Rock Band is one of my favorite video games of all time. I would say that it's the greatest in the music video game genre. Yes, I think it's even better than Guitar Hero. Lemme tell you cats why this game was the shit and way better than that Guitar Hero crap.
- The graphics and game design were way better. I'm usually a fan of cartoony looking characters but Guitar Hero's looked so ugly.
- If you were like me when I was younger, you owned a Nintendo Wii. Guitar Hero's controller required that you put the Wii remote inside it. It made the guitar controller look ugly. On the other hand, you didn't need to do that with the Rock Band guitar, and those looked cool.
- Speaking of which, the instrument controllers for Rock Band looked way better than Guitar Hero's. GH's fret buttons felt like they were spread apart and were very clunky. RB's guitar had fret buttons that were right next to each other, making for a more slick, efficient way to play.
- Through the Fire and the Flames? That song is pretty difficult, but Rock Band 2 had two songs that were just as difficult and (IMO) much better songs to listen to, "Pain Killer" by Judas Priest and "Panic Attack" by Dream Theater.
- Guitar Hero was so intimidated by Rock Band that they created Guitar Hero: World Tour, which was basically Rock Band with a Guitar Hero aesthetic.
- Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS was fun, but you haven't lived until you played Rock Band: Unplugged for the PSP. You get to control all four instruments, giving you much more of a challenge.
A lot of my childhood memories involved playing this game with friends and sometimes by myself. This series had a lot of installments and I owned the following:
Rock Band - which was fun
Rock Band 2 - which was amazing
Green Day Rock Band - which was alright
Lego Rock Band - which was cool but the playlist wasn't as good as the other Rock Bands
Rock Band 3 - which was okay but also pretty disappointing.
Rock Band Unplugged - which I had to borrow my brother's PSP to play because the Playstation store didn't have it for my PSP Go.
I never played the Beatles edition although the mandolin controller looked cool as hell. Anyway, I remember the first time me, my brother, and my cousins played the first Rock Band. It was awesome. Back before I went through puberty, I was a pretty great singer (I mean, I can still sing but I can't hit high notes anymore). I always sang when we played. I specifically remember playing "I Think I'm Paranoid" by Garbage a bunch of times in a row. That song is still amazing. However, my favorite song in the game was "Roxanne" by The Police, which I always slaughtered on the mic. I always got a high score when it came to singing, but I never got a perfect score. When we played "Here It Goes Again" by OK Go, I scored my first 100% and you better believe I was hyped as hell.
I remember being a bit too aggressive on the drums and breaking one of the sticks. The drum pedal also suffered quite a bit, so that ended up breaking over time. We owned two guitars, the original black and white controller and the one with a "wood" finish. I was apparently too hard on the plucking mechanism and that one ended up breaking. As a result, we just switched plucks with the other controller. Man, we were really tough on those instruments.
It wasn't until Rock Band 2 where I felt like I excelled on the other instruments. I was able to progress all the way to hard mode and I could do expert difficulty on the easier songs (Look, I'm about having fun, not stressing myself out due to difficulty). I truly believe that the Rock Band series peaked with this game. It had the best tracklist with so many great songs like "Down With the Sickness" by Disturbed, "Panic Attack" by Dream Theater, "Pain Killer" by Judas Priest, "Almost Easy" by Avenged Sevenfold. and "Alive" by Pearl Jam. The tour mode on this game was definitely the best part. You could go to a bunch of cities and play a set of songs there. I never completed it, but I had one that was pretty deep with my guitarist named Wolf (We all had an edgy phase, right?). That game was so awesome it made me, my brother, and our friends want to start a band.
One night, my brother (or my brother's friend, the details are kinda fuzzy but I remember a good bit of it) decided that we should all form a band. We were really young at the time and we had big aspirations. Our band was called Quicksilver, which we later had to change to Quickzilver so the clothing brand didn't sue us. Why did we choose that name? I have no idea, but we agreed that it certainly sounded cool. I was the lead singer, my brother was the bassist, his friend played the drums, and my friend played the guitar. We wrote a bunch of songs, but never performed them. I'm pretty sure most of them are probably in a landfill, but I remember some of them fondly. I remember them being so edgy they cut you open. The first song we wrote was called "Cocaine." Keep in mind that we weren't even thirteen yet. All we knew about cocaine at the time was that it was a drug. I had no idea how cocaine was done until the seventh grade, which was over a year after the band broke up. We wrote a bunch of other edgy songs, including a joke song that I wrote called "Gut" that was, I shit you not, probably 75% swear words and made no sense. We took quite a lot of influence from Nu-Metal bands like System of a Down and Disturbed.
I remembered getting Rock Band 3 for Christmas. I was super excited when I saw that they were making a third one, especially after how amazing the sequel was. While there were certainly some great songs like "The Beast and the Harlot" by Avenged Sevenfold and "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne, they got rid of their tour mode that made the second game so amazing. It felt like they undid everything that made the second one great and put out a decent, but mostly shitty game. It was the point in the series where I feel like it started to go downhill. When I got an Xbox One, I didn't even bother getting Rock Band 4 because I had lost interest in playing these games.
To this day, the Rock Band 2 disc is currently lost somewhere and I haven't played these games in so long. I will always look back on those memories as some of the best moments of my childhood. It helped friendships grow stronger and fueled my passion for music that I have today.
Tomorrow, I will either revisit Coloring Book by Chance The Rapper or Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World by Lil Uzi Vert. I might be leaning toward LUV vs. the World after I learned that Chance won't be dropping an album this week.
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