Konami Gamer's Night: Rock Revolution
One of the games to take the main stage at the Konami Gamer's Night was their 'rock group simulator' game called Rock Revolution. Konami is one of the pioneers of immersion music gaming with the commerical success of Dance Dance Revolutions which they first released in the Toyko arcades over 10 years ago, but more on that in a different article. Rock Revolution is your stereotypical band game in that it allows you to play in the band as either the vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar, or drums. The bass and lead both use the standardized Guitar Hero controllers and a similar user interface to that of Guitar Hero or Rock Band (with some minor modifications for legal reasons I'm sure). They didn't actually have a demo for the vocals part of the game either, but I'd imagine it's just your standard microphone hook-up and something akin to Singstar or Rock Band. The piece that is there to really set this game apart is their unique drumkit. Instead of the Rock Band setup of four drum heads in a semicircle, Rock Revolution has six drum heads strewn in a random manner and in varying shapes but carry the lovely feature of having pre-dampened heads so that they make far less noise. There's also a kick petal there too (I was worried there might be two).
Now I got some hands-on time with the drum kit, and I have to admit that it is as addictive as another other drum game to play, and the extra heads do require a great bit more skill to master. They also added the nice feature of playing the extra drum hits you play outside of the ones specified on the song track, allowing you to freestyle whenever you want to in the game. Add on top of that the great list of songs that they were previewing at the event and you have a good game in the making; however, how it will stand up against the large gorilla already on the scene *cough*RockBand*cough* has yet to be seen. The release date for the game is still a hazy '2008' and the exact pricing of the games and/or peripherals is still very much up in the air. Until that time here's some lovely UI screenshots to entertain you.
PixelPoet
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 15 May 2008
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: drum kit, konami, nintendo ds, peripherals, playstation 3, rock revolution, wii, xbox 360
I just hope people realize that Guitar Freaks and DrumMania did come out first, and Rock Revolution is a combination of those two. I'm glad Konami is finally doing this. They've got some big competition though. It only makes me wish more that they did this earlier before Guitar Hero, because I have a feeling all the Guitar Hero fanboys are going to cry foul when in reality, it's quite the opposite.
I don't know that I could adjust to having a seperate colum for the foot pedal when drumming. I know that percusion freaks, or whatever, had it setup like that and it drives me nuts.
well... as long there's no J-Pop, i'll be happy i thank you!