There’s great new interview at the Onion AV club which covers Harmonix’ design philosophy in rhythm games. A few highlights:

On teaching people to hear music differently:

You can go to a really great sandwich shop and you can order an amazing sandwich and it just has one big name, and you eat it, and it’s great. But maybe you didn’t taste that they’d layered the prosciutto on top of the mozzarella with this special mayonnaise or whatever. You aren’t tasting every individual element of the sandwich. You’re eating the sandwich and it’s a great sandwich. There are a lot of people who turn on a song, and it’s a song. And they couldn’t tell you what the bass player’s playing, versus what the guitar player’s playing, versus the synthesizer in the background, or any of those elements. They just hear a song, in the way that you might eat a sandwich. And playing this game does a really easy trick, which is deciding that the success of one event determines the muting of one track. It equates two things which are actually not equal, and does this great trick to your brain which is hugely pleasurable, and educates you in a way by pulling [the track] away. It’s this simple, “One of these things is not like the other.” And then you all of a sudden have this knowledge that with a lot of other people would take them two or three years playing in a band to figure out. And bang, it’s there right in front of you.

How rhythm games are becoming a way for new bands to get heard:

We’ve always been thinking about [giving indie bands exposure]. And that is something that we really want to do, and [we've] started actually a few things that we can’t talk about, to make an avenue for indie bands to get their music heard through Rock Band. Because it’s so tough for them to get heard through the major record labels. So we’re thinking about that and seriously pursuing that.

This is particularly true with DLC, and I wish there was more of it. Although they really should release more at the 99 cent price range for new bands; pricing tracks from new bands at the same $1.99 as established classic acts is not helping anyone.

On adding new instruments, in particular keyboards:

We talked about keyboards a lot. I don’t think it’s actually what we need to add right now. I don’t think there are that many songs that are going to have interesting keyboards all the way through, that are going to warrant a new piece of hardware, or learning a new thing. That would be kind of tricky, teaching people to play with two hands. So I don’t know, that’s not something I would actually push for. Every year we talk about it, and one of these years it could pop up.

I think keyboards would be really tough to integrate; not only is it fairly limiting in terms of song choice, imagine how complex the controller would have to be. Certainly 5 or 6 inputs wouldn’t even begin to cover it!

Many other great insights in the interview; I highly recommend reading it.

This one’s fairly self explanatory.

Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills on Expert, played on Rock Band drums:

Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills on Expert, played on real drums:

Very cool to see how the in-game drum pattern correlates to play on real drums!

After looking at the note pattern, and playing this song on Hard drums all too often, I think it’s true what they say this song is actually harder on hard, due to the odd way they drop drum hits to make it “easier”!

He has some other real world drumkit Rock Band videos, and they’re all fun as heck to watch:

1. Foreplay/Longtime (Boston)
2. Sick, Sick, Sick (Queens of the Stone Age)
3. Buddy Holly (Weezer)

There’s been a lot of Rock Band 2 news, probably because the game is a bit closer to launch. A quick check of current release dates shows the following on Amazon:

The game alone is $60 whereas the “special edition” includes drums, guitar, microphone, and the game for $190. Ten bucks less if you buy the Wii or PS2 versions. Although the “special edition” will not be available on September 14th, oddly enough, the Standalone Rock Band 2 Drums and Standalone Rock Band 2 Guitar will.

The Guitar Hero World Tour release schedule is considerably simpler:

I checked on EBGames / GameStop website and it confirms these dates to the exact day.

So if you have an Xbox 360 (and platform allegiances aside, for rhythm games there is no contest — the Xbox is the best choice due to controller compatibility and DLC experience), you’ll be playing Rock Band 2 before anyone else, and over a month before you can play Guitar Hero World Tour regardless of platform.

To me, Rock Band 2 is by far the superior overall game — so I’m anxious to get it as soon as possible. One caveat: it is unknown (and currently unlikely) that the Wii version of Rock Band 2 will support DLC, whereas GHWT has confirmed DLC support for the Wii. So if your only console is a Wii, you should prefer GHWT at this point.

That’s not to say that GHWT doesn’t have charms of its own. Check out this video Joystiq captured of the development team kicking out Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher at E3.

As a genre addict, I’ll definitely be buying both games.

Via Engadget, a shot of the official Rock Band 2 cymbal add ons. These Cymbals plug into those mysterious red, blue, and green plugs on the back of the new Rock Band 2 drumset.

Pricing is supposedly $30 for a pack of 3 cymbals, or $15 each. They are from Mad Catz, technically, but they will be licensed as official first-party add-ons. As mentioned earlier, the cymbals can be played interchangably with the same colored pad, but they do appear to be independent inputs. Rock Band can distinguish which one you’re hitting during fills — hit a tom and you hear a drum, hit a cymbal and you hear a cymbal.

It disturbs me a little that the cymbals are add-ons — so learning to rely on the physical motion of hitting a cymbal will be unnatural on a “stock” Rock Band drumset.

My current strategy is to try out the Guitar Hero World Tour drums, which include cymbals, to see if I enjoy playing that way or not. I have to buy the full GHWT kit because I definitely want the new guitar, and at that point it’s almost as cost effective to buy the full Guitar Hero World Tour band kit for $190.

Similarly, the new Rock Band 2 Drums are available as a standalone kit for $90, but by the time you factor in the $60 price of the game, you’re already at $150 — and fairly close to the price of the Rock Band 2 Special Edition which includes game, new drums, new guitar, and microphone for $190.

Wondering what, exactly, the difference is between the new Rock Band 2 drums and the original Rock Band 1 drums? Me too. Engadget has a great set of photos from E3 that reveal all the new features. Let’s examine them one by one.

Reinforced bass drum pedal — check.

Neoprene or rubber drum surface for better “bounce” and less noise — check.

Fully wireless (look ma, no wires in this picture!) — check.

The one disappointment I have is that the new Rock Band 2 drumset offers no additional reinforcement of any kind between the green and red drums. This means the red and green hits will be vulnerable to excessive vibration and might be unreliable under intense expert-level drum play, as they are on the original version. I hope my drum reinforcing struts will work on the new kit; it looks nearly identical in shape, so I’m thinking they will.

But there is one exciting new feature which you can see hinted at in this photo — green, blue, and red plugs on the back of the drumset.

These are for the add-on cymbals you can attach to the drumset. According to a source from E3, the cymbals can be hit at any time instead of their respective tom pads, but during drum fills, the game knows to play cymbal or tom sounds depending on which you hit. We have yet to see any information on pricing or availability of the add-on cymbals for the Rock Band 2 drumset.

Still, I’m encouraged that two out of three major flaws with the original Rock Band drums are being addressed with the new Rock Band 2 drumset:

1. Reinforced pedal
2. Improved drum surface for better durability, bounce, and less noise.
3. Structural support for the “hanging” red and green drums

I guess two out of three ain’t bad.