 'gamed' up Guitar Hero and ultimately failed," said Harris, who writes about games for the Dubious Quality blog. "Harmonix has stayed very true to expanding the experience ... making it more musical with each installment. Rock Band 3 has so many innovations – in particular, Pro mode, which I absolutely love – that if it fails, what other direction is left?"
Making games more complicated is risky business, but the rhythm game genre seriously needs a shot in the arm.
Activision's recent Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, released in September, only moved a piddling 86,000 copies, according to analyst reports. Compare that to the 1.5 million copies that Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock sold in its first month in 2007 and you get a sense of the problem.
"Every console owner who wants a music game already has one or more," said Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter in an e-mail to Wired.com. "Future sales will be mostly limited to new console purchasers, and there is really no compelling reason to buy a brand-new release when there are so many discounted copies of prior versions."
Pachter predicts that the worldwide music-game market will end up settling in at about a quarter of the $2 billion industry it was in 2008.
"I think more complex [software] means a smaller audience, so I don't see either Rock Band 3 or Power Gig expanding the installed base meaningfully," he said.
Rock Band 3's improvements probably aren't enough to keep the game's sales from declining. But they are enough to make it fun and challenging again even for those with guitar-game fatigue. Meanwhile, Power Gig is a miserable failure that would be lucky to hit 86,000 copies.
Review: Rock Band 3 Gets It Right
My friend Clarence, who plays guitar, latched onto Rock Band 3's Pro Guitar mode like white on rice.
The enthusiasm with which I have seen actual serious guitar players take up Pro mode handily puts the lie to the "just play a real instrument" slander that holier-than-thou critics love to sling unthinkingly at music games. Why would someone who can play guitar quite proficiently spend even more time on Rock Band?
Two reasons, one of which has held true for a few years and one of which is new to Rock Band 3. Music games are games: They score you, they let you compare your skills under pressure against the rest of the world. As a bonus, Rock Band 3's Pro mode teaches you to play new songs.
At one point, Clarence dropped the (fake) Fender Mustang, grabbed his (real) Fender Telecaster and started to crank out the familiar five-note riff of Devo's "Whip It." He'd never played it before, but the muscle memory of playing the song in Pro mode transferred over to the real thing.
"Hey, wait a minute," I said, jumping off the couch. I'd been playing "Whip It" on the pitch-accurate Pro keyboards mode. I don't play at all, but I ran over to the piano in the room and – on my first try – played the three synth notes.
I started singing and before you knew it we were banging out what I am proud to say was quite possibly the crappiest acoustic cover of "Whip It" ever heard outside a 7th-grade talent show. But the point stands: Just playing Rock Band 3 taught us a little bit of actual music.
Learning Pro guitar if you don't already play will probably be about as daunting as beating Deep Blue in chess. That said, I'm pretty sure that some percentage of Rock Band fanatics will start from scratch and force themselves to learn everything in Pro mode. And they'll probably discover that memorizing the patterns on-screen, which are a thick tangle of colors and numbers that show you which strings to strum and where to put your fingers, is quite a bit easier when they learn the fundamentals of the instrument.
Rock Band 3 is happy to oblige, offering a deep training mode that runs players through an increasingly complex series of chords, scales and riffs that apply equally to the game guitar and the real thing.
Still, most people will probably be like me. I started from zero in Pro guitar, plucking out simple songs like "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" on the easiest difficulty and being overjoyed if I managed to hit half the notes. If I really wanted to learn rock guitar, I probably would have by now. I was looking for something more gamelike, and Pro keys fit the bill.
You can play the Rock Band 3 keyboards like a traditional music game – the normal game mode gives you a series of patterns to bang out on five keys, so you never have to move your hand. But playing Pro keys on Easy mode isn't that much harder, and it's pitch-accurate (if dramatically simplified). I barely even bothered with the normal mode before switching entirely to Pro.
Konami made an arcade game called Keyboardmania in 2000, and it is a total pile of junk. I was in love with the concept until I realized that the game's only difficulty setting was "ludicrous." Rock Band 3's Pro keys mode is the game I always wished Keyboardmania had been, stocked with amazing music and a sensible difficulty curve. The 83-song set list is filled with fantastic '80s synth tracks: "Centerfold," "The Power of Love," "Walk of Life." And just like the guitar mode, an extensive series of lessons is there to give you real-life skills.
