Week 13

In my final week of game play, I decided to test out the cheat codes for Rock Band. The first place I went to look for these cheats was a reliable video game cheat website I have used since I was about ten years old, and it is called gamewinners.com. Here I found out that there is only one main cheat for this game. If you quickly press Red, Yellow, Blue, Red, Red, Blue, Blue, Red, Yellow, Blue at the title screen when "Press Start" appears on the guitar or drum controller, you can unlock every song. This turned out to be a great cheat considering I never unlocked every single song to the game. I then played these new songs until I had mastered them like the rest. So while there is only one cheat for this game, I did find out that there is a great deal of unlockable content, through achievements in the game. For instance you can unlock a gold drum kit by completing the career mode on drums under medium or high difficulty. I also was able to earn XBOX Live Gamerscore points through many achievements in the game. An example of this was when I finished the guitar portion of the career mode as a beginner; this helped me to gain 20 points for being a String Shredder. There were about 15 other accomplishments I experienced during this semester and all of these points add up to make me a well ranked gamer in the XBOX Live world. Overall, I truly enjoyed playing Rock Band and learned that this game can definitely be used as an educational tool in school systems that teach music. I would recommend this game to students next semester and hope they learn as much as I have in the past 13 weeks.

Week 12

This week I experimented playing another game called Guitar Hero. This game is very similar to Rock Band, except you only play the guitar, rather than having the option between the guitar, bass, drums, and singing. I noticed the game play was a little different and it made my transition difficult as a result. In Rock Band the colored notes are dashes versus the circles that are present in Guitar Hero, which threw off my timing. I also noticed that Guitar Hero has a better music selection than Rock Band. Yes, these two features are just my personal preference, but I also feel that Guitar Hero is slightly more challenging than the Rock Band songs that I have practiced on and been used to. One disadvantage of Guitar Hero is that you cannot have a whole band playing, like in Rock Band, but you can challenge your friends in a guitar rock out, which is cool in a different sense. While these are two games that promote playing and learning music through active participation, I feel that Rock Band has more to offer from an educational viewpoint. Overall, I like Rock Band better than Guitar Hero because it gives you more musical freedom to choose your instruments, is a more beginner friendly game, and provides players with the true feeling and experience of playing in a band.