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  Fuser is a brand new rhythm game* from Harmonix, the people behind Rock Band and possibly the worst advertised board game ever called Dropmix. For those of you who didn't play Dropmix, the concept behind their now defunct board game was taking cards that correspond to parts of a licensed song (Vocals, Guitar, Keyboard, Drums, etc) and mixing them together by playing them on a game board. Their sorcery blends the songs together in a way that accounts for things like tempo and key changes automatically, allowing even the most casual fan to make some truly special mixes without much effort at all. The game itself was kinda bad but the tech behind making the parts mesh together was incredible, and Fuser is them taking that but applying it to a videogame.  *Here's the rub, there isn't too much game in this game. Their advertising prominently features a star ratings for the song much like Rock Band, however the real meat of the game is the freestyle mode which does not grade you based on your performance. There is a campaign that you run through which is where you see the promotional material with star ratings and people making requests ("I gotta hear Never Gonna Give You Up!"  ), but each campaign set is a glorified tutorial that walks you through each mechanic available to you when mixing music. It's easily the worst part of the game because when chasing a higher star rating, you are often making a song that sounds like dogshit because it expects lots of changes, effects, etc. whether it sounds good or not.  As previously mentioned, the meat of the game is the freestyle mode. The campaign is helpful because at first glance the mechanics might seem pretty simple, but there's a lot under the hood once everything opens up to you. You have a deck that allows up to 4 simultaneous tracks and anyone can plop down tracks to mix them together, but you can also cue up discs to switch back and forth during a song, there are a wide array of effects you can apply to individual tracks or all tracks, manual adjustment of tempo/key, and even a drum machine that lets you manually make loops in the middle of a set by choosing one of many instrument types. There's even a way to bring up a sequencer that lets you record a selected number of measures to re-play automatically. There is a ton more depth here than early streamers and promo shots let on. With all that said, I can't in good faith recommend this game to people who are looking for DJ Hero 3. I think to fully get the most out of the game for the price (more on that later), you should come into it thinking of it more of a mixing software that will let you play around and make some awesome music. I think this will appeal more towards musically inclined folks such as myself who can have fun with a game like this without a clear goal or objectives. There is a cross-platform multiplayer component to the game, honestly the most fun I've had with the game is in the Co-op Freestyle set online. You and up to 4 other people join a set, the first person is handed control and allowed to make whatever mix they want in 32 measures or so, and then gets passed onto the next person in line from that point to do what they want with it. This is awesome and allows people to hop in as spectators and can join/leave as they please during a set, as well as send out emotes and stuff when they like what they hear. You can also "follow" DJ's and join their sets later if they're online and open to join. There's a competitive battle mode but I haven't tried that yet because I prefer collaborating  . I hope you like hearing a thousand mixes of "Old Town Road" and the Numa Numa song because people online like making horrible nightmare creations.Now, the price. There's a lot of consternation about the cost of this game. It will set you back $60 USD for the base game, and there is launch DLC of around 30 more tracks at $1.99 a piece. The VIP edition of the game is $100 and includes all the launch DLC. It's a tough pill to swallow, however there's some incredible tracks in the DLC that you will want (loving Funky Cold Medina) so I personally went with the VIP edition. There is NO upgrade so I bought the base game on Steam to try it, I was into it, so I refunded it and re-bought the VIP edition. It's a lot of money, but music licensing ain't cheap and these are master tracks so I can't imagine these are cheap to acquire. Harmonix has also said they plan on doing a weekly Rock Band-esque release schedule of additional DLC for $1.99 a piece moving forward. There's a ton of songs so I won't paste them below but feel free to check out the set list on the Wikipedia article for the game.  I personally think that this is a return to form for Harmonix, the game is so polished and fun, and the mixing is easy to start but hard to master with a lot of tools at your disposal. I hope they do well and continue to support it but based on the reaction of the price I've seen I'm not sure if this will be a big hit for them or not. If there's enough goons who picked this up maybe we can get a list of names together for online to do some co-op sets. explosivo fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 21:50
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 12:57 |
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Once I finally got the ability to change the tempo the campaign got a lot better. The vocals on Here Comes Your Man, Rehab, Symphony of Destruction, and surely others are just SO SLOW at normal tempo that it ruins your song to throw them on. There is obviously a ton going on under the hood in this game. HMX has done so much work on each track with isolating a 32-beat section to roughly match up verse/chorus/bridge with every other song and marking on which beats pickups occur to make it very user-friendly. I've had a lot of fun and I look forward to sharing with my friends once I stop producing hot garbage and also make friends.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:07
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Cliff posted:Once I finally got the ability to change the tempo the campaign got a lot better. The vocals on Here Comes Your Man, Rehab, Symphony of Destruction, and surely others are just SO SLOW at normal tempo that it ruins your song to throw them on. Yeah, I will say at least they have a no fail toggle that you can turn on for the campaign. I turned that on and have been going through just to get all the tutorials and unlocks without caring much about the star rating. I may go back for more stars later to unlock some of the cosmetics but I legitimately cannot believe that there's no way to go back and re-try prior campaign sets without having to do the tutorial stuff too. I expected to be able to double back once I unlocked everything and just do a set but nope, every time you replay the set teaching you about volume control you have to do the stupid tutorial stuff in between the sections where you're getting graded. It's just so bizarre that they didn't make a quick tutorial with a list of all the lessons separate from the campaign.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:45
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I don't know if I just haven't figured it out yet but I dread being asked to play an instrument or drop a loop. They always sound so out of place and maybe that's because there's no way to practice and fiddle around with them outside of throwing a bunch in your crate and heading to freestyle to see if there's anything worthwhile. Does anyone else have suggestions other than "never use instruments you ding dong"?
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Nov 15, 2020 18:07
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I had no idea this was a thing, hell yeah. It looks like what I wanted Dropmix to be
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Nov 15, 2020 18:29
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Cliff posted:I don't know if I just haven't figured it out yet but I dread being asked to play an instrument or drop a loop. They always sound so out of place and maybe that's because there's no way to practice and fiddle around with them outside of throwing a bunch in your crate and heading to freestyle to see if there's anything worthwhile. Does anyone else have suggestions other than "never use instruments you ding dong"? You might already be aware but it took me a while to figure out that you can just hold the buttons down when performing with an instrument and it'll play something with the beat, I was originally expecting it to be like one press is a drum hit but I usually hold the button down and drag the cursor around to hit different ones on the board. Sometimes it sounds good and sometimes not the best but I think it's about learning what they all sound like and loving around with ones that sound cool. I've made loops before just by holding down one button for the whole two measures or whatever they give you and it's usually good enough to layer with other stuff or throw a filter on to make it sound cool.
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Nov 15, 2020 19:02
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Edit: gently caress double post
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Nov 15, 2020 19:03
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Just thinking about this game's existence is giving me performance anxiety, holy crap.
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Nov 15, 2020 19:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcKIYY49wCk There's nothing real technically impressive about this mix but I submitted this for the week's community event thing and have been tapping my toes to this beat for the past few days. The recording tools are nice because you can rewind a few bars to change something up, but it also loving sucks because when you do rewind it takes any cued tracks off of your deck so you have to remember what you had cued up and rewind enough to give you time to re-add the tracks back on. I've done much better things with this mix live but I hope they can patch things to make it easier to perfect a recording in the future.
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Nov 15, 2020 20:18
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It looks like we accidentally have two Fuser threads, one will probably have to go.
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Nov 16, 2020 04:03
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 12:57 |
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Oh poo poo we do, theirs was first. I didn't see it. Other thread here
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Nov 16, 2020 04:08
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