Published by MTV Games

Distributed by Electronic Arts

Developed for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 2 by Harmonix

Rating – “T for Teen” Contains Lyrics, Mild Suggestive Themes

Special Edition Package (contains instruments) - $200

Game Disc Only - $60

Instruments to be sold separately in 2008.

Rock Band expands the popular Guitar Hero trend by including, both physically and virtually, every instrument in the band – vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar, and drums. Although you can certainly play it on your own, and use any single instrument to go through a virtual solo career, the experience pales in comparison to having a room full of people to fill all the positions. Forming your own band is truly what the game is all about and so its best to have a circle of friends who can chip in the money to divvy up the Special Edition kit’s instruments and buy extra copies of the game disc, so that everyone can practice at home and you can organize rehearsals, think of a band name, wear costumes, and throw parties where you rock out in your pajamas, giggling at each other’s antics long into the night.

Although created by a different company, Rock Band uses the exact same game system as the Guitar Hero series, right down to the Simons Says system of colour-coded notes and buttons. Press the buttons in sequence to match the notes on the screen and the music will play. So much so, that at least on the Xbox 360 version, you can use the guitars from the Guitar Hero series, perfect as the Special Edition Rock Band kit comes with only one guitar, not two.

Gathered around a single television, everyone in your band plays off of the same screen, with the scrolling fret board for each instrument sandwiched into a different quadrant of the display. Yes, it helps to have a big-screen television, but even with a smaller one the graphics have been laid out well enough that everyone can follow along and see their video game characters perform on a virtual stage.

Vocals

The kit includes a simple, USB Microphone. There’s no buttons, no controls on it whatsoever, in fact if you don’t like the microphone for some reason, you can use any other kind of microphone as long as it has a USB connection. Later on, when you become fully immersed in the role of rock star, this might inspire you to buy a gold or Swarovski crystal-encrusted microphone. To create a character, select a song, or go through menu options, the vocalist uses a regular game controller. You sing with the microphone in one hand and the game controller in the other (or at least kept somewhere close by).

Singing is measured like many other Karaoke-based video games – with pitch control. As the song plays, a line (or bubble as it is called) floats across the screen, representing each vocal phrase. The higher the line sits on the chart, the higher in pitch your voice should be to match. A floating arrow represents where your voice is and as you change your pitch, the arrow will rise and fall to match. Keep the arrow and the line synchronized and you’ll score the best points, the crowd will go wild, etc. Fail to keep the two connected and you’ll get booed off stage.

Singing is by far the easiest task in the game. The lyrics for each song scroll across the screen Karaoke-style and you can sing with the original vocals playing underneath your own. The game only cares about the pitch and timing of your performance, not over-all quality. It doesn’t even care if you get the words right, as long as you hum something that kind of matches what the song is supposed to be you can get past most songs. Even the most ridiculous cartoon-voiced performances can get you a high score. I can’t sing myself, for example, and I’ve completed the game as a vocalist on the “Hard” difficulty.

The only real trick to singing is enabling the Overdrive (Star Power as it is called in Guitar Hero). As you successfully sing selected phrases, you’ll fill up an energy meter which you can tap into to add multipliers and get the crowd whipped up into a frenzy. To unlock that power, you need to wait for special wallpaper graphics to appear on the vocal grid and utter some kind of improvised shout, shriek, or comment into the mic to engage it. Since many of these moments come when you would normally be taking a breath or at points in the song where yelling out kind of ruins the whole vibe, it can be a real challenge to come up with something appropriate.

The Guitars

The Rock Band guitar controller is a Fender Stratocaster replica. It has the same controls, colour-coded buttons, strum switch, and whammy bar as the Gibson guitars used by the Guitar Hero series, but offers two major innovations. Its longer neck supports two sets of fret buttons, one set at the head of the neck and another at the base of the neck, close to the guitar’s body. This second set is designed for kids and for people with smaller hands and the feedback from one of the girls in my band is that the closer frets can actually make a difference for some song parts.

The second innovation is a sound effect switch which you can use in mid-song to change your guitar’s tone, adding one of four effects labeled “Wah-Wah”, “Flanger”, “Echo”, and “Chorus”. None of them have any impact on the game, but are offered merely as fun effects for the guitar players to experiment with.

To add more realism to the Fender Stratocaster, the fret buttons have been placed flush to the neck of the guitar and the strum switch is harder to push down or pull up. Personally, this made it harder for me to find the buttons without always looking and as Rock Band tends to favour a lot of repetitive strumming, I found the higher resistance on the strum switch annoying. I prefer to use the Guitar Hero III wireless controller in its place, but the members of my band like the tweaks. Clearly it’s up to personal preference.

The Drums

The hardest rhythm-based controller you will ever take on, the drum kit features four colour-coded sensor plates and a base pedal. Regardless of what level of difficulty you try, you’ll have to use them all at the same time. It isn’t like the guitars where you can begin with just three notes and slowly graduate to include the others, it’s all five elements right from the beginning. The controls amount to a pair of real-world drumsticks and you’ll have to learn how to properly hold and use them, just as you would if you were taking drum lessons. This means getting comfortable and getting coordinated in a way that you’ve probably never had to before. The kit doesn’t include a stool, so you’ll have to find a chair or an ottoman to improvise with and adjust the drums themselves to a height that will suit your reach. Learning to incorporate the drum pedal as the fifth note to the ones your hands are playing, both on and off the beat, is extremely difficult and you’ll find your leg cramping up quickly.

