Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House
by Derek Wilson on October 24, 2008 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Automatic Calibration
One of the major things we were excited about with Rock Band 2 was the automatic calibration feature. For gamers who have trouble with calibration, there really hasn't been an easy way to get video and audio all matched up. This can cause all sorts of frustration. The Rock Band 2 guitar features a camera and a microphone that can be used to sense the actual delay down to the millisecond for both video and audio.
Those two circles in the center are the camera and mic. The camera is the bigger one.
The drawback is that automatic calibration isn't as consistent as we would have thought it would be. Depending on the distance from the screen or the speaker, we can see about a 5ms swing on video delay and a 10ms swing on audio delay. Calibration was more consistent when the controller was held right up to either the screen or the speaker, but generally people don't put their head right up next to a speaker when playing Rock Band.
The variability in the video wasn't something we could really notice and the automatic calibration worked very well. With the audio, the larger swing did have an impact we could feel. After calibrating it a few times and playing with it, we were able to decide what delay felt best and manually set it to that.
While we were less impressed with the automatic calibration than we thought we would be, it will absolutely do one thing to help out: it will make calibration consistent between different people's set ups. If I go to a friends house and play with their setup and they automatically calibrated it, I can expect the same degree of error I had when I set it up myself. It's not the be all end all of calibration, but it is certainly better than leaving it up to the eyes and ears of one person in a room who may or may not be able to match timing to sight and sound in tune with reality.
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7Enigma - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
A buddy sent this to me a couple weeks ago. Insane drum playing on Expert in RockBand.http://gamerblips.com/video/this_calling_5gs_all_t...">http://gamerblips.com/video/this_calling_5gs_all_t...
And just to give you an idea of how difficult this really is to play (if hearing it didn't quite sink in):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whkXozib-0g">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whkXozib-0g
silversound - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Anybody have any ideas about the guitar hero world tour?Im planning to buy a RB2 bundle or world tour bundle since they are at the same price. Which one is better? Most of my friends got RB, any thoughts?
DerekWilson - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
i'll try to get some quick thoughts on GH4 up after we get ahold of it.if your friends have RB 2 and want to play with you online ... then ... i'd prolly go with RB 2 :-)
if you guys get together and play with eachother, it might be nice to add some variety and pick up GH4 so that you and your friends can play a little of both.
GhandiInstinct - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Where's the hi-hat pedal?Electronic drum kits have 2 pedals.
crimson117 - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
"In songs with 16th notes or triplets, there still isn't much that gets by without being fairly accurte." ...unlike the Anandtech spell check process :)JarredWalton - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Okay, I may not be the most up-to-date in terms of bands and such, but the number of songs and even band names that I recognize from the RB2 list is amazingly small. Half of the bands/groups I recognize then have one of their B-sides or some other unknown song on the list. RB1 was pretty bad in that area, but RB2 takes it to a new level. Plus there's the "20 free songs" you can get - but I don't recognize a single group or song on that list! If I were to want to pretend to be a rock star, I think I'd prefer to "cover" songs that I actually know. Guitar Hero seems to do a lot better in this regard; Harmonix appears to have cut costs by choosing cheap/free songs to license.Myrandex - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I felt the same way until I played it, then I realized that I recognized a lot more afterwards. also as the author mentioned, I eventually obtained a greater appreciation for certain songs or even certain aspects of songs. There are definitely songs that I didn't know that I like quite a bit after playing RB2.And for the 20 free songs, I am greatly looking forward to Static-X "Push It". I love that band and I could think of at least 8 songs that I'd gladly pay for to be in the game (with Push It being one of them).
I recognized some other ones, but not too many. I don't know if the list that I saw was actually finalized or not though. The one song that I was looking forward to the most in RB2 was Linkin Park's One Step Closer. I could think of probably 15 LP songs that I'd also pay for in there.
Jason
jnmfox - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
+1 to the comments & +1 for more LP songsheadbox - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Rock Band is genius- it gives all of the untalented people something to do other than waste money on instruments and annoy their neighbors. It's so well made that people can actually pretend they have some talent, allowing tone-deaf people who can't keep a beat to still have fun with music.headbox - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I'd like to add: Rock Band is to music what FPS games are to military training.