Nintendon’t: Rock Revolution (X360, PS3)
Below is another rough draft sample of one of the entries of the Nintendon’t project.
Konami is a company so ingrained in the history of gaming with so many hit titles to their name that you can’t venture out into the gaming world without hearing of their endeavors. Whether it’s in regards to their Castlevania or Metal Gear franchises or their establishment of the Ultra Games “company” in the 1980’s to creatively circumvent Nintendo’s third party licensing restriction not much can be said about Konami that isn’t positive, except for whatever you can conjure about Rock Revolution.
Konami, and their extension company Bemani (a portmanteau of BeatMania, one of their most successful music-based arcade games), are responsible for some of the most successful and iconic music-based video games ever conceived. Speaking locally and generally Dance Dance Revolution is perhaps the franchise you might be most familiar with, but Konami has been responsible for so much more (mostly overseas). Unfortunately, though, not everything they produce can be a winner, what with the original incarnation of American Idol on the PlayStation 2 being nothing more than a timed button masher and also with the train wreck that is Rock Revolution, the subject of this entry in Nintendon’t.
Some of you may not realize this but the history of taking a gimmicky plastic guitar and pounding out some hot licks isn’t something that Activision pioneered with Guitar Hero. Konami explored this territory first with their Japanese arcade hit GuitarFreaks, a game that plays almost identically to Guitar Hero. Konami licensed some of their music simulation patents to Activision for their games in North America assuming they could enjoy continued success in Japan with GuitarFreaks (and its accompanying arcade games DrumMania and KeyboardMania). Eventually, however, Konami decided they wanted a piece of that North American market pie and compiled the functionality of GuitarFreaks and DrumMania into one game, and that game was Rock Revolution – a game with all of the looks of Guitar Hero and Rock Band but with the tolerability of a six year old screaming in a McDonald’s over his McNuggets.
Even though Dance Dance Revolution caught on with the otaku markets Konami is infinitely more successful in Japan than they are in America with their music-based games, likely because they’re able to license original songs over there; problems with licensing always seem to come up with their American games which bring the playability of the game down a few notches right off the bat. I don’t really understand how or why Konami gets stuffed with awful, AWFUL covers of popular songs but somehow they always do and it’s something that plagued the entire American Idol game series as well as Rock Revolution. The tolerability of cover songs is something that varies between music enthusiasts; some music fans won’t mind seeing a Sublime tribute band while others will vehemently be against it and call it an abomination of the music art form. Generally, though, if it’s an exceptionally good cover people on both sides of the argument can come together and embrace the spectacle, which ended up working for Guitar Hero and landed them the ability to secure licenses for original recordings in later releases (Rock Band started off ahead because it’s produced by MTV, a Viacom-owned TV station that has zero programming relevant to music but somehow still has access to a seemingly infinite library of record labels). Konami hired one guy, Steve Ouimette, to cover almost all of the guitar tracks for the game (a task which he did quite nicely I might add) and considering the quality of the vocals for everything else Konami more than likely spent more on the Photoshop artist who designed the cover art than singers for their newly recorded covers.
The cover vocals of Rock Revolution are HORRIBLE, and while I am nowhere near being a hardcore music buff the quality of the covers for such songs as “All The Small Things” and “Spoonman” are so off-pitch and awful they’re enraging. If there was a “Milli Vanilli Mode” (or “Ashlee Simpson Mode” for you younger folk) where you could just turn off the vocals and play the instrumentals the game would still be mildly awkward but nowhere near as off-putting as hearing people placing “W” sounds at the end of every “na na na” in Blink 182 songs or someone’s inability to emulate Chris Cornell’s voice in “Spoonman”. The remainder of the covers range from decent, and that’s me being generous, to about as listenable as those gimmicky holiday albums where Christmas carols are remade entirely out of dog barks and cat meows. Rock Revolution had a very promising setlist but upon hearing the news that it would be comprised almost entirely of covers of each master recording I can’t say it wasn’t disheartening, and the end result is just crap.
When it came to the peripherals used in conjunction with Rock Revolution the game entered a whole new realm of crazy. For the most part any guitar you’d normally use with Guitar Hero or Rock Band would theoretically work with Konami’s cover funhouse and while there were some fringe reports of guitars with crazy model numbers not working properly most gamers had no issues whatsoever, so there’s one good thing I guess you could say. The problems came with the drum peripheral that Konami had made for their game. If you happen to have a drum kit from either of Rock Revolution’s competitors then that should again “theoretically work” properly, but the real thrill came from playing with the proprietary Rock Revolution drum kit – a six-faced kit with a bass pedal that looks like it was misplaced by some generic pop band from the early nineties. Realistically speaking this is closer to a full drum kit than the four-faced kits that work with Rock Band and Guitar Hero but at the same time its minimalistic size-saving approach makes it look more ridiculous than useable, and furthermore with essentially seven “buttons” to keep up with casual gamers who aren’t musically disciplined will likely have an aneurysm over how short of a learning curve the set has.
With incomprehensibly shitty covers and a confusing new peripheral that was a failed attempt to try and add a pinch of variety to the music-simulation genre Rock Revolution looks and feels like a desperate “ME TOO!” plea for attention. Critical reception of the game was so poor that many big box retail chains have tried selling brand new copies of Rock Revolution (game only) for as low as $4.99 with GameStop currently selling them for $4.49, that’s less than the price of Bomberman: Act Zero, a game unanimously hailed as one of the worst games ever released for the Xbox 360. A video game retail outlet on eBay was featured on the “Daily Deal” page when they offered brand new and unopened Rock Revolution drum kit bundle packs for $14.99. The main selling point of any Daily Deal is no cost for shipping to the buyer meaning that this game sold so poorly this business was willing to essentially make either zero profit or LOSE MONEY due to shipping costs just to get rid of their stock of this game. It’s that bad.
Guitar Hero and Rock Band have had the time to become so complacent with themselves that the scare of some competition from the likes of Rock Revolution sounded like a good thing, but in the end thanks to some awful covers and dubious peripherals it was nothing more than a false alarm and business has resumed as usual. It’s only a matter of time, now, until Konami leases the patents of KeyboardMania to Activision and we get Piano Hero.
- Dracophile
