Synyster Graves

Rock Band 3: Destined for greatness, tabbed by cretins

by on Nov.26, 2010, under Gamer Rages

For those of you who read my Rock Band 3 review, you’ll know that I was quite disappointed by the fact that so many good songs are ruined by shite tabbing. What I mean by tabbing is the notes you’re forced to play on screen corresponding with the actual song. After my review, I thought to myself that perhaps I was being harsh and over critical, especially seeing that Rock Band 2 was such a good game and pretty much had everything you wanted out of a music game. I paid about £100 for this game and I’m reluctant to just give up on it because it’s essentially broken but I need to write this article because I’m fed up of the arse licking that this game has received, because quite frankly it doesn’t deserve it.

See I'm not shit at this game, I've just got 100% on Expert for this song!

Now before I get heckled with the cries of “it’s because I’m crap at it”, I’ll respond by saying that previous Rock Band titles, I’ve been up there in the tops of the leaderboards in Rock Band 2, Lego Rock Band and Green Day:Rock Band, the latter of which I was ranked joint #1 in the world for Green Day’s “Time of Your Life“. The purpose of this article is actually an apology. A few months ago I wrote an article on how I was looking forward to the release of this game and praised the tracklist. I have never been so wrong in my life. 95% of the songs are complete and utter tripe and work at all well in a music game.

Anyways, going back to RB3, despite my large collection of music games, including the aforementioned as well as GH:World Tour, GH:Warriors of Rock and Metallica, I have never had to calibrate my instruments so frequently in any music game. It’s almost that the game makes up random calibration numbers just to fuck me up. I’ll start a song, pretty much fail straight away (I always play on Expert unless I’m drums, when I play on Retard) and I know full well I can play this game, I’m not some useless idiot who pretends to be a Rock star! I’ll start a song as there’s a progress list in the game and I’ve found myself quitting out of so many songs in sheer frustration. Why? Is it because I can’t play them? No. It’s because they’re complete shit.


My prime example of this is The Beast & The Harlot by Avenged Sevenfold. If you couldn’t tell I’m a massive fan. I actually filmed the intro for this song above when I saw them in concert at the Brighton Centre in November this year. The setlist for A7X blew me away. B&tH is one of my favourite songs by them ever and City of Evil is also one of my all time favourite albums. So I know the song pretty well. The tabbing for the riff however is nothing like how it goes. The following factors make the game frustrating and nearly unplayable on Expert.

1. The Songs are tabbed by complete retards

Sorry guys, Harmonix have regurgitated your classic song...really badly!

The overwhelming majority of songs have the notes you have to play completely out of sync with the song. It’s not that TV is unsync’d, its the fact that the patterns of notes on the screen have absolutely no correspondance with the music you’re hearing in the background.  The bass riff in particular is completely random and is completely synchopated, the rhythm more akin to the sound of throwing an upright piano down a spiral staircase. The solo in the guitar seems more accurate but again it fails at the main riff as the tabbing is nothing like how it goes.The other songs seem to have an obsession with playing about 15 notes in a row at great speed. You can guarantee that you will get about 14 because randomly your chain breaks even though you are being thoroughly consistent in that section. For this reason, punk songs in general suffer greatly. Most modern mpunk songs are a series of power chords, and pretty much involve you palm muting the riff as you slide your hand down the neck of the guitar. In Rock Band terms however, this means battering the hell out of your strum bar at an manic pace only for the game to randomly punish you saying you missed a note.

2. Any Non-Rock Band Equipment cannot play some of the songs 100% on expert

Playing the same note is repetitive and frustrating, especially when you randomly drop off the rhythm

I have a guitar hero controller and microphone. The upstrums just don’t register at all in RB3 and I got my upstrum achievement by using a lefty flip and a mirror. Fast sections in songs are impossible to maintain a streak as a result and seems to be a combination of the equipment being substandard and the game being stupidly harsh. To test my theory, I played a song on a friend’s Rock Band guitar, the Fender Stratocaster with the solo buttons and I can safely say that that guitar is horrendously worse. The buttons are more unresponsive and the solo buttons are a complete joke. The drums are like pancakes and don’t register hits and the keyboard is about as sensitive as trying to turn on a steel coffin with a set of oven gloves. The game expects this much of you, yet there isn’t any equipment out there that is up to standard to attain it. The microphone is arguably the biggest shitter of them all, as the arrow sometimes completely vanishes! You could be singing along when all of a sudden it randomly dissipates and you get booed off stage for being crap.Even when you do manage to get the arrow dead in the lines of the singing, it’ll randomly say you only scored a “strong” and reset your streak for NO FUCKING REASON. It seems like an intermittent fault and seeing that the box advertises it being compatible with any USB microphone, I’m tempted to say that that is complete bullshit.

3. The songs are quite possibly an anthology of the worst music I’ve ever heard

Amy Winehouse: Please kindly fuck off!

