Friday, July 17, 2009

Rock Band Diversity: From SpongBob SquarePants to Cannibal Corpse!

When Rock Band was released and we started getting weekly DLC, I knew that this would be a great way to expand the range of artists we can play as. For example, in June 2008, we got a week that featured both Disturbed and Jimmy Buffett! :)

But that is nothing compared to what is on display in our current Rock Band catalogue. In a single set, we can now go from SpongeBob SquarePants (ex: "The Best Day Ever") to Cannibal Corpse ("Hammer Smashed Face")! For an interesting "Disney-esque" parody of the real Cannibal Corpse song played in E major, see this video (warning: not for the squeamish). Those are some very happy riffs...

While some of the extreme lyrics of Cannibal Corpse could potentially have been censored (see this post), having such contrasting musical and thematic styles in a single game is a good sign that we'll continue to get some great artists in all genres. Harmonix is a company that is not afraid to push boundaries to expand their clientele.

That said, tonight we started off by playing all 8 songs of the Mayhem pack. That was a very intense set, with Phoenix thankfully playing on Hard difficulty (I warned him beforehand of how crazy some of the drum charts are). Most of the songs were a lot of fun to play, with my favorite being the Behemoth song.

We played another 16 random unranked songs after that, the first time in a while we play the whole night with our optimal line-up. Because we started the night with 464M points, this should be bring us very close to the top 20 in the "All Songs" Leaderboards when they are updated.

Highlights:
- Stars breakdown for the 24 songs: Gold star (5), 5 stars (12), 4 stars (5), 3 stars (2)
- Raikan is once again the "Top Performer" for the most songs (10), followed by Phoenix and Bongoo (7 each), and DMan (4)
- Raikan and Bongoo tie for the most FCs (2 each), DMan would have won but we don't count songs that only have "talkie" sections

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