I repeat: Rock Band 3: Holy Fucking Shit

Just wached the stage demo of Rock Band 3, so I thought I'd follow up my previous post.

Pro mode truly looks like it's going to own me, especially on guitar.  It's also a game modifier with its own series of difficulty levels from Easy up to Expert.  Pro mode tells you which string and which fret to strum, and on Expert (Besides Easy and Expert they didn't show any other difficulties), they also tell you which chord a combination of notes is so if you play guitar you can just go off of that.

One thing they covered that I didn't mention before but I'm incredibly glad they're doing it: the keyboard controller and the Pro mode guitar controller both have MIDI out ports.  This means you can hook them up through your sound card (if you have one with a MIDI port) and use them to write or play music in various applications that support it.

Also, the reverse will be true too.  MadCatz, the company making all of these controllers, is making a device that will adapt any electric instrument with a MIDI out port to be a controller.  This means if you have a set of Roland drums and you want to use them in-game, well, get the box, plug it in, and there you go.  This will also let you use a real keyboard for keyboards, and one of the Pro mode guitars they showed off (the Squier Stratocaster one, which was actually made by Fender) is using it and is actually a real guitar in disguise.  They showed that off too, hooking it up to an amp and playing the game with it at the same time.  The other one, as I mentioned previously, is the Fender Mustang, which Azusa plays in K-ON! (fangasm).  Good job guys, now I want both of the Pro mode guitar controllers you've shown off.

They added drop-in drop-out play as well.  Basically any time (even during a song) you can pick up a controller and sign in, or exit the game and go do various important real life tasks.  So no more having to log everyone back in because your drummer decided to solo on the menus.

The keyboard will be able to be played using five adjacent keys in non-Pro mode.  Before I made a small inference based on the colors shown on the controller, but this is actual real information.

Gameplay has been extended into a ton of new modes, and with the song list going into the thousands of songs assuming you have every track ever exported and downloaded, new sorting options to help you find the songs you want to play.  It's clear that they're thinking of everything.  Gameplay on all levels should be way better than before.  Whether you're just playing with friends at a party and don't care about score or if you're in the upper echelon of ScoreHero users, it should be more accessible to all.

There's a lot of stuff I'm glossing over, but I think I hit everything important.  One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet in any of these videos is the price.  This is pure conjecture, but the Pro mode guitars, especially the one that's a real guitar, will probably be more expensive than your regular hunk of plastic with a strum bar and colored fret buttons.