Where are my fellow rhythm gamers hiding?
From the old-school Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution, to the widely popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band, to more recent additions like Crypt of the NecroDancer, and Thumper, I've been a fan of rhythm games for years. Hopefully a lot of you out there feel the same way, and we can share and discuss our favorite games in this post.
I think it might be a good idea to keep top level posts about single games (or game series / similar games, i.e. Dance Dance Revolution, Pump It Up, and In The Groove can all be one topic, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band can be one topic, etc.), so they can be discussed in that thread specifically to try and keep the discussion organized. This post should work until there's enough of us to make a ~games.rhythm sub-tilde.
I'll make a couple topic posts below to get things started, but feel free to add your own for any games you want to discuss as well. If you do make a top level post, please provide a brief description of the game for those unfamiliar with it.
Edit: I updated my post to read ~games.rhythm above, as I originally posted in ~hobbies. Deimos has now moved it to where it should have been. Cheers!
Should this be moved to ~games?
Also thanks for typing all of this out, awesome post! I love Guitar Hero and Elite Beat Agents, and now I'm going to go check out Crypt of the NecroDancer.
Guitar Hero, Rock Band:
This is probably one of the best-known and most popular rhythm games ever released. It's controlled with a guitar-shaped controller that has 5 buttons on the neck and a strum bar. You hold down the correct neck buttons, and strum in time as the color-coded noted glide down a track towards the bottom of the screen. It's similar to a Konami arcade game called 'Guitar Freaks' that runs on roughly the same mechanic. The rock band games were able to obtain licensing rights and in many cases the original track recordings for popular rock songs. This allowed the game to cut out the guitar tracks when you made a mistake in playing, giving the illusion that you were actually playing the track in the song. The games became popular, releasing ever more songs and versions.
After Guitar Hero 3, Harmonix, the original creator of the game, split off and made their own new game called Rock Band, which played similarly to guitar hero, but also added additional instruments. Now you could play with 2 guitars (guitar and bass, or lead and rhythm depending on the song), an electronic drum kit, and sing along karaoke style while being scored based on hitting the notes. The Guitar Hero brand also released multi-instrument versions starting with Guitar Hero 4, later rebranded to World Tour. There were assorted differences in the kits, but for the most part the games played the same, with multi-track audio that cut out when you made mistakes. The next innovation from a gameplay perspective was adding keyboard support in Rock Band 3, as well as a funky MIDI guitar controller that aimed to teach actual guitar hand positioning and strumming to people. Rock band 3 also differentiated between cymbals and toms in the note track in what they called 'pro drums', allowing for more accurate drumming. There were 3rd party controllers and peripherals to allow you to hook up edrum kits via MIDI to play the game using what was essentially real drums to play.
The series also spawned tons of mobile games, as well as band-specific versions, such as The Beatles, Metallica, Aerosmith, and Green Day. Both Guitar Hero and Rock Band ended up having large DLC libraries in addition to the on-disc songs that came with each version of the games. In addition to the official releases, people made custom homebrew songs for use with emulators such as Frets on Fire and Phase Shift.
I probably left a lot out, but that's the gist of it. For me personally, I started playing when Guitar Hero 2 was released, buying that and GH1, and continued to play Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s, Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and Rock Band 3. I ended up with about 6 different plastic guitars, and a full edrum kit that I can use to actually play the drums now. I think my favorite experience was Rock Band 3, as by that time I had gotten really into drumming, and it gave the best experience with the Pro Drums. It also had collected a large deal of DLC at that point, so I could play a ton of songs from a single interface. These days I tend to play mostly on Phase Shift, as it's a pain to set up my otherwise unused PS2 and Xbox 360 to play the official releases.
How about the rest of you? Which versions were your favorite? What songs did you like best? Do you still play, and if so, on what platform, and with which controllers?
I'm technically a professional Guitar Hero player.
I got heavily into them starting with GH2, and when they reached that period of mainstream popularity, there were quite a few local tournaments that I did really well in. I probably ended up winning about $5000 overall, plus 4 electric guitars (that I still own and have no idea how to play), and various other random prizes.
