Rock Band: The Next Great Franchise - Page 201

Still trying to figure out good strategies for high-end play. When I fill up on power-ups and give it my best shot, I usually wind up just shy of 5 stars, and occasionally hit 5. I normally take Bandmate, Pinball, and whichever super track is best suited to the song. I focus on maxing out the multipliers on each track, trying to use Bandmate on the super track where I can, and keeping the pinball in play within reason. No matter how efficient I am with this, I'm not coming even remotely close to gold stars.

Is 2x a better choice than Bandmate, since it can double your ending bonus? Do you have to use Jackpot to have any hope of getting a really high score? Are any of the note bonuses better than Pinball? (I've tried others, but they always seemed to give me ~10-30k less than Pinball does...)

I'm also getting really annoyed by the paid power-up system. Why do I have to play songs without power-ups just to earn coins to make another real run at a high score with power-ups? That's just empty grinding. Boo.

- Jer

Actually they've claimed that the coin system prevents grinding, in the sense of playing the same song over and over again trying to maximize your score. If you play a new song you get a double coin bonus. Also there are goals in the "Rock Band World" Facebook app which will get you large numbers of coins. Unused coins don't seem to accumulate.

I played for a few hours yesterday evening (it's one of those "OK--just one more" kind of games ) and only once did I have sufficient coins to use one of each of the three kinds of power-ups, Overdrive, Note and Track. At least I played through all of the Blitz songs once.

The problem is that power-ups are required to get a good score, so when you go to play some new track without power-ups just to get more coins, you have no hope of gold starring it and very little hope of 5-starring it, so you'll have to come back later with power-ups in order to do well. And to do that, you'll have to play some other song without power-ups to get the coins to make the attempt.

Once you've already 4-starred everything, the incentive to keep playing is to improve upon your score. The game forces you to jump through hoops just to make that possible, which I don't like. They could have at least made power-ups free on a per-song basis if you're already at 4 or 5 stars on it...

- Jer

I just played "A-Punk" in Blitz and got over 3000 coins. I linked my game to the Rock Band World Facebook app so I suspect that it was awarded for the completion some kind of goal (I think that it was the "Let's All Play Classic Rock!" Community Goal). I'm in power-up heaven now .

I mixed it up and started doing Jackpot, Bomb, and the appropriate super track, since I saw someone on YouTube gold-star "Shine" with that mix. I definitely saw an improvement in score, and got a few more five star performances that way. Still haven't found the magic bullet, though...

- Jer

If my performance doesn't earn back the coins that I paid for the power-ups, I lose some, so my precious pile of coins is slowly dwindling away .

I'm really starting to get the hang of this! I've pumped my coin supply back up over 3000 by carefully choosing songs with a heavy note count in one of the lanes and choosing that lane as the "super" one and using the bandmate overdrive power-up and the blast note power-up. I carefully bang on that busy super lane and use bandmate to drive it while I pump the multiplier on the other lanes, making sure that I hope over and collect as much energy as possible when energy notes appear somewhere.

Some songs with "frantic" charts:

• "Edge of Seventeen" -- Stevie Nicks (thick with notes on guitar, bass and drums, probably thickest on guitar)
• "Landslide" -- Fleetwood Mac (just voice and guitar, with the guitar being a constant stream)
• Pretty much all We the Kings--they all start and end with a ton of heavy strumming guitar
• "Rooftops (A Liberation Broadcast)" -- Lostprophets (a constant stream of rapidly strummed guitar chords)
• "Seven" -- VAGIANT
• "Free Falling" -- Tom Petty

And the list goes on and on. Loving 'em .

Those 3000 coins were apparently only on temporary loan. I lost most of them suddenly; I left the game with 3100 coins and came back to 700-some .

They relaxed the coin system. Now it's only 550 coins to use all three power-ups instead of 750, and you get 100 coins for each star in every performance. Plus they're running a double coin reward on Linkin Park songs (triple if you haven't played the song before), so it's a lot easier to stock up on coins and not have to grind so much.

I finally 5-starred all the Blitz songs and gold starred "Raise Your Glass" by accident. Judicious use of Jackpot on the super track is key there.

- Jer

Thank God! (Although it seem unlikely that He concerns Himself with video game minutia ). This has restored my interest in the game--the coin chase had pretty much ground me down.

Seems like they'd have balanced that in internal and beta testing .

I just bought that Linkin Park pack and ground through the 11 LP songs that I now have to amass over 8000 coin. That should hold me in good stead for a while (I was also awarded 500 coin for losing a score war).

Mega-DLC sale (not sure the end date?) is going on. Nearly all of the pre-RB3 DLC songs and albums are half-off. Yes, $1 singles - finally!

