Rock Band 4

[Cagliostro]

Ok, I decided to go ahead and make it's own thread now. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not learning anything new. I did go ahead and get Rock Band Rivals, and I'm going through the Rockudrama, which is pretty funny.
But overall, it is Rock Band 3 without the keyboard or the pro-Guitars. It does still allow for Pro Drums, which I'm thankful for.
For those with a PS4, the whole band kit is currently $99.99 at Gamestop and the guitar bundle is $39.99. I bought the guitar bundle last night, and I like the new guitar much better than the Mad Catz one. It works much better, and might be why they parted ways.

I'm fairly glad I bought it, because now I can get new songs, but overall, I just wish they'd combine the real guitar experience into it again.

[Cagliostro]

So, for anybody who is at all interested, the old songs did transfer over completely, so I'm happy the songs I had before I can play on here. Plus I bought the Rock Band 3 songs to transfer over to RB4 because I thought that was the best selections of songs.

The new features on just Rock Band 4 by itself is that it lends a lot more to creativity, but you are still very much creative only under their guidelines. You can only "freestyle" on guitar solos, and not every song has a guitar solo. There are different settings, and I haven't explored the others so much, but for the default setting, the guitar solos have a few different sections and are identified in the graphics onscreen so that you know what to do. One section is pretty much half-notes, so you have to strum half-notes with your fingers on any fret (or frets). Then they have a quarter notes section. Then holding the same strum for a while, and then a free area that you can do whatever you want. If you don't have one of their newer guitars, I'm not sure how the solos work, and I suspect they don't. The lines for the sections are also color-coded for the part of the neck you play. Blue is for the regular set of frets and orange is for the ones closest to the strum bar, as the new guitars have two sets of frets. On the, we'll call them the orange frets, you can hold down one fret after strumming and tap the other frets for a very fast bit o' guitar playing without having to strum, which is kinda fun, and on the long sustains, if you tilt the guitar up, it gives feedback.
Again, this is just the impression of choice of what to do, because if you don't follow their guides, and sometimes it really is pretty hard to do so, you will not get the "full combo" during the solo and it docks you points. However, it doesn't necessarily ruin your multiplier in scoring when you come out of the solo.
On the drums, again with the default, it feeds you random (it seems) drum fills, and you have to hit them correctly. If you don't, you can still set off the excite-o-mode (I forget what they call it once you've filled up the energy and are ready to unleash) by hitting the last one, which is the green cymbal or drum. It's pretty much the same other than that, and I'm pretty sure you can set it to how it worked in RB3.
The best of the upgrades, however, is the microphone/vocals. You do have to set it to Hard, so it is harder on the vocals, but you can freestyle the vocals throughout the entire song, if you'd like. However, the limitation is that they have additional yellow lines on the screen as well as the main melody line which I think is in blue. If you sing with the yellow lines, which is basically the pitches that would work well with the song, you get extra points. I like this aspect the most of the game, and am looking forward to playing with it more. Oh, and vocal harmonies still exist, if you have more than one USB microphone and willing participants, up to three mikes total. Currently, I think I have about 7 mikes at the moment from all my collecting.
All in all, it pretty much is the same as most people are used to but with a few more bells and whistles. Kinda disappointing, but it keeps the Rock Band parties going, and they are releasing new songs again, which is fun.

[Cagliostro]

I am ashamed to say that I've been playing a hell of lot of Rock Band 4 because of Rivals. One of those "you and your crew play as much and as good as possible to beat out the other bands, which you'll never have as much time as those kids who pretty much play videogames all day long and you'll never find the time to get better than them" type of game. But they come up with a new category every week, and more than anything, I just like seeing what the category is.

[Cagliostro]

Still doing it. Anybody playing Rivals, join my crew! Cranberry Tort Reform