I also got really involved in the community side of the game (because that's what I tend to do with my life) and I was a senior moderator on ScoreHero, the main fansite for the GH/RB games. Before GH3 released, the developer (side note: Harmonix stopped being involved before GH3, not after - GH3 was developed by Neversoft) flew a small group of us to LA to go to the press reveal event for the game so that they could have high-skill players there to help show off the game. We spent the whole next day at their offices as well, testing out the game and giving them feedback, and we got to reveal a lot of information about the game that hadn't been previously known.
I continued playing a lot through Rock Band and Rock Band 2, but my interest slowly drifted down from there, and I don't think I've even touched any of the games in at least a couple of years at this point.
Yeah, this is how I was as well. It's actually why I instinctively posted this in ~hobbies instead of ~games like @Mango and @Algernon_Asimov have pointed out. For me playing DDR and IIDX and Rock Band were always social events more than just gaming, which is why I thought of it more as a hobby than a game. If you want to move this to ~games that makes sense to me, as these are all games at the end of the day.
That's awesome! I eventually took up trying to learn real guitar and bass once I got tired of Rock Band, but I am still not very good at it. I play Rocksmith, and it's good for keeping me interested, even if I'm not focusing enough on real practice to get much better. Come to think of it, Rocksmith probably deserves its own post in here, so I'll see about making a new thread for that as well.
He already did, according to the Topic Log for this post. Looking at the timestamp, he moved this post just before he commented here.
I was a big fan of all the Guitar Hero games, and I also played a lot of Rock Band. I never quite got to the point that I could finish Through the Fire and Flames on expert, but I did finish, I think, every single song in the "main campaign" of each game on Expert, with most of them getting 5 stars. Lots of great songs in all of them, and what a great concept.
I've thought about trying out some of the "guitar hero with a real guitar" style games available, but haven't ever done it. I have a significant number of guitars and computers, so it seems like a natural fit; I should really give it a shot.
Beat Saber is another one that's more recent. I've only played it once but it's pretty entertaining.
Beat Saber is the most fun I've had with a video game in a LONG time. Absolute murder on my arms though, and I have to keep switching out the foam insert on the HMD to keep sweat from leaking into it.
I've heard good things about that, but I am not currently in possession of any VR gear to try it out myself. Hopefully in the future I can find someone with the gear and give it a shot.
Beatmania (IIDX):
One of the oldest, most challenging rhythm games I know of. The game had 5 keys and a turntable originally, and later versions branded 'IIDX' had 7 keys and a turntable. The function of the game is similar to DDR, in that notes scroll down the screen and you must press the corresponding buttons at the time they reach the bottom. The game would play a sound file when you pressed each button, while a background track played the rest of the song's audio. If you messed up hitting the buttons, the song you were playing could sound terrible. It also allowed for you to freestyle and add sounds to the song as well. The timing windows were very narrow, and if you didn't have nearly full health at the end of each song, you failed. Konami saw fit to make few US releases of the game, and these days it is only available in a specific arcade chain in the US called 'Round One.'
There were home versions, mostly japanese only on PS2, but there was also a home release in the US of beatmania. There is also a popular emulator for PC called LunaticRave2, but it is tempermental, and has a pretty bad memory link. This is still my preferred method of playing these days.
All of the home releases were sold with controllers of dubious quality, but there are also custom controllers such as the DJ Dao available for sale.
I took to playing Beatmania around 2002 when I found an old US Beatmania 5-key cabinet at one of the arcades I was frequenting to play DDR. It was challenging, and not very accessible as our arcade machine was a japanese version with no english instructions, but I still found it to be an extremely fun rhythm game, that I am drawn to even today above many of the others. Eventually that machine broke down, and there were few other options for playing locally for me. This led to me building my own controller so that I could still play the game even though Konami wasn't particularly interested in releasing new versions in the US anymore. I've got a build log and all my schematics posted on my website if anyone else is interested in doing the same.
So, any other IIDX players out there? When did you get into it? What do you play on these days, if at all? Any favorite versions or songs?
A similar game to this is DJMax (Respect being the newest version, available on the PS4). It loses the turntable aspect, though there are notes you hit by holding one of the analog sticks in any direction. It goes from 4 button (left, up, triangle, and circle by default) to 5, (adding right and square, which both count as the same button), 6 (where right and square are now separate), 8 (which adds r1 and l1), and even 10 (in special versions of a small number of tracks, which adds r2 and l2). It has a wide selection of original music, some of which I quite like, and seems to have a fairly high skill ceiling.
