Following on from the leaking of the full Rock Band 3 setlist a few days ago at Gamescom, the internet has been watching the announcement video over and over again, trying to digest what they've found out. We know Elton John, the Doors and Amy Winehouse (sorry, we just threw up a little) are included in the game - but what about the various parts? Some of the songs, we mentioned in our hands-on preview, don't actually seem to have an audible keyboard part - so what are Harmonix going to do for those?
This is what we're used to
The answer, somewhat ridiculously, is to just not give the keyboard a part at all. In total, going by what we can make out from the announcement video, at least 14 of the 83 songs in the game won't feature a keyboard part - and while this may be better than simply trying to shoe horn a keyboard part into a song that doesn't have one, it does seem more than a little bit ridiculous that the games newest peripheral won't even have a part to play in 14 of the songs on the disk.
What makes this even worse is that it's not as if there aren't plenty of songs out there that could have made better use of the keyboard - as we picked out in our fifteen songs we'd like to see in Rock Band 3 article, where we made a special effort to choose songs that had interesting parts for the entire band - something which Guitar Hero really needs to start making a priority again, too. In case you're wondering, of our fifteen choices, Harmonix have included... well, none - even though we picked a Who song that actually had a synth/keyboard part, while their choice doesn't.
Even worse is the news that one of the songs - John Lennon's Imagine, for obvious reasons, won't include a guitar part. By not including a part for what's arguably still the game's main instrument, it does make you wonder what the point of including it is in the first place. While it's not as crazy a decision as making you play the Song of the Century in Green Day Rock Band's career - a song that only had a vocals part, which meant anyone without a compatible microphone couldn't finish the game, and although the news that you'll be able to play the keyboard part on your guitar if needs be does soften the blow a bit, it still seems like a stupid decision to include a song that seems to go against what Rock Band is all about, especially when so many other great, and much more suitable songs are out there.
Still, despite a few dodgy decisions, our optimism remains high. From what we played, Rock Band 3 is still going to completely re-write the rule book of music games - and there's always the post launch downloadable songs to flesh out the song choice. Find out what we thought in our hands-on preview.
