I play guitar/bass, and I’ve played in bands and by myself, but this represents an entirely different and interesting skillset. Rhythm games are a skill in their own right, the visual element of what they’re simulating is somewhat inconsequential - the guitar controller could just be a stick or even a regular controller and the gameplay is roughly the same. Maybe the drum controller for rock band(?) is a close analogy, but it misses the point so to speak
IIRC the Rock Band team was borne out from part of the GH team that had a different view of the game. It's all in the title: Rock Band vs Guitar Hero. One is collaborative, the other competitive.
The RB team had this vision that the game was a mind trick to maybe get people into music, with a low barrier to entry, ramping up all the way to RB3's pro guitar (the one with 6 strings and the full fret board, that ends up showing actual chords on screen), pro keyboard, pro drum set, and so on. Of course it's useless to pretend this makes you learn the real instruments, still you get to approach key things like pacing yourself, rhythm, strumming, song structure, pattern matching, rehearsing, talking to your band members... all while having a damn fun time.
And dare I say, this was a success, at least for one of my friends and his family. I showed him RB1, he enjoyed it so much that the next day he bought a X360+game+accessories, started playing it, and pulled along his wife and two daughters, where they rotated instruments in turn. As they ramped up through the whole RB saga up to RB3, they thought "it's so fun playing this game together, kinda like being a band!". Next thing you know they picked up real instruments and started an actual band.
I myself picked up the guitar much more easily, not because of any technique learned (because the game is incredibly different from the real thing still) but because it made me raise in confidence that this was approachable.
The Rock Band team was pretty much the Guitar Hero 2 team. Harmonix made Rock Band because Activision chose to hand GH3 development to another team. Activision even had the option to use the Harmonix engine under license, and chose to allow Neversoft to fork the Tony Hawk engine and bolt a beatmatcher on top (which they did horribly, by the way, ExileLord has some videos on YouTube discussing some of the more egregious bugs).
It's entirely possible that, had Harmonix developed GH3, it may have been a full-band game. We do know that they considered drums as early as post-GH1 development, there exist a whole array of drum gems in the 4-song OPM GH2 demo, as well as some leftover code fragments (for example, there is an entire DrumTrackWatcher class with several functions like AddFills and AddLanes, and the OPM demo build itself actually also at some level checks for Konami/Topway drums for PS1 DrumMania, and has controller detection script that recognizes Topway drums).
GH2 also has leftover "band_version.dta" files that, across all builds of GH2 and GH80s that we have, always contains the same contents: "Build: 060302_A" (HMX dated these builds YYMMDD, best we can tell). band_version.dta is the file later used in the Rock Band series to contain the build date. There is also a separate file "gh2_version.dta" that is different between PS2 4-song, PS2 10-song, PS2 retail, 360 retail, 360 10-song, PS2 GH80s press review, and PS2 GH80s retail. I'm pretty sure there exists within Harmonix, a disc with that very build date written on the label (including the A, which I feel signifies that they'd burnt a second distinct build that day), and my feeling is that if we had that disc, it would have whatever drum support active that they had at the time. Perhaps 060302 doesn't have drums active, but 060302_A was a branch that did? No way to know unless someone steals those binders from HMX and leaks them to us (fat chance lol) or HMX themselves decide to open up their archives to our dataminers.
Interestingly, you could buy a midi adapter and hook up something like a roland electronic kit. Kind of a learning tool.. just that it wasn't good at teaching good habits.
If the 360/PS3 controllers didn't absolutely blow for the purpose, I'd suggest checking out Rock Band 2 Deluxe and the "pad is guitar" modifier we added, which restores GH2-style gamepad play for guitar (and for shiggles we added another that does "pad is drum", although button mappings are kinda funky).
Yea, I knew that. I was mentioning that it's possible to play RB2 in the same fashion.
"We" are a small team of people who make mods to older Harmonix games. RB2 Deluxe is a free patch for modded 360/PS3 that adds a lot of quality-of-life features to the game. https://rb2-deluxe.neocities.org/
Is nobody going to address the series of elephants in the room here? Even the embedded video in the article didn't say anything about it, and the author's proposed and current solution is more or less a social band-aid. These animators need to unionise, or demand full-time/part-time employment conditions that are outside of their current contractual arrangement if they want to see any progress. At least then they should come under some kind of minimum wage law. Lamenting the issues of the industry as if they are some kind of force of nature that is part-and-parcel with the nature of the work seems intentionally ignorant to me. They only have to suffer these conditions because of the companies they are working for.
