The Playstation 3 is for Educational Research Dear…

Yeah Right!

These days you have to keep up with the kids.  Ironically Playstation was the first console to be marketed at 20 somethings with expendable income hence its success and the playstation 3 is no exception with its price tag.  I bit the bullet and the GE money genie bought me a PS3 and Guitar Hero World Tour (with guitar, drums and mic) on tick.  After some hard practicing I took the gear round to Richards house for an evening of home made wine and rock and roll.

The game itself is fairly straight forward, choose an instrument, skill level and a song, play individual or as a band and away you go.  Beginner skill level just requires you to keep a beat with the strum bar (guitar) or tapping a beat on any part of the drum kit and if you have never done it before even this is quite challenging for an entire song.  Crank it up to easy and it gets quite intense with medium almost impossible without considerable practice.

Playing as an individual is great fun but playing as a band is even better and if someone makes too many mistakes then the band gets booed off the stage.  I even had a go at playing drums and singing at the same time Phil Collins style which was extremely challenging but I managed to get to the end of Band on the Run.

Of course with a room consisting of 75% teachers we saw huge educational value amongst all of the fun and thoughts wander to how it may be used in a classroom.  We also wandered if we could hook the wireless drum kit up to Garage Band and sure enough you can – just download Gamepad Companion and map the drum pads to keystrokes and use it with the on screen keyboard to play the drums on your mac. And even though the guitar playing isn’t as authentic as the drums, as a guitar player myself I could see it helping with strumming patterns, rhythm and muscle control (especially little finger fretting which I tend to avoid).

There are a whole lot of skills involved in this game and it is one of the few games that doesn’t annoy me when I get killed.  Maybe it is because there are some great rock songs, we all certainly found the drumming very satisfying and decided that it was more fun than singstar because of the team element.

I would love to see one hooked up to a projector in a music department with students learning to appeciate good rock music instead of that crap they listen to these days.