The video gaming industry has been around for over two decades now. You would think that it would be simple to create a “perfect” interface regularly by this point. However, the creators of Rock Band, one of last year’s best and most innovative games, made just about every bad choice imaginable when implementing their user interface and menu system. I do not understand. Before I dissect these inadequacies fully, allow me to repeat that this game is incredible and I love it.
- The first time you enter the song list in Solo Tour mode, it jumps to the first song that you have yet to complete. Fair enough, that kinda makes sense. Every subsequent time you return to the menu after playing a song, however, it jumps to the same place. Which means that if you’re trying to, say, get a bunch of gold stars on early songs, and have all but Green Grass completed, you have to scroll all the way back through the list after EVERY SONG. This may have been a situation I was in, recently.
- In Band mode, selecting Random and then backing out after seeing the song title puts the cursor at that song, instead of back at random. Especially frustrating since most of the songs we want to avoid in Random are at the end of the list.
- Selecting a two-song set, however, does the reverse. After selecting a song, the cursor jumps back to the top. What on earth.
2.) After going into Practice mode from the failure screen, practicing for awhile and then exiting, you are taken to the main menu. Wha-huh?
3.) A band needing a Leader in tour mode. This is very annoying, since the first band I created with my roommate had myself on the drums as the leader. This means if we ever want to play anything with that band, I have to play the drums. Fixing the next problem, however, would also enable a good compromise for this one.
4.) Created characters cannot play more than one instrument, and band members’ names must be unique (case-sensitively, thankfully). Why can’t I just create one character who can play any instrument, and have them be the band leader? Maybe even allow the creation of different outfits for different instruments?
5.) The lack of an online tour mode. C’mon now.
I mean, so much of this just seems like common sense. I do not understand.
Now, as for achievement structure, my go-to “lacking” example is Mass Effect. Here is a breakdown of the achievements and if/how I think they should be changed:
I like, keep ‘em as they are.
Not cool. You have a difficulty level that doesn’t have its own achievement, and “do the exact same thing twice” should never be an achievement. Change to “Complete a playthrough on Veteran.”
I like, as long as they also unlock all appropriate lesser-difficulty achievements. Not sure if they do or not. If they do, well done. If they don’t, they should. I’d bump up each of them by 25 pts, though.
I like, also. But why is pistol five points less than the other three, especially since it's arguably the hardest to get? Up it to 15 each.
Fine, keep them.
A neat achievement that I like a lot. Probably the best of the lot.
Fine.
Also fine.
Here’s where ME and I really start to not get along. These achievements are trivial and meaningless. I chose to play through the game as an Infiltrator. This means there are a bunch of these that I can’t get without starting a whole new game as a different character. If I do this, all I’ll do is sit and cast all of these over and over at an inanimate object. This is not an achievement, but I’ll do it because I am a completionist. But I am not experiencing more of what the game has to offer, really, which is, in my mind, what the achievement structure should do. I will address what I would replace these with in the next section.
These are egregious. In my experience, the game does not change AT ALL based on which allies you have with you. They just run around and accomplish nothing while you kill everybody. Thus, this basically reads “complete all the sidequests identically a bunch of times”. Artificial replayability at its finest.
50 g – Complete all Citadel sidequests.
50 g – Complete all UNC sidequests.
150 g – Complete all sidequests
(this would only include the appropriate background-specific quest for one play-through; it would not make you play through as all three backgrounds)
