Rock Band

Found some excellent review of Rock Band and Guitar Hero by Derek Wilson.

From the review: "There are actually quite a few songs that, while I had heard them before, I gained a real appreciation for them after playing them on Rock Band 2. If the beat or the melody or bass line or whatever is interesting and fun to play, the songs actually gain another attribute to the listener that can be positive or negative. It's sort of surreal and meta, but the special sauce on the music game genre is the fact that the music impacts the likability of the game while the game can also affect the perception of the music, creating a sort of echo chamber where appreciation for music is able to expand. Additionally, because of the way our brains access memories by association, hearing a song that was fun to play on Rock Band 2, whether you knew the song before you heard it in the game, can subconsciously enhance your enjoyment of the song."

I totally agree. Then on page 10 he writes about the rock band 2 song difficulty ratings. He says that there is a difference between a zero and 5 red devils, but then means nothing when you compare a 1 to a 5. Now I definitely agree with the first statement. But I think I can feel an overall difference (across easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels) that 1's are most of the times easier than 3's and then 3's are overall easier than 5's. I have seen exceptions and I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

First of all, I would really like to know how they determined those ratings. Derek makes a good point that it would really help if they further broke it down by the difficulty level you are playing. So how did they come up with the ratings? What data did they collect? Is it an average of some test group? What test group?

I think they should be pulling the song results data from all the people logged into XBOX Live and playing the game. And in the least, using that data to determine better difficulty ratings. They could then provide an update to the ratings on some kind of reasonable schedule. They definitely don't need to be paying a test group.