Viacom To Sell Rock Band Creator Harmonix 112
UgLyPuNk tips news that Harmonix, the game developer behind Rock Band and the early Guitar Hero games, will be sold by parent company Viacom, signaling the media conglomerate's exit from the console game market. Quoting Wired:
"The news is yet another ominous sign for the music-game business, which exploded seemingly overnight in 2005 with the release of Guitar Hero. ...sales have been in free fall since the dizzying heights of 2008, with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock moving only 86,000 copies in its first week... Thus far in calendar year 2010, the balance sheet seems to show that Harmonix has been a $300 million liability for Viacom. And it doesn’t look like Viacom believes in the long-term future of music games. With any luck, the company will find a buyer that can help Harmonix grow, but it’s hard to imagine a better partner in the music biz than MTV."
Re:required peripherals (Score:5, Interesting)
Learning guitar takes a lot of patience, especially early on.
I think that's why you don't see guitar a lot in school.. most instruments you can get people transitioning between a few notes pretty quickly, then can get everyone together and honk out "twinkle twinkle little star". With guitar this takes a little longer. There are a lot of fundamentals you need before you can progress to anything beyond very simple tunes.. and getting these fundamentals can be very tedious.
Wrapping up the hours and hours of scales and building muscle memory in a game might encourage some people to pick up music who otherwise wouldn't have the patience. Personally (as a non elitist type) I think this is a good thing.
Re:required peripherals (Score:1, Interesting)
As a drummer I would recommend getting the real (acoustic) kit because the lower end electronic kits are just not going to give you the same feel and dynamics as an acoustic kit. Now I have messed with some of the higher end Roland kits, and they are amazing. They offer great feel and dynamics... but your gonna shell out at between 3 to 5 thousand dollars for the base models. For just the raw muscle memory, rudiment practice you can get a practice kit that consists of rubber pads or you can get rubber pads to place on the acoustic kit. Hell, to work on wrist coordination and stamina... grab your sticks and a pillow. Go through the rudiments on a pillow... especially the double stroke roll, or paradiddle. It forces you to use your wrists and not rely on the rebound of the sticks on drum head... it's a hell of a workout.
I would recommend talking to your neighbors and find out when they are not around (at work etc) and try and work with them on a practice time.
Re:required peripherals (Score:3, Interesting)
My father in law was/is the LITERAL guitarist for a couple of tracks that made it onto Guitar Hero.
He can't play the game. His problem is that the 'notes' don't match up to the song, and the disparity is so great that he is so used to playing the actual notes, that trying to 'reduce' what he would do on an actual guitar is not possible.
It is the weirdest thing to listen to the guy grab the guitar next to his couch, and play the actual song, or listen to his old performances OF the song, and then watch as he plays the game as if he were wearing oven mitts.
Re:This is surprising? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh a Simon analogy! That's fresh and original!...
On an extremely superficial level, it is like Simon... and that would be that they are both games that have several large brightly colored plastic buttons on an electronic device, where these buttons also happen to result in a tone. However, where are the rest of the similarities?
However, if you insist on using superficial analogies in order to fool yourself into thinking you are insightful and/or belittling a game type that doesn't happen to be your taste, let me offer a few alternative analogies so you don't have to rely on the surprisingly cliche (for being so inaccurate) comparison of Simon.
* Rock Band is nothing but a reinvented Space Invaders. Instead of the aliens scrolling horizontally and you have to shoot them before they land, they scroll vertically and you have to "shoot" them right as they land! It's basically just a vertical shooter with 5 cannons, right?
* Rock Band is just a reinvented fighting game, without fighting characters! The defining characteristics to fighting games are simply responding having to hit buttons at the right timing, and pulling off combos effectively, right?
* Rock Band is just a reinvented Tetris! All the player is doing is responding to various falling colored blocks, right?
Why just stick to Rock Band style games?
* StarCraft is nothing but a reinvented game of Risk!
* World of WarCraft is nothing but reinventing NetHack!
Being cynical and dismissive on the internet is fun!