Rock Band 2: Flawless Guitar Solo Achievement
by Rabit on Dec.09, 2010, under Ridiculous Achievements
The Rock Band Series have some ridiculous achievements, Synyster has already highlighted one prominent waste of programming in The Bladder of Steel Award on Rock Band 2. There are, I think, some just as worrying achievements in both games in the form of having to fork out more of your hard earned cash on accessories or downloads.
Now I’m not ranting about DLC with achievements, although it is annoying when you have 100% on a game and they release a DLC, taking away your 100%. But that’s not where I’m going today. What I am complaining about is, among others, the ‘Flawless Guitar Solo’ achievement which cannot be claimed unless you have the official Rock Band guitar. Now I use an old Guitar Hero guitar on Rock Band, as they are compatible and a hell of a lot cheaper than Harmonix’s official guitar. Everything works fine but there are no ‘solo’ buttons on the Guitar Hero guitar. Most people who bought Rock Band bought it because they had Guitar Hero beforehand and Rock Band seemed like the next step in evolution. However, with this achievement it seems like Harmonix are blackmailing users into buying ‘their’ merchandise for a few miserly G.
It’s not just the Flawless Guitar Solo achievement from Rock Band 2 that is guilty of this, in Rock Band 3 there are no less than 15 achievements where you have to have bought a pro instrument or you have to had downloaded (and paid for) certain songs from their online library.
A little pricey for my liking...
Lets assume that the average Joe who owns Rock Band bought it with (or already had) a guitar, lets also assume that they will own some kind of compatible microphone (any USB microphone will work or even the Lips wireless ones). Even with these two items purchased… sorry 3, you need to fork out for the game disk too… then if you were wanting a large gamerscore from Rock Band 3, you’d still have to empty your wallet to buy the Pro Drums, the Keytar and the Pro Guitar. That’s a staggering £360 on top of the £85 or so you’ve had to pay out for the guitar, game and microphone. I’ve not even gone into how much the DLC costs to download the song specific achievements.
Which incidentally is about anther £11.60.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think the Pro Instruments idea in Rock Band 3 is a really good and innovative idea, but why do they have to focus nearly a quarter of the achievements in Rock Band 3 on having to fork out more money for the accessories or having to buy certain songs from the DLC library?
December 9th, 2010 on 9:56 pm
Can I mention that the solo buttons are completely cack? I tried them once and they’re too close together, which means you end up pressing them all at the same time, but they also are really sticky and unresponsive.