Been playing a lot of Rock Band on the 360, and by a lot, I mean as much as I can stand in one sitting. Not saying that the game isn't amazing (it is) but that I simply couldn't play it solo for much longer than three hours. I sat down and laid five star runs on all but the last two songs, by which time my hands were frozen and I could only four star Run for the Hills and absolutely failed the next song.

The difficulty in the guitar is not that incredibly high this go around, I'd say that overall it is easier than the first Guitar Hero. But that is probably most given to the fact that Guitar Hero's original engine was less lenient on timing and made "hammer ons" and "pull offs" damn near unusable. This time, if you'd played an okay amount of the GH series, none of the trickier portions of the guitar licks ought to trip you up much. At the very least, it didn't mess with me very much, I only had to retry one song for a five star... upon which I'd come to my senses and switched to the GH2 guitar. Afterwards I was flying through the game and playing with a lot more ease. Sure, the GH2 360 controller has plenty of flaws, but they are all familiar flaws, problems that I've learned to play around, stuff that no longer affects me.

My breakdown of the controllers is this:

1) I do NOT like the drums. It may be that I'm too used to, or spoiled by, the DrumMania setup. The DM drumset is amazing, it plays like drums should, in my opinion, and is sensitive to a proper degree. The Rock Band controller, on the other hand, makes a huge and horrid tap noise on every stroke and is inproperly insensitive even to the point that you sometimes must strike them in certain places for them to operate correctly. Of course, because of the layout of the controller, this makes the red and green drums the most problematic, because they are closer to the player and somewhat outside of what I'd consider natural range for an adult's arm motion and reach. Also, though it is true that you can adjust the height of the drums, it cannot be adjusted by more than say, (off the top of my head) a foot? Maybe a foot and a half? Playing primarily on Hard mode right now, somewhat on Expert, I have quite a bit of trouble in the fact that my elbows are quite often needing to be where my knee also frequently is. This failure at coincidal existance causes a loss in my ability to keep rhythm or even to function my leg due to fear that I may totally fuck whatever rhythmatic pattern that my arms are supposed to be performing. Even more, I'm not entirely certain how the foot pedal works as it doesn't have any apparent input devices at first glance, but it certainly leaves plenty of room for not knowing exactly when the strike happens. Of course, the foot pedal is also going to be lacking that real life aspect of reverb on the actual strike itself as well, which is going to make operating this foot pedal several times harder than operating an actual one. DrumMania's foot pedal is just as bad, with the exception that it is much easier on DM to tell when the actual hit takes place. Not saying that the drums idea is a total loss, it just needs a lot of improvement, some adjustments, maybe a realistic drum cover for the tops so that it doesn't make that hideous clap sound, maybe a better method of hit detection, maybe a better and/or larger drum layout, perhaps a foot pedal made so that the hit is more apparent and a rubber stopper or something to give just a little of reverb. These of course, are just ideas, and may not necessarily be feasible (at least, not without a significant price increase)... but that does not negate the fact that the drums need serious work. If it weren't for the controller's problems I'd be playing Expert mode pretty comfortably.

2) The new guitar looks and feels amazing, though it isn't as effective as the GH2 controller, it'll probably be a lot better once I'm used to it. One of my complaints would definitely be the fact that it is no longer incredibly apparent exactly when the strum takes effect. It's easy enough to figure out when the strum is happening if you are focussing on that particular aspect, but while playing complex sets, you really can't afford to be paying attention to the pluck's stress factor, thus I was unable to make fast plucks effectively. This could be very much because (I know you'll think I'm crazy) I usually only pluck downwards... I completely fail at plucking in both directions, I lose my sense of rhythm that way, I'm not sure why. But I have mastered the art of plucking quite fast and I tend to stick to that, with the rare exception of something completely retarded (such as Misirlou), yet even without this fact I am still not completely comfortable even with the slower notes on the new guitar's pluck. That just leaves the buttons, I have one word for those, "heaven". My only problem with them is that they have braille style risen dots on some of them, the orange button in particular has a habit of absolutely raping my pinky, bleeding did occur in the short hour that I used this controller... perhaps I'm holding the buttons a bit too hard, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm thinking about filing those things off, they are only there to serve as a guide so you can find where your hand is on the buttons, and I'm experienced enough not to need that.

3) The microphone... what can I say? It's the fucking microphone. What you have to do to work with it, is plug in both the microphone and activate a normal 360 controller... any time that you are moving about in the game using a 360 controller, the game will assume that the player in question is using the microphone. This game is quite accurate and super finicky about the controllers, syncing a controller to a certain player at any time ever will result in that controller needing to stay on for the duration of the game's use without reboot, and that controller will remain locked onto whatever player it synced with, even if removed. When you hold down the Home Button you are not given the option to turn off the controller, in fact, attempting to remove a controller after it has been synced in any way tends to result in the little indicator saying "Please reconnect the controller *player symbol*"... this will NOT go away until you have complied with its instruction. This type of thing also makes it absolutely impossible, as far as I can tell, to attempt to use a standard controller on guitar or drum tracks. Which is cool because there won't be any fraudulant scores going on. I really wouldn't like to play either of the last two songs against someone using a controller online, they'd have a super unfair advantage.

For the most part, the game has a lot of nice features, for instance, the presentation and animation that they have now are amazing. It is so very kick ass to have a song start off with just the drums and to have the animation focus on a drummer animated such that he realistically is playing the audible rhythm. Of course, if you're playing the drums at this time, it is unlikely that you'll notice. But this time around, the animation is not focussed on any single participant in the music based show, bass guitarists, singers, and drummers will not be highly ignored in the video presentay as they were in the GH series. Not that a game with the word "guitar" in its very title should be highly focussed on anyone not holding one, but still, it would've been nice and really cool to watch.

Another aspect I'm quite happy with is the new notes, the lines, of course it is very much like Bemani's GF/DM or BeatMania's note style, except this time they are in 3D, moving in from a distance at an angle, and they BREAK into little bits when they are played rather than bursting in a flash of light (or whatever your latest IIDX note explosion choise may be).

Ok, now before I completely lose myself here, endlessly ranting about Rock Band... I'm going to go ahead and get back to doing something I need to be doing. Uh... Rawk on?

Five hour drum solo to fade out.