It’s been nearly 2 years since I picked up my Xplorer for the first time and I feel like I’ve come a long way from when I started. What this post is going to be about, is all the different techniques and tricks that I’ve picked up over the course of the last 2 years. It may seem sad to alot of people, but there are actually quite alot of difficult positions. position changes and various other concepts/skills that you need to get used to to be able to play at a high standard. So, here we go:
- Firstly, learn the basic game mechanics. – Just get to grips how the game works. Once you’ve played a few songs on easy, you’ll soon get the hang of how the game works. If you’re anything like I was, you’ll get bored of easy soon and want to move on to medium.
- Learning star power. – I’ve seen a fair amount of people that have just picked the game up or have little experience with it (there were a surpringly high amount of people down at my Game Society last term like this) and just gather it up and waste it. If you know the song quite well, you’ll know when to use it effectively. But if you don’t know the song, try not to go beyond 3/4s as you’ll probably end up gathering more even though you’re full. Just use the star power on fast sections to get the most out of the star power and avoid hoarding it to the point of wasting it.
- Chords. – Chords are quite a big aspect of guitar playing so expect to see them a lot. On easy/medium you’ll be given rather simple chords and it’s just a case of getting used to them. Mostly there are about 19 different regularly occuring chords to learn when on expert. There are however odd occassions where you’ll see G-O or G-Y-O or even G-B-O, but because of their rarity, you’ll remember where they are.
- Medium to Hard. – This is one of the biggest challenges in these games. I remember struggling at first with that extra button up the top that required me to move my hand away from what I was used to. It took me a long time to get it. At first you’ll try and keep your hand where you like it and just move your pinky up for the orange. It’s a valid thing to think about as a solution, but after a bit of practice, you’ll realise that you will have to move your hand up and down between the two hand positions. To move on to expert, this is something that will have to become instinctive to you.
- Strum rhythm changes. – If you’ve been able to master the extra button, you’ll soon see difficulty in a different form. Alot of places that have fast strumming are easy to play, but difficult to perfect.
- Getting good at hammer ons/pull offs on Hard. – The vast majority of songs beyond Hard will no doubt have sections with hammer ons and pull offs, especially solos. It’s good to get a grasp of them early on so that when you get to something like Prequel to The Sequel on Expert, you won’t feel completely overwhelmed.
- Keep playing. – This advice almost sounds too simple to even be advice. As they say, practice makes perfect, and getting good at GH/RB is no different. I find these games extremely fun, so practicing didn’t even feel like a chore, as in my mind, I was just playing a game. I also was playing with my brother, so our natural brotherly competitiveness made me want to get better.
Admittedly, a lot of this stuff will just come naturally as you progress through the various difficulty levels. I feel however that there is a lot of work to do once you can pass songs on Expert. I’ve been passing songs on Expert for a very long time, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Lately however, my hitting of fast hammer on sections has improved a lot and solos such as the one in Rock Rebellion are getting easy. Anyway, I hope this post has been somewhat informative of my learning experience and maybe helpful to some one out there. 🙂
Desperately Bored 