With the rise and eventual world domination of Guitar Hero since 2005, it’s surprising that only in recent months has another company chosen to compete with it. However, even though we gamers now have both Guitar Hero and Rock Band to moisten our gaming and masculine desire to wield Toys “R” Us style plastic instruments and feel the thrill of rocking the world to it’s underpants, a third developer has decided that two ways of rock escapism is not enough.
Enter Konami, makers of the Metal Gear and Silent Hill behemoths. The game will be entitled Rock Revolution and will centre predominately around the drumming aspect of rocking, however guitar and base will also be included. The drum kit will consist of six drum pads and a pedal. The game will be released for Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and DS. Strangely the DS version will be the only one to include vocals.
Has our rock hunger been satisfied already, or will that be achieved only by either Shreddies, or Rock Revolution?. Only time will tell.
News courtesy of Kotaku.com.
I have already watched the demo of this game floating around about the internet. I am a big fan of Konami since it was their games that got me into the music game genre.
That’s right I started with none other than Dance Dance Revolution 4th mix with a soft pad and modified Playstation 1 back in 2000. From there it moved to Beatmania, then GuitarFreaks. Later on I picked up Beatmania IIDX. Tried Pop’n Music but I wasn’t into it nor did I have a proper controller.
These were back in the days when Red Octane was nothing more than a retailer of bemani controllers and rented out a selection of games which had a fair amount bemani imports. Before the whole Guitar Hero craze!
Now I know we’re going to have many fanboys of both Rockband and Guitar Hero say that Konami is trying to copy and cash in on the whole band experience. To them, I just tell them to shut their mouth. Why is that? Oh my friends, I’ll tell you why in a moment.
GuitarFreaks first came out in February 1999, and Drumania in July 1999. However, the first drum based game was MTV Drumscape developed by Devecka Enterprises. The patents were registered in 1996 while the game was released 1997.
So yeah, technically Konami’s Drumania was not the first drum music game. I don’t know how popular MTV Drumscape. Production of that game was stopped in 2001.
So far, this game has potential but some flaws as well.
1. All 40 tracks that have been announced will be covers. This is simple not acceptable where the competition is able to get mostly masters of their songs.
2. No vocals - no band type is really complete without vocals in game.
3. While I am not real life drummer. The drummer set looks very weird. Truthfully none of the video game drumsets are like a real drumset. Harmonix did well, seems like Activision is doing a little better with their design for Guitar Hero IV. Konami’s just seems weird.
While overall is doesn’t bad so far. I am not a big fan of the interface I’ve seen so far. Let’s just take a wait and see approach to this game.
Ok folks, that’s your music game history lesson for the evening. I expect a 500 word essay due sometime in the next 2-10 years. Also keep on rocking!
Janine Phelps
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