No need to go to Ibiza – the music fest can be at yours.

Fuser is a DJ ‘game’ from the digital interactive maestro’s Harmonix (Rock Band) where you’re presented with a varied genre selection of licensed tracks, from the 70s to 2020 that you add in to your ‘crate’ and then splice them up into beats, vocals, tempo’s and rhythm.

First up though, you need to either select or create your own DJ.

The creation tool is littered with detailed options from ethnicity to facial features, body type, and clothing.

Then you’re thrown on to a laser light stage surrounded by fireworks with thousands of hyped up fans in a crowd pit waiting for you to start your best mixing.

This is the tutorial – and it’s here that you’ll be given a handful of objectives to do to get yourself up to speed with the controls and how to manage the tracks in your library (called a crate).

After completion you are rewarded with credits. you need these to purchase the available in-game tracks.

Once you’ve mastered this intro – it’s in to the game. And when I say game – there are gameplay aspects to it, but Fuser is more of an experience / entertainment title that I have a great appreciation for the complex development that game would’ve taken to produce.

You can opt to drop yourself right in to the Campaign game – where, similar to the tutorial you would’ve just worked through – you have a set of objectives to work through.

You set up the tracks in your crate, swapping them out and replacing them with any of the available ones – ultimately having well over 20 tracks in one session for you to mix with.

Completing objectives successfully nets you more credits.

Unless you’re a mixer whizz I do recommend giving Freestyle mode a jam as your first bout in to Fuser.

Freestyle is basically a practice where there’s no tasks and you can mix it up a storm.

The four turntables that will be in front of you correspond to beat, tempo, rhythm and vocals. Each are colour coded to the coloured buttons on your Xbox controller.

There is also a track guide, if you’re observant, where coloured dots will be presented along the main track bar, highlighting the optimal timing to drop a new beat, swap out the tempo or change the track for the vocals. When you make changes the game will adjust itself accordingly and sync all of the four tracks you have going on, automatically adjusting the speed of the vocals or tempo as required. The coloured guides also adjust with every track change you make so you can still make those swap outs at crucial timing.

And that’s what playing Fuser is all about – timing, as DJ’ing is in real life.

Fuser is a social game too. Play other Fuser player’s shared tracks, share your own to the Fuser community and get in for some local co-op action.

Fuser is an explosion of auditory sensuality as you create your own commercial quality remixes of songs you already know and probably stream on a regular basis.

Differing arenas (stages) open up as you progress and as you get real good more tools open up for you too, such as samples and being able to tweak at a micro-level.

The game’s full library has around 100 tracks on offer from Hip Hop, Country, Contemporary, Pop, Rock and Dance from nearly every decade in the last 30 or so years. There are DLC packs, where you can purchase full song packs or buy individual songs – but these cost real world money and are a bit expensive.

If you’ve always fancied yourself as a bit of a DJ, simply love music or looking for something different that is likely to hook you in – Fuser is definitely the one.

Start recording, do your best 90 minute mix, snapshot it so you can return to it, if you want, bring it out at your next social gathering and let it play to the entertainment, amazement and bewilderment of your friends and family.

The post Fuser (Xbox One) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

The second coming of the rhythm music game is upon us and first on stage is Mad Catz and Harmonix Music Systems’ Rock Band 4.

This is software borne out of necessity over anything else. With a massive back catalogue of licenced music, over the last few years the die-hard Rock Band fans have been steadily replacing their PS3s and Xbox 360s with new-gen consoles. What must have been a steady revenue stream for Harmonix has, no doubt, been slowly drying up.

It also makes sense that the pioneering music game developers have found a publishing suitor in veteran peripheral manufacturer Mad Catz, who are now likely looking forward to a bumper sale of plastic guitars and drum kits this Christmas.

For the uninitiated, Rock Band 4 continues a legacy started by developers, Harmonix, with their original Guitar Hero before going it alone with their own Rock Band franchise, incorporating drums and vocals into the equation.

The concept is simple. Players must, in the case of the guitar, press the corresponding coloured fret buttons on the neck as they appear on along the track on the screen whilst strumming the button on the guitar body. Advanced players can also use the lower fret buttons and whammy bar to create a unique sound. Drummers have the same deal, but instead need to beat the corresponding coloured drum or the foot pedal.

Pro-drummer may want to consider the optional Mad Catz cymbal kit to mix things up a bit. Vocalist need to keep up with the lyrics on the screen karaoke-fashion. The game can accommodate lead and bass guitars allowing players with all the kit to play as a four piece band.

Scores are accumulated by maintaining streaks of faultlessly playing notes, racking up multipliers. Correctly playing the special white notes on the screen will fill the overdrive bar which, when activated by tilting the guitar (or a double beat of the drums), gives an extra 2x multiplier until the bar is drained.

As in previous games, the visual style of Rock Band 4 is a stylised, cartoony look-  with band members based on classic rock group clichés. The graphics are nigh indistinguishable from previous entries apart from a higher resolution, better lighting and what looks to be a pretty solid 60fps.

As before, the game takes fans straight onto the stage. The familiar-looking menu allows you to play a show- which is essentially a set list, go on tour- which is the band/campaign mode and select a quick play session with a single track.