Rock Band has always been focused on the social experience. You can now play with up to seven people – guitar, drums, bass and keys plus three vocalists singing harmonies. The only way to do this is the "All Instruments" mode, in which only the instruments but not the vocals receive scores and Achievements. Since Xbox 360 only allows four players to be signed in at once, this makes sense, although it seems like there should have been an option to choose which instruments are scored.
The only other niggle that my playing group came up with was that outside the All Instruments mode, you can't play with guitar, bass and keyboard simultaneously.
Harmonix stumbled out of the gate with the Mustang guitar, which won't be available – and therefore the entire Pro mode won't be playable – until mid-November. It'll also take Harmonix until early 2011 to ship the Squier Stratocaster, its controller that is built from and functions as a real guitar.
But those are minor issues at best, especially for such an ambitious game. Wedbush's Pachter is probably right that Rock Band 3's enhancements won't stop it from seeing the lowest sales of any installment of the series yet, but I'm hooked on it in a way I haven't been in years.
Rock Band 3 (Xbox 360 reviewed, also on PlayStation 3, Wii)
WIRED Keyboards and Pro modes add depth; extensive training modes; fantastic set list.
TIRED Limited multiplayer options.
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Next page: A review of Power Gig, the music game that uses a real guitar as a controller.
Review: Power Gig Blows It
The lengthy delay of the Rock Band stratocaster opened up a crucial window for Seven45 Studios. The company is technically right when it says its game Power Gig: Rise of the SixString is the first to market that uses a real guitar. Although the game can be purchased separately for $60 and played with any existing guitar controller, the big draw is the $180 bundle that includes the SixString guitar controller.
While Harmonix's ambition is to get gamers to play realistic guitar, Seven45 just wants to fake it. Although Power Gig includes a real guitar, you don't use it to do anything that's much more complicated than the basic five-button setup that guitar games have been using for the past half decade. That's right – you don't do much else with that guitar besides hold down the top five sections of the fretboard, but you're pushing on strings instead of buttons.
You can turn on "power chord mode," which will add a small selection of easy guitar chords to the gameplay. So at certain moments, instead of holding down any string in a given section, you have to hold two individual strings with your index and ring fingers. This does add difficulty to the game, and these are real guitar chords. But it's not real playing, just another level of fakery.
"But the guitar is real!" you say. "Surely it is worth it to own a real guitar." I wouldn't know. So I gave it to Clarence. After spending a few minutes with it, he a) determined that our review unit of the SixString could not actually be tuned properly anyway and b) broke the first string clean off trying to play "Freebird."
The advantage, then, of the SixString is limited to this: It allows you to play a guitar game with a significantly more realistic-feeling controller. In my experience, this is no advantage at all. In fact, I found playing Power Gig to be massively frustrating. The guitar works by measuring when the strings make contact with metal sensors on the fretboard. But if my fingers were a millimeter off, it pushed the wrong buttons and my hits didn't register.
Meanwhile, I'm holding this incredibly heavy guitar and strumming a pick across the strings, which are making an ungodly racket. I wanted to quit halfway through every song, which is tragic since Seven45 lined up a couple of excellent exclusive tracks, most notably the Derek and the Dominos version of "Layla."
Luckily, I didn't have to subject myself to playing one of my favorite songs on a substandard controller, because Power Gig locks 35 of its 70 songs away behind some unexplained requirements. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say you have to play the single-player mode to unlock them. This is what other music game developers used to do about 5 years ago, but they stopped once they realized it was excruciatingly stupid.
In many other ways, Power Gig seems to be stuck in 2005. The software is so profoundly feature-deficient that I hardly know where to begin. You can only play with vocals, drums and guitar – no bass. There's no online play. The graphics are ugly. The whole thing feels like a cheap Wii game into which Eric Clapton somehow got suckered into appearing.
Power Gig kicked off its marketing campaign with a video showing the company throwing guitar controllers into a volcano. I will refrain from further comment.
Power Gig: Rise of the Six-String (Xbox 360 reviewed, also on PlayStation 3)
WIRED Three Clapton songs, which you can play with a normal guitar controller if you want.
TIRED Incredibly dated software; playing with SixString guitar is not actually that fun.
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