Rocking out with COVID-19
Rock Band 4 is surprisingly compelling in 2024
At some point during the holidays, I managed to get COVID-19 for the first time. Despite being generally pretty healthy and vaccinated, it’s been an absolute bitch. I’m 9 days in and still feel like an absolute dumpster.
In an effort to lift my spirits last weekend, my partner suggested we buy a third-party PGP Riffmaster guitar controller for the not-very-reasonable price of $144 from Amazon (which I think is how much I paid for Rock Band back in 2007 or some shit). The plastic contraption arrived the next day, and to my surprise, it actually feels pretty solid — and at almost $150, I guess it should.
PGP’s guitar reminds me of the OG Rock Band controller, only with a little more heft and a few clever new features — mainly that its neck can fold in, making it easier to store, and that it includes a built-in joystick in its neck (unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Rock Band 4 as far as I could tell). I booted up the aging Xbox One X that I have in my living room, bought the digital version of Rock Band 4 Rivals for $12.79, and then waited roughly an hour and a half as the decrepit console downloaded the game at roughly 1Mbps (after a few hard resets the download speed picked up). I refuse even to entertain the idea of playing Fortnite Festival because it looks awful.
To my surprise, the Riffmaster connected instantly, though you need to plug in a USB dongle and there’s a different version of the Riffmaster for PlayStation consoles. I immediately started scrolling through Rock Band 4’s list of songs and found nothing I wanted to play. After all, this was the first time I’d picked up a plastic ax in probably a decade. Whatever track I decided to jam out to first needed to be good, right? Then I remembered I purchased a lot of songs back when I was into the original Rock Band in the late 2000s, including pretty much every Blink 182 song that was available at the time.
Thankfully, they were all still there, though the download process involved awkwardly getting them from the Xbox Dashboard’s download screen (thanks, Harmonix 🙏). On a side note: what the hell happened to the Xbox One X? I’ve heard that the Series X update slowed the older console’s operating system down a bit, but the experience has been so bad I’m considering destroying it with a hockey stick and buying a Series S to use as my living room console. Moving between simple menus can sometimes take up to 5 seconds.
But back to Rock Band. I was immediately perplexed after selecting Blink 182’s “Down” for my first playthrough. I just couldn’t make my fingers go where they needed them to. And the orange button? Forget about it; I could barely handle the first four buttons on the Riffmaster. I was never a Rock Band/Guitar Hero pro (no, playing Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames was not my thing), but back in the day, I could play most songs on “Medium” and at least a few on “Hard,” yet here I was, struggling to handle the power chord-filled song, “Down.”
After a few more attempts, it all came back to me, and once I finally hit my groove, a strange in-the-zone feeling wafted across my COVID-19-filled brain that I’ve only really felt before when hitting my stride in a particularly competitive Halo Infinite Ranked match. It disappeared quickly as a more complicated cluster of notes flew across the screen in Paramore’s “Crushcrushcrush.” I spent the next few hours exploring the songs I bought back in 2007 (why the hell do I own so many Queens of the StoneAge songs?) and buying way more new tracks than I should have (which cost between $1.99 and $2.75).
There’s still some magic in Harmonix’s plastic instrument-music game format, and to my surprise, I’m actually looking forward to Rock Band 5’s release (if it ever actually comes out).