The big addition, which may not appeal to the hardcore, are the optional freestyle solos. For guitar players, if switched on, this means using the high and low buttons on the guitar to either strum freestyle notes to a tempo or go crazy and knock out your own insane riff. There’s even a continuous freestyle mode where you just unleash a guitar jam over the top of a song.

There’s no points to be earned, but it’s pretty awesome fun, especially for your young kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to cope with the game. There’s something rather special watching a four-year-old concoct his own freestyle accompaniment to Judas Priest’s Halls of Valhalla!

The lack of an online mode is a bit of a shame. There are rumours that it is in the works, which fits in with statements from Harmonix that suggest that Rock Band 4 will be the only version release for this generation of consoles. This makes the game more of a platform on to which the developers will build rather than just an iteration. A good idea, if you ask me, as there’s little point in knocking out essentially the same game every few years, with nothing but a new tracklist, and saturating the market like they did last time.

The Rock Band 4 comes complete with over sixty tracks ranging from Elvis Presley to Ozzy Osborne.

There are 1500+ tracks available to purchase for a couple of bucks each alreadyin the music store. Weekly additions to the Rock Band catalogue are starting back up again, giving the game the largest music collection on new-gen consoles.

Songs already purchased, either as downloads or transferred to a copy of Rock Band 3 from previous games in the same console family (i.e. PS3 to PS4), should be available to download from the store free of charge.More on this in a moment.

For fans of the previous Rock Band games, Rock Band 4 is going to be very familiar. Familiar as in it’s basically exactly the same game. Unlike previous incarnations of the franchise, Harmonix are still ironing a few kinks out—which is pretty much how they’ve shipped every game up until this this one.

Expect the store to not quite be working as you’d expect and any songs you own from previous Rock Band games to not yet be available or a little tricky to transfer over. Harmonix are working on a list of things that need fixing. And I believe they will fix them, as they have in the past. I just think that their Rock Band network infrastructure is a bit shit.

Through a bit of skulduggery that involved logging into the PSN Store on my PC, I did manage to locate a list of add-on songs that I had on Rock Band 3. It is a bit of a mess and overly onerous.

In saying that, I still managed to transfer a good 24 songs that I purchased on my old NZ account over to my PS4, which are now available to play on my Australian PSN account. I’m expecting more of my old RB3 tracks to be available to me free of charge once they’ve been uploaded to the NZ PlayStation store and polished up the process a bit.

Until Harmonix have got their act together, I’d stay away from the Rock Band 4 in-game music store. There are some fundamental issues that still need to be sorted. You could end up paying for content that you already own or, as I did, buy music (The Best of The Who Rock Band Edition) that is not yet available for RB4 and only downloadable to the PS3. WTF Harmonix?

All your old Guitar Hero and Rock Band instruments will work with Rock Band 4, with some exceptions. If you were well-heeled enough to invest in the Rock Band 3 Fender Mustang Pro-Guitar or the Pro-Keyboard, you are out of luck if you want to show them off with Rock Band 4. For this fourth outing, Harmonix have gone back to basics with the five coloured buttons and strummer.

Instrument Backward compatibility is a piece of cake if you are using PlayStation 3 guitars and drums, as the little USB wireless dongles that can with your PS3 instruments will work with the PS4. Xbox 360 owners will need an adapter to get their old kit working on the Xbox One.

A word of warning if you intend on using your old Guitar Hero World Tour kit with Rock Band 4. My dongle worked fine the first time, but then stopped working. The thing works fine in the PS3, but only occasionally works with the PS4 if the console is shut right down. It’s an issue that has been widely reported on the internet from many users. I’d hazard a guess that it is a PS4 driver issues and one that is unlikely to be solved by Harmonix or Mad Catz, as they didn’t manufacture the Guitar Hero kit.

Those wishing to use their old Guitar Hero kit may want to consider upgrading to a Mad Catz Rock Band 4 guitar, anyway. Not only do I find that the overall build quality to be more refined (they look less like a child’s toy than the old Red Octane Guitar Hero ones), but they also feature adjustable guitar sound modes (wah-wah, echo, chorus etc.) and also built-in sensors for calibrating the audio and visual lag.

Of course, the best options, if you’ve the cash, is to purchase either the full “band in a box”game, drum-set, guitar and microphone combo or the game and guitar. Not only have the new instruments been refined since the Rock Band 3 kit five years ago, they also feature share buttons, enabling you to upload your game footage and save screens.

Besides, if you were into Rock Band the first time around, your instruments could probably do with replacing anyway.

Rock Band 4 is the welcome return of a franchise that I though had had its day. The new freestlye solos are a great addition, but other than that it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. But if it’s not broken don’t fix it. Regardless, the game does allow fans to continue enjoying their Rock Band experience on the new gen consoles.

I still found it mercilessly addictive and a great way to enjoy music. As a party game it’s superb, allowing guests to command the room with their guitar and drumming skills whilst some poor soul wails into the mic. I had an absolute blast Rock Band 4 it and heartily recommend it to players both old and new.

The post Rock Band 4 Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.