Victory!

Last night.. right before I had to drop the kids off, we managed to finally make it through the Endless Set list on hard difficulty in Rockband. I was playing drums, my older son was on vocals and my younger son on guitar. If you are not familiar with the Endless Set List, it is all the regular tracks and the 9 bonus tracks that come with the game right out of the box. Thats all 58 songs in one set list. Gabe and I had done this set list previously, but only on medium difficulty. This time there were 3 of us and we took it up a notch. The songs are varied and so there wer songs where the vocals were a struggle or drums or guitar, but with the ability to aid each other with overdrive and saves when needed. There were a couple of songs we had to do more than once to get through, but better planning on saving overdrives for the second time through took care of that.

We were almost done with the set.. had just finished song 56 out of 58 and the song I was dreading came up. It's 'Run to the Hills' by Iron Maiden. Not a bad song in general, but absolutely horrid to try and play on hard drums. I am stuck on the hard drums solo tour because of this song. It is redonkulous. Absurd. Frustrating. But here I'm thinking, with two people to boost me with their overdrives and toss a save if it gets ugly, we should be fine. Yeah.. not so much. Here is a video of what hard drums looks like on this song. If you have played RB at all, you will quickly realize how much of a bitch this song truely is:



Anyway.. when you fail a song on the tour, it tells you how many fans you lost. On average we were losing about 13K fans per failure. We had maybe 5 failures total up to that point where we had to redo a song. When we got to RTTH, it took us probably 20 tries over two sittings to finally get past it. There was much rejoicing. I figured we would still come out way ahead. 25 retries for 58 success, we shouldstill be up about 33 songs worth of fans on hard difficulty. So the set ends, we get our gold medal tags for our rocker names and then it gives us our summary. We earend about $24K each.. and gained.. ZERO fans. Apparently you don't get fans for doing the endless set list. At all. But you can lose them. We started with about 560K fans. When we ended, we have just over 14K fans.. W T F. So now a whole bunch of stuff we had unlocked that is based off of fan count is now greyed out.

I know its not the end of the world and we can earn them back pretty quick, but mighty frustrating to put all the effort into beating it on hard and finding we had lost basically all our fans on ONE song. Granted I am no expert drummer or anything, but I can play every other song in that game and make it through on first try usually with maybe one save on the really hard songs. That song I needed both saves and every overdrive possible just to finally squeek through. I mean I like a challenge and all, but don't make a required song for that kind of set to where only a professional drummer has a real shot at it. I know people who have played through the solo drum tour on expert and still have not managed to complete that song on hard.

While I generally like Iron Maiden's music. I would like to give them a friendly middle finger right now and politely tell them to DIAF. Not that you all care, but it was quite an accomplishment for the boys and I and we had fun doing it together. Here is my gamercard and you can click on it to view my achievements and go see that I am now a Gold Artist meaning we finished the endless set list on hard.



Guitar Hero 4 is slated to come out this fall. Previously GH was just that. Guitars only. After seeing the wild success of RB however, they are now making GH4 a full band setup as well. They have learned from a lot of mistakes that were made with the equipment and gameplay from RB and I am really looking forward to this game. The drum kit will have 3 pads in the center, bigger than the current RB ones and then two elevated 'cymbol' pads, making it a little more realistic and they have gone to great lengths to make the whole kit more stable and durable, not wanting the problems harmonix has had with massive returns and repairs of the drum kits. The pads will also be velocity sensative, allowing a real feel to the drums and giving you the opportunity to play louder or softer depending on how hard you hit them making it possible to more closely recreate the song.

The gameplay looks to be more solid overall, especially for online play. Supposedly you will be able to do an internet band and do a world tour. This is not available in RB. You can do quickplays where you just pick a song and play with others on xbox live, but you cannot actually progress through a tour and earn rewards or anything. Was my biggest drawback. While its fun to hop on and play with other people, I would love to be able to create a band with friends or family and whenever we got a chance to play together to be able to do our tour and actually play different set lists and move through the content and earn fans and rewards together. GH4 will also supposedly have a battle of the bands mode where your band can compete against another band via XBL. That should be very fun when you have enough people for two bands.