Although the toy drums are well-made, durable with easy clasps and grooves to make adjustments, I recommend investing in an inexpensive real-world adjustable drum stool or “throne” as the difference it will make on your back and ability to play the game is night and day.

Banging on the drums is only fun after you’ve learned to take them on and push through the challenge of their controls. For every person I’ve allowed to try the game out, the drums have proven to be so intimidating that most are discouraged from buying their own copy of the game. The learning curve is certainly high, but the rewards are there to match the work.

Rock Shopping

By far the most popular feature for the girls in my band is the ability to create and clothe your own Rock Star. There’s an admirable selection of faces, body shapes, eye colours, skin tones, and mannerisms, enough that you can easily create a cartoon figure that resembles you enough to get your friends giggling. But beyond the initial body sculpturing, the game features a shopping mall full of tops, pants, shoes, and accessories that include glasses, earrings, wrist bands, rings, and gloves. There’s different hair styles, tattoos, and make-ups patterns, enough to keep any fashion fan busy for hours and hours. The couture is divided by genre, with a shop each devoted to styles for Punk, Metal, Goth, and Rock. You’ll find everything from a simple T-shirt and ripped jeans, to ruffled shirts and studded warrior garb inspired by the Mad Max movies. You can change the colour of each piece of clothing and the combinations can seem limitless.

True to the video game format, the clothes are locked at the beginning, and it’s only by performing songs that you can win the dollars to finance your shopping sprees. Amongst my band, this quickly inspired the trend of playing a song, then shopping, then playing, then shopping, etc.

Going On Tour

There are two kinds of tours you can take. The solo tour, where you play alone with a single instrument, is mediocre at best. Essentially you play through the songs in sequence, and slowly the stadiums you play at get more impressive, but that’s about it.

It’s only when you combine two or more rockers and instruments that you access the real campaign of the game. With an official band name, you and your friends embark across a series of taverns and clubs, where some times you get to choose the songs and some times the virtual audience does it for you. There’s challenges to unlock tour buses and roadies, and for every gig you play, you’ll be awarded a number of “fans” who will help you later on to gain prestige with awards and entry into the Hall of Fame. Along the path there are financial choices to make, wagers you can pick up or venues that you can choose from and should this be beyond your own decision-making skills, there’s a virtual manager you can employ to help you out.

One of the big thrills of going through a virtual tour is watching the evolution of your band, from riding about in a broken-down bus and playing at high schools, to eventually seeing your name printed across the side of a Lear jet and watching as album covers with your faces on them swirl past the screen.

The tour mode includes two extremely important and ultimately very rewarding features. The first is the ability to play online. Trying to get everyone to assemble in one house for one night of the week sounds like a task that shouldn’t be too hard until you actually try it, and so the idea of having everyone take their instruments home to join together over the internet provides the important service of keeping everyone playing together.

The second is the ability for one person to combine two instruments together. For example, you can play the guitar and sing at the same time. I highly recommend trying this, it’s one of my favorite parts of the game. If you don’t have the group available to play with, you can do this to access the band mode. The singing mode supports a wireless headset, meaning that you can also form a band by playing the drums and singing at the same time.

The Music

Unlike the Guitar Hero series, which has a very strong bias towards Heavy Metal, Rock Band features a strong mix of songs from across a wide variety of genres. Most of the tracks are original, with only a few cover songs in the mix. The Police, Molly Hatchet, Deep Purple, Fall Out Boy, and Kiss are among a catalog of 59 songs that evenly represent Rock, Punk, Metal, Alternative, and Country. Missing are the face-melters and frantic fretwork songs used to supply more difficult experiences in the Guitar Hero series and in its place you’ll find instead that, one you choose a difficulty setting, all of the songs stay within that range of challenge.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about the way Rock Band presents its songs that is different from the Guitar Hero series, it’s the way that the pattern of notes are laid out. As each song has to ultimately support four different parts working in unison, I find that each individual part, whether it be drums, bass, or lead guitar, is far more repetitive than it would be if it were the only instrument being used. There is an awful lot of consistent strumming in Rock Band that can get tiresome, and can be hard to motivate yourself to push through without a group of people around you to make it feel worth while.

Rock Band The Verdict

Rock Band’s most admirable trait is its dependency on the group of people playing it to deliver its intended experience. Despite all the gadgetry and cool visual graphics, if you don’t have a group of people to get into the illusion of playing as a band, you don’t have a game worth playing. The plastic instruments, the music, and the virtual clothes are just an activity from which to bring people together and it’s the personalities that gather and inject themselves into the experience of “rocking out” that deliver the natural high that allows Rock Band to transcend itself as a regular video game. This is the ultimate party game and everything by design is there to help you and your friends have a great time. For its $200 price tag, the Special Edition Rock Band set delivers one of the best values for your dollar.

The Lords of Kobol (left to right): Nadine Bell, Kris Abel, Alison Salinas, Darko Milivojevic