Seriously what is up with the setlist. As I said at the beginning I have never been so wrong in all my life when I was praising the setlist. I think I can count on one, maybe two hands, how many songs I enjoyed and think it was a good idea to include them, but the rest are truly disgraceful. Lets start with the positives, excluding the abysmal tabbing: obviously Avenged Sevenfold, “Rainbow In The Dark” by Dio, “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis, “Misery Business” by Paramore, “No One Knows” by QOTSA, and “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd are fantastic songs and I’m glad they were included. So what’s that?six songs. Possibly about 10 more are pretty good to listen to. That leaves the remaining 67 songs being complete and utter shite. Why the FUCK is Elton John and Amy Fucking Whinehouse on the setlist? This is ROCK band, not POP band. There’s random spanish shit on it which no one would have heard of except possibly for the Latino cunt who recorded it, there’s experimental cock dribble from bands like Phish and Primus which make NO sense I reckon about 10 iPods in the world may have those songs on it. Seriously when I heard half these songs, not only had I never heard of the artist, but I realised that ignorance is bliss because it’s THAT BAD. Harmonix seemed to prove as to what eclectic taste in music they have but in reality it makes a game whereby you wince through every track like someone is inserting glass bottles in your rectum. I slated the Guitar Hero World Tour setlist for this reason and side by side looking at them, I’d rather go back to GH:WT.

How the fuck is 98% on Expert only 4/5 stars? Fail.

I could go on about the terrible implementation of this game which was obviously pushed aside for very nice graphics, but who honestly watches the background when you’re playing? I’ll write another piece on the Pro mode as I have a piano teacher friend and I need to get Freqmaster on the keys as he’s an amazing keyboardist in real life to give a more comprehensive review of the Pro Keys.

In a nutshell, I’ve read so many positive reviews of this game and I personally find them to be a starstruck and glazed when they completely miss the fundamental failings that this game has. It seems that the more I play it, the more frustrated I get but I’m going to persevere and hit my goals on it, even if the central core of the game is rotten and broken. Harmonix’s QA department should be sentenced to death.

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4 Comments for this entry

  • Whyte Rabit

    I think you’re entirely right there, I just finished the ‘Endless Setlist III’ chievo last night. Not only did it take the best part of 9 hours… for 50G! (yes, who’s the mug?). But also, though the entire setlist, I counted 7 songs I liked. SEVEN out of EIGHTY THREE songs! Playing them all in a row was, as you quite rightly say, like having something thick and sharp inserted where nothing has been inserted before.

    I can’t comment on the pro equipment, but the tabbing on expert guitar is indeed ridiculous, the photo you have up there is very conservative, most of the punk-style songs have around 20 or 30 notes at a time within millimetres of each other and it’s physically impossible to strum that fast with the strum bar they give you on the standard guitar controller. And that’s on base, I’ve yet to try something like the Crazy Train lead guitar solo on expert!

  • Synyster Graves

    The photo was the only one I could do whilst playing and taking photos! I just don’t think any available equipment is up to scratch! Possibly using the pro guitar because you use a plectrum to strum instead of that inept strumming key which doesn’t quite respond how you want it to.

    But I’m starting to hate this game, its too harsh whereas RB2 was fun. This is more like a music exam which doesn’t register you properly so even if you do get it right, you get punished. The DLC is mainly ok because it was written for RB2, so I’m assuming that they must have had a change of staff.

  • Whyte Rabit

    Yeah, the pro guitar might well ease things up a bit, but they seem to keep putting back the release date for it which suggests there’s massive problems with that too! *sigh*

    Also with the pro stuff, there aren’t enough (good) songs with pro keyboard parts, I’m sure you’re feeling that more than me, as I only have the basic guitar but it does become a problem online when peeps with the keyboard can’t play in half the songs. I also remember you mentioning before that they’re re-releasing songs with pro parts, however making you pay for them AGAIN is a bit harsh.

    As for photos, I can see how taking a photo of the millimetre spacing would be pretty hard while actually playing lol!

    The DLC is good, but as you said, you can play all that on RB2 without having to fork out for RB3!

  • Synyster Graves

    It seems to be all a money spinning venture. The piano songs are pathetic, I mean songs like “Welcome To The Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance or “Critical Acclaim” by Avenged Sevenfold would benefit greatly from having the piano parts in it. The worst part is the fact that the 83 songs on the disc, only 63 have keys support. Seeing that this was the flagship game for the keyboard controller, why not put key support in ALL the songs? Or why choose songs that don’t have a keyboard in it. I think what makes it worse is that songs on the disc like “Beast & The Harlot” DO have keyboard parts in the real song, yet Harominx turn around and write “no part” in the keyboard section for the song. It’s fucking lazy. They rushed the game to take on GH:Warriors of Rock and cutting corners never makes a good game.

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