It's all well and good for the commenters here to say that dream jobs will often have hard conditions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be so if we have government or union enforced labour conditions that aren't predatory.
It's nice to see comments that actually talk about unionizing.
> It's all well and good for the commenters here to say that dream jobs will often have hard conditions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be so if we have government or union enforced labour conditions that aren't predatory.
Understandable, but it's beside the point. The point is that legally mandated (and enforced!) employment agreements should exist regardless of the amount of people vying for jobs.
I mean in cases like that, unions often just constrain supply artificially. But that just creates a new problem, in that people who want to fill a role and are capable of filling a role can't necessarily fill a role that the company would be happy to give them if not for the union saying that this individual is locked out from filling the role.
The animation and VFX artists in California are unionized. For example, here's the Animation Guild [1] and the list of studios covered [2]. It's basically all the big names plus many of the small ones.
What the union couldn't do is prevent jobs from offshoring: the jobs moved to Vancouver, Montreal, and wherever else the tax credits were. I think it's still the case that the studios are getting like a 50% tax rebate on Canadians working in film in Vancouver. When your staff are "half price", that's hard to compete with.
I think you're conflating animation and VFX. They both have different stories than the Japanese anime industry this article is about. These [1] are the kinds of studios I think of for VFX and none of them are in the Animation Guild.
The Animation Guild has been around since the 50s. There were fights in the 70s and 80s over offshoring. In my experience, in the past few decades the Animation Guild has great training programs, medical and retirement, but doesn't really swing its weight around over employment.
VFX was completely separate and has never been unionized. There were efforts in the 90s that turned into the Visual Effects Society, which is more about promoting VFX and recognizing achievements. There were efforts again when Rhythm and Hues closed the same year it won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects that also didn't go anywhere.
I'll be honest in saying that I didn't consider the American experience. The article and video in question was about the Japanese Anime industry, which as far as I could see, works by contract direct to animation studios, without union representation.
It's not perfectly legal, but reasonably more legal than the alternative (a key bought from a reseller). Those stickers are meant to be affixed to a machine sold by a reseller, and is only meant to be used for that machine. If the machine is destroyed and the sticker/key is kept, then it can be used, and it does register Windows Professional/Home installation rather than an Enterprise/Education installation, but is in violation of the TOS that it's provided under.
That being said it is difficult to shed a tear for Microsoft of all companies over this practice.
I'm not sure if this could be considered a niche audience, but I install Adobe Reader by default on user machines, mainly because the built in readers with Chrome or Edge don't handle printing natively very well, due to not using the system's print settings immediately. You can bypass it with a shortcut and make changes, but it's not so great when users will select print and click ok, it's difficult to educate them against that. It's much easier to use Acrobat Reader and set it to open by default in that. So this may be the install base, SMB and schools, some large enterprise as well.
Whether that preference will get changed back to edge in a feature update is another story.
Business won't be the one to push the change on this attitude. It has to be people, or at best government. Most companies are morally agnostic, they only follow the money, you can judge them for it either way, but it's the truth.
What do you think makes companies do what they do? Companies consist of people. There are still people making these decisions. Many companies have taken ethical stances wrt China. Many more have not. Companies don't just get let of the hook because they're companies.
It has to be people pushing companies to do it. Which is why it is exactly counter-productive to post "Of course companies won't do anything" when a person is demanding a company do better.
In a sense, yes, but someone, somewhere had to be the one to say "we could be courageous, but let's softpedal this and come up with a lame excuse". They also (perhaps with others) had to build a culture where people know they can't speak up on it.
Of course, there's a question of causality. Are businesses "morally agnostic" because they choose to be, or because the ones that aren't don't survive? Companies that say "we don't do business with places that harvest organs from prisoners" will struggle against ones that say "we were able to cut the price of our phone 50% by doing business with (said regime)"
This would actually be a good reason to impose import duties on those places - to make goods from ethical regimes more competitive.
I'd say "only following the money" isn't moral agnostiscism, but very much a moral choice. It's a choice made by people collectively, and either way it doesn't exist outside of morality, or consequences.