Hi guys, got a random question for y'all. I'm still loving Rock Band 3 with my DTXPLORER. But, I'm starting to look for some new songs from other sources. As a big Van Hagen (not Hagar) fan I was really bummed when Activision signed them exclusively and it doesn't seem like there's going to be any VH soon if ever. So I was wondering how GH:Van Halen is? Any impressions from anyone that tried it? Most importantly, as someone who does (almost) exclusively Pro Drums, will the Rock Band 3 pro drum adapter work with GHIII? That last one is a dealbreaker, if it doesn't work there's no point for me.

Thanks for any replies, and a Happy New Year everyone!

I don't believe you can get the 'pro' drum experience with GH. The software just looks for four drums and two cymbals, no matter the hardware.

That sale's been on for quite a while--since mid September.

"That sale's been on for quite a while--since mid September."

My post was from September

Sorry --brain fart.

Not quite dead yet! http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=233472
This is a great six-pack (although I am not very familiar with the newer stuff, will have to research them) and shows they can release new-to-rock-band (covers don't count) major bands even this late in the lifespan of the game. Color me surprised and excited!

I hate to think it's almost over, but the recent trends do indicate as such.

Still, this was a shock that came out of nowhere. It wouldn't surprise me if we started to get the other two bands (Metallica & Van Halen) that were "exculsive" to Guitar Hero as well.

Me and my friends still play this game, so it's definitely not dead from my perspective.

We still have hundreds of songs we haven't even played yet so the lack of DLC is no big deal after the firehose we drank from for so long.

The whole franchise started with Boston bands...
and it should end with them -- but not necessarily Aerosmith.

I'd love to see a last RB3-ized Boston pack.

More Bang Camaro!

Yes, "Dream On"!!

Why is it that every version of "Dream On" is the live one, this includes on iTunes, Amazon, etc. Where is the studio version?? Never available it seems and I generally don't like Live songs but for this one, it'll have to do.

You know they have five songs on RBN, right? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rock_Band_Network_1.0_songs).

Yes, I know. I actually have all their songs. I was just saying I wanted more.

Somewhat related to Bang Camaro: Another menu song has been released over the RBN. Down June - More.

I'm wondering how they're going to manage the Rock Band catalog through this upcoming console transition. There's been basically zero news about a Rock Band 4, and RB3 moved significantly fewer units than previous mainline titles. That said, PS2 Rock Band instruments migrated directly to the PS3. If it's technically feasible to do the same in the transition to PS4, you could imagine a less risky disc-only Rock Band 4 release, but then there's the question of the back catalog.

I'm sure there would be some licensing snafus with migrating your entire library to the new machine. Some songs wouldn't make it, and I suspect they'd have to make sure that anything you used on the PS4 wasn't still usable on your PS3. So you might be stuck deciding between staying on the PS3 with your full RB3 library, or jumping to the PS4 in a one-way transition with a partial RB3 library. Yuck.

If there's no way to manage a transition of the DLC library and at least most of the game exports to the new platform, I think Rock Band will be dead. People will turn their old consoles into Rock Band machines, and DLC might trickle out for a little while longer, but that'll be it. People who've invested in hundreds of DLC tracks aren't going to start over clean on a new console.

- Jer

This is just my opinion, but I think that the Rock Band franchise is dead. I don't think there will be a RB4, on the PS3 or 4.

There has been literally endless discussion of whether there'll be an RB4 in the rockband.com forums. I don't think that many people expect that there will be at this point.

The Wii RB3 players are managing to continue playing on their Wii U's, migrating their DLC libraries somehow. I don't know what the difficulties have been.

The developers at the Rockband.com forums have stated repeatedly that there are no plans for another Rock Band game at this time. The amount of DLC released has slowed down from previous years as they have taken employees formally working on the DLC tracks off of the project and moved on to other projects.

While they haven't flat out said "Rock Band is done", and why would they as that would be a horrific business maneuver, the signs are all pointing to the franchise ending at some point this year. When they started releasing the Blitz tracks as DLC a month or so ago, there was an uprising on the forums and the HMX folk stated that they will be releasing all of the Blitz tracks on an alternating week schedule with "new" DLC coming out in between. It was stated that after March, they will update us on what their future plans are.

In all other instances of things like this happening, HMX has rapidly and repeatedly stated that they have a 6 month pipeline of songs ready to go for release. In this case, they have stated that they have no comment regarding the pipeline. With this generation of consoles coming to an end, I don't see any plans for them to support Rock Band in the next generation. Especially considering that the music game genre is now just a niche and not the widespread attraction that it once was.

With the Wii U situation, Harmonix has nothing to do with that. They've actually stated that they do not officially support the game on the Wii U platform. Wii U is able to play Wii games via emulation of the hardware. I believe the issues that folks have been having is getting their Wii DLC to be recognized by the Wii U.

I still love playing Rock Band, especially when inebriated, and plan on keeping my PS3 around idefinitely as I have over $1500 invested in DLC and add-ons to the game.