 “I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’re just too darn loud.” High School Band Judge - Back to the Future.
We recently got our hands on Rock Band, the upcoming music game developed by Harmonix, original creators of the wildly successful Guitar Hero, and we’re officially excited. Games have always been a social past-time, and despite the fact more people are playing online, many of us grew up playing games with our friends. We played in groups shouting at the same television screen or crowding round dirty arcade machines egging each other on. (Someone’s showing their age again-Ed). People like playing together; it’s one of the reasons the Wii is incredibly successful and why Rock Band has such a good chance of being the ‘next big thing.’
Just looking at Rock Band makes you wonder why no one did it sooner. Two players in Guitar Hero is fun enough, so it stands to reason that fully fleshing out the rhythm game concept into a full band experience would kick ass, right?
If you're not familiar with the Guitar Hero, and now Rock Band, game concept here’s a quick run through. Players strum and hold down frets on a guitar-shaped controller. A guitar neck appears onscreen, and as the coloured notes travel down the neck, you play the notes by holding the corresponding frets and strumming the guitar pick-shaped button on the face. In Rock Band, you have a similar arrangement for the drums and the singer has a bar for voice pitch to follow as the words go across the screen. The faster and more complicated the song, the harder it is to play.
Three of the UKMusic.com crew took to the virtual stage last week as singer, guitarist and drummer, to put the new game through its paces. And thus far Rock Band looks to deliver on its promise. Imagine the karaoke inspired fun of SingStar, add the guitar fuelled mania of Guitar Hero and then throw in a fully fledged drum kit rhythm game. Sprinkle the lot with a generous helping of classic rock tracks from every era and serve piping hot! While we only scratched the surface of the game, we really liked what we saw; in fact some members of the team had to be dragged off the thing!
One of the first things that struck us was the quality of the actual band