Oh, who wants to be in a real band anyway, with all the sex, drugs, and choking to death on your own vomit, naked, in a cheap motel room somewhere in Eastern Europe on a comeback tour nobody cares about since your last six albums were a load of self-indulgent, “progressive” rubbish because you’d mostly forgotten how to read and write and do anything else useful since that time with that stuff in that place in ’86? Exactly. Besides, nothing says “independent celebrity” like a little plastic guitar-shaped thing in your mom’s lounge, and everyone knows indies have more cultural significance and intellectual credibility. Or something.
Anyway, just like the real thing, getting your rock on in rhythm games is much harder than it looks. And also just like the real thing, almost everybody totally sucks at it. Here’s a crib sheet:
1. Hold the line
This one’s obvious to anyone who plays a proper guitar, but it’s apparently not at all obvious to anyone else. When playing sequences of mixed single notes, it’s a good idea to keep one button held down at all times, and play off that. Playing a green-red-yellow triplet, for example, hold down the green button and hammer on and pull off the other notes. This effectively cuts the green note from your list of stuff to do, since it’s already in play.
2. Push me, shove me
Have you ever noticed how real guitarists strum up and down? Yeah, you should do that too. If you can’t do this, don’t expect to get anywhere in the harder difficulties.
3. Set to fail
If you’re bollocksing up a complex sequence and fall into the danger zone, stop playing altogether, refocus at the top of the screen and roll with it, then start playing over. You’ll fail out faster if you play the wrong notes than if you don’t play them at all for a moment.
4. Speed demon
Guitar Hero (from the second game onwards) and Rock Band 2 include modes that increase the scrolling speed of notes. In Guitar Hero, this is a cheat called “Hyperspeed”, and in Rock Band, the optional “Breakneck Speed” display mode. This doesn’t work out for everyone, but lots of players do find this can dramatically improve their game in difficult songs. Since the notes are pushed farther apart, it’s simply easier to see what’s actually going on in sections crammed with notes.
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