Why Rock Band's guitar tracks "feel better" than Guitar Hero III's

[Darren Dirt]

pure love, baby. love of the music, love of the instrument.
http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2008/07/i-asked-harmonix-about-note-tracking.html

Note tracking or track authoring is the process by which recorded music is translated into the rows of glowing gems in the game. I've always been curious about the process, because I've always thought that tracking plays a huge role in how fun a song is to play. It's kind of hard to articulate this quality, but some ways of realizing notes in a game are just more fun to play than others; you notice it when you play the same track in multiple games, like Cherub Rock in Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. I didn't know if the game's designers had some special insight into producing the sense of satisfaction that comes from navigating a tricky set of notes and chords.

I talked with a Harmonix staffer about the process, and I was surprised to learn that the most important factor in the process is musicianship. The people responsible for note tracking, she told me, aim to reproduce the way that the song is played on a real guitar to the greatest extent possible within the confines of the guitar controller's limited repertoire of moves. If, in the real guitar, you would produce a sequence chords by keeping your index finger planted on a higher fret and moving your fingers on the lower frets, the note-trackers will mimic this hand movement on the guitar controller using the fret buttons. The same goes for passages that call for a guitar player to slide his hand up and down the neck of the guitar. She also told me another detail: the various chords on a guitar often have more than one set of fingerings, and a guitar player will usually choose among them based on the chords that surround them in that chord progression. The same line of thinking informs making the tracks in-game when the audio team works up a in-game note chart.




Elrond Hubbard said...
This is interesting. I had never really thought of GHIII as anything more than a game you played with a guitar. I mean, it's a simulator, the way that all games are, designed to make the player feel more powerful than they are in real life.

But the growing consensus seems to be that Rock Band is more "pure," and I think this is going to devolve into the same hard-liner B.S. to which we've all become accustomed in video game reporting.

So this explains why this restriction exists, as Penny Arcade was whining about it... Hence my discovery of above. Thanks G & T!


$29.99 for this? that's not even a real discount off the $1.99 per track cost other consoles have... *sigh* well at least the big Canadian retailers are offering the main game at the same $169.99 price as the US price.

[Darren Dirt]

Sorta on the subject...

Rhythm Game Track Finder

http://trackfinder.mtv.com/

Want to play along with your favorite band in a video game? Find out if they are in any of the major rhythm games here. Discover which songs are in which games. Master take or cover version? We've got that info, too. Or just compare track-lists from Guitar Hero, Rock Band, SingStar and more.

PS: is it a GOOD thing or a BAD thing that both "American Idol" *and* "AatC" have 40-ish tracks in games around town...

[Darren Dirt]

uh-oh, looks the battle continues... check out this review of GHWT:

pt 1/2
pt 1/2

The studio thing sounds amazing, and the way the instruments are mucho improvedo makes me wish I had the coin to buy every new group music game that has come out / will be coming out in the next 5 years, looks like Competition + Creative Developers = Profit! (for the consumers)