Dance Dance Revolution, Pump it Up, In the Groove:
These are the games where you stomp your feet to the beat. For those unfamiliar with this game, it's got a dance pad that you stand on, with arrows that correspond to arrows shown on screen. When the arrow reaches the top, you stomp on the corresponding arrow in time with the song that's playing. Originally it was only an arcade game, but there were home releases on console, as well as emulators that appeared as it gained popularity, such as the venerable Stepmania, and OpenITG. It can be played on the arcade pads, as well as on various home-pads that were released with the home versions, as well as using game controllers and keyboards and custom arcade controllers as well.
What's everyone's favorite version? When did you get started? How long did you play, or do you still? Do you play in arcades, or with home versions, and what controller / pad are you using?
For me, I started my rhythm game journey around 2001 playing DDR 5th mix at my local arcade, and eventually the PS2 versions and on assorted 7th mix and extreme machines around town. Made a lot of friends, and would spend way too much money driving around town to find the machine with the best pads. These days while I still have a cobalt flux hard pad that's in working order, I tend to mostly just play Stepmania on an arcade button controller I built for that specific purpose. I do need to rework it, though. Might make a 2 player version.
I don't play too much these days but I used to be really into StepMania. I feel a weird combination of pride and embarrassment for not only playing a dancing game with a keyboard but also being fairly good at it. It's not a common skill, or a remotely useful or even interesting one.
Aren't you talking about computer games? That's what ~games is for (among other things).
Rocksmith / Yousician / Synesthesia:
This is a post for the games where you take actual instruments and play them with a game interface that gives feedback. I've been messing around with learning to play Guitar/Bass for about 3 years now, and I am still absolutely awful at it. It's fun, though. I've only got first-hand experience with Rocksmith myself, but I have heard good things about others, so if anyone has some input / experience there feel free to chime in.
Rocksmith was first released in 2011, riding on the coattails of Guitar Hero and Rock Band popularity. It was marketed as being like GH and RB, but you used a real guitar or bass to play instead of a cheap plastic simulacrum. The game was originally sold with a RealTone Cable which allowed you to plug your guitar into a USB port directly, and play the game from there. The RealTone Cable also works as a generic audio input on your computer, allowing you to record guitar audio directly. The game works similarly, by scrolling notes towards the screen, which you are to play when they hit the front. Since guitars have multiple strings, it's actually a 3D note track, not 2D like GH/RB, with color coded strings. They also have chords shown as 'cards' to enhance readability, so if you strum the same card multiple times, the notes only show on the first one.
Rocksmith had an assortment of songs to play, as well as the Guitarcade which had several skill-building activities in the guise of old-school arcade games. As you played the songs, the game would start off with a simplified chart that showed only a few notes. As you got better at playing those notes, it would add more, until eventually you were playing the whole song. It also has a built-in practice mode called the Riff Repeater, which allowed you to slow down and loop sections of the song to practice. Rocksmith released a second version in 2014 called Rocksmith 2014 which worked similar to the first, but cleaned up some features and removed a lot bugs. It allowed you to import the old songs from RS2011 for a small fee, so almost everyone only plays the 2014 version these days. Another free update to the Rocksmith 2014 software was released which rebranded it as Rocksmith Remastered in 2016. This fixed some common complaints about the game, such as Guitarcade games reloading ALL the menus every time you died, and made the Riff Repeater more fine-grained and allowed for faster looping.
In addition to the songs that came on-dick, the game boasts over 1000 official DLC songs, which can be purchased on all platforms. In addition to the official DLC, there is a large fan base that makes Custom DLC (CLDC) for the game's PC version. It's not officially supported or allowed, but the CLDC makers remove any songs that get official versions, so there is currently an unspoken peace between the CDLC creators and the game developers. There is a whole suite of tools just for creating and editing these custom songs, built on some of the same software that Guitar Hero / Rock Band custom song files are created with.
Feel free to share your own experience with Rocksmith, or let everyone else know about Yousician / Synesthesia / your own favorite way to learn real instruments through gaming.