Rock Band Battle of the Bands, Round Two

When you start playing Rock Band as a group, there's this initial period where the band is getting a feel for the game's instruments and gameplay elements and are just happy to clear songs on Medium. But quickly, Rock Band has become more than just a jam session here at GameSpy HQ; we're now looking for ways to max out our scores on every tune, which would be key if we wanted to do well in the ongoing Battle of the Bands between ten online game review sites (GameSpy, IGN, GameSpot, 1UP, etc). So as this week's match approached, we did some research on bumping up our scores, which we're now sharing here as an advance primer for Rock Band's release in a few weeks.

Kickin' it into Overdrive

While playing guitar, bass or drums, Rock Band's scoring system works much like Guitar Hero's. Instead of 50 points per note, each is worth 25, and chords are worth double or triple (depending on whether it's a two- or three-note chord). As you successfully play streaks of notes, you'll get a score multiplier bonus that goes through x2, x3 and finally x4 on guitar and drums; in a nice twist, the bass guitar can go as high as x6.

The big change here is the Energy / Overdrive system, which is Rock Band's version of Star Power. As you play songs, you'll occasionally see clusters of white notes, and if you can successfully complete an entire phrase, a yellow bar under your note chart will fill with Energy (you can also use the whammy bar on held notes to add a little extra). Like Guitar Hero, each phrase is worth a quarter-bar of energy, and once the bar is half-full, you can tilt your guitar to activate Overdrive, doubling your multiplier bonus all the way to 8x (or 12x on bass).

The twist is that, unlike Guitar Hero, it's possible to keep adding Energy while Overdrive is activated. If you get a white note you can whammy, you can basically stall your energy from draining; if you complete an Energy phrase, you'll add another quarter-bar even while it's running out. So it's possible to fill up your Energy bar, activate Overdrive, and then keep picking up more Energy for extra-long Overdrive activations. Devising optimal Star Power paths was a huge source of strategy for expert Guitar Hero players, and the new Overdrive system will undoubtedly do the same but in an entirely new way.

Also of note is the novel way of activating Overdrive on drums. You collect Energy the same way, but since there's nothing to tilt, once you fill your bar halfway the game will occasionally offer you blank sections for you to do random drum fills in. When you do, a green note will appear at the very end of the phrase; hit the note and you'll activate Overdrive. This adds a completely new type of strategy: do you always use Overdrive as soon as it's available, or do you try to save it and get a full bar of Energy -- which means the game keeps giving you chances to do fills (which in turn removes stretches of notes you could be using to bump up your score). For the short term, we found it was beneficial to use Overdrive as soon as it was available, unless we were about to go into a quiet section of the song.


Shout It Out Loud

The other key scoring mechanic of Rock Band should be familiar to fans of Karaoke Revolution but new to Guitar Hero players: vocals. Here, you don't get points per note, but per vocal phrase.

For each lyric, there's a little circle that fills up as you sing. Depending on how well you do, you'll get a grade -- "Messy," "Strong," "Awesome," etc -- that determines how many points you rack up. Like the other instruments, you can build score multipliers by stringing together consecutive phrases and go for major points. You can also accumulate Energy in the vocal track via special gold phrases (normal lyrics are usually green), and when you've got at least half a bar of energy you'll see gold sections appear in the lyric bar; sing anything during these empty spaces and you'll trigger the vocal Overdrive.

On vocals, the scoring seemed a little nebulous compared to the other instruments, so we weren't quite sure if we should be shooting for Expert (at the risk of breaking streaks for the rest of the band), or if we should lower the difficulty down to Hard or Medium. So we conducted a little experiment on the song "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. First, we put together a perfect string of "Awesomes" for the first verse on Medium, which netted us 12,000 points. On Hard, doing the same gave us 24,000 points. But a perfect 100% run on Expert came in around 30,000 points, leaving us feeling that it wasn't quite worth the risk of breaking streaks for the rest of the band unless we were totally confident in the song. And so, with that in mind, we moved on to round two of the Battle of the Bands.