I also managed to sneak in a quick Rock Band session tonight, just to check out the new songs for today. I wasn’t familiar with “Siva” or “Ten Speed (God’s Blood And Burial)”, but they’re pretty fun to play on guitar and I even managed to nail a 100% full combo run on “Siva” (albeit on medium, still). “Ten Speed” is a cover, but I’d never heard the original, so it doesn’t really make a difference to me.

“Working Man” is also a cover, but the vocalist isn’t that bad and there’s not really a lot of singing in it anyway, relatively speaking. It’s a looooong song, with lots of complex guitar solos, so it’s not one you want popping up in the world tour too often, but it’s awesome to play when you’re in the mood.

I also got back to Rock Band for a bit today, mainly since I wanted to check out the latest DLC. I wasn’t really a huge Oasis fan back in their day, but the DLC was recommended and the guitar parts are actually pretty fun to play.

I then cleared a couple more tiers of the solo guitar career on Hard. I’m still only getting three or four stars at best on them, and not scoring any higher than I did on medium yet, but I’m not really getting consistent practice at it either at this rate.

I briefly popped back into Rock Band tonight, after picking up this month’s OXM disc since it had a few bonus songs on it. The Freezepop (“Sprode”) and Bang Camaro (“Rock Rebellion”) ones are pretty decent (the built-in bonus Freezepop song turned out to be rather disappointing), but I didn’t really care for the Count Zero one (“Shake”). I’m also apparently falling a bit out of practice already, as I tried “My Iron Lung” again and scored 3/4 what I did the first time. Ugh.

My account is also finally linked up with the website, but it’s a bit underwhelming. I can’t really see much in the way of stats, and it mainly looks like a social network for organizing bands for now. Maybe they’ll add more stats as time goes on, and more might appear if I finally start doing the world tour.

I finished unlocking the bonus songs in Rock Band tonight (“Outside” by Tribe and the Bang Camaro songs are pretty good, and Honest Bob And The Factory-To-Dealer Incentives gets the award for best band name in the game). I was going to start the world tour after that, but then discovered that you really do need at least two players in order to do it. I had assumed you could do it alone since it let me get past the player join-in screen with just me, but then it stops you later on. Oh well.

I started the hard level of the solo guitar career, and was disappointed again to discover that the bonus songs are locked again and have to be unlocked per difficulty level, not just once. Oh well. I was able to go on and complete the first two tiers on hard. Only one song really gave me any trouble and pushed me deep down into the yellow, and I only got three or four stars on most of them, but I did manage to five-star “Orange Crush” at least.

I got used to shifting my hand down one fret on medium, but now I need to be able to shift down two frets to reach the orange note, and I frequently wind up losing my place if I have to shift quickly. There are also more notes that are difficult to hit, like triple chords and RO or GB chords. I’m still using three fingers for now and haven’t decided yet whether to switch back to using my pinky again. Hey, if Clapton can do it with just three… But then again, I’m no Clapton. ;)

I finished off the medium solo guitar career in Rock Band tonight, and as is typical nowadays, the final song (“Green Hills and High Tide”) was an extremely lengthy one with an insanely long solo part. It wasn’t too hard though, and I five-starred it fairly easily. Overall, the medium difficulty was probably a bit below that of GH2, and it’s become a common criticism that Rock Band is a bit too easy. We’ll see about that once I move to the hard level…

I also started unlocking bonus songs, which unfortunately you have to do one at a time here, since playing one unlocks the next. I was hoping to jump ahead to the Freezepop song, but oh well, it won’t take too much longer as I’m about halfway through them now.

Next up I think I’ll try the World Tour mode, even if just by myself for now. You can collect fans and lose them if you don’t perform well, so I think I’ll keep it at medium for now until I build up some and a bit more practice.

There are some minor problems: you no longer get detailed performance statistics after each song, just the final score and star rating (though it at least shows partial stars, so you know how close you came). There’s also no reward or special marker for getting 100% of the notes on a song. The leaderboards only track the top 100,000 players, so I don’t even show up on a lot of them yet. And the community site could use some improvement, as it doesn’t really show that many stats and I can’t even link my account there yet due to some kind of huge delay in updating the data.

But at least I’m getting the snotty rock star attitude down:

Today I finally caved in and bought Rock Band. Not the full kit though, just the standalone game only. I already have a guitar, you can use a headset as the vocals mic, and I’m not really that interested in the drums right now. They’ll be available separately at the end of this month anyway, should the urge ever hit me.

The guitar parts play pretty much exactly like Guitar Hero, unsurprisingly, with only a couple major differences: solo sections are specially marked off and your percentage of notes hit is tracked within that section and gives you a bonus based on how well you do, and at the end of some songs is a freestyle section where you can go wild on the frets for bonus points, as long as you hit the final notes correctly.

The other major differences are in the higher-level character management. Instead of choosing a built-in character, you create your own. Playing songs well unlocks clothing and instrument options, you can buy a lot more at the shop, and you can edit artwork onto some items a la Forza, so there’s quite a bit of customization potential. Each character you create is tied to a specific instrument type though, so you can’t switch between guitar and vocals with the same character.

There’s a single-instrument single-player solo career mode, and that’s what I spent most of my time in tonight, getting past the first four guitar tiers on medium. It started off really easy, but towards the end the difficulty was about on par with medium in GH2, and easier than GH3. The chosen songs work fairly well, though a couple seemed out of place in terms of difficulty. I still managed to five-star all but one of them though, and even hit 100% on a few, which I still haven’t done on any in GH2/3 on medium yet. Unfortunately there’s no bass guitar career, just lead, but at least you can choose bass in the quickplay mode whereas in GH it’s relegated to co-op and practice only.

There’s also a ‘world tour’ mode that’s supposed to be a bit deeper than the plain solo career mode, but it’s mainly meant to be used with multiple people playing and doesn’t work online, so I haven’t bothered with it yet.

There’s already plenty of downloadable songs out for Rock Band, but unfortunately a lot of them are covers. I wound up buying only three of them: Limelight (gotta have any Rush, even if this one is a cover), Buddy Holly, and My Iron Lung. The latter two were harder than the career songs I’d done so far, but Limelight was fairly easy.

I also tried vocals for a bit, doing the tutorial and a couple songs on easy, and it just confirmed one thing: I should never be let within ten feet of a microphone. I’ll stick with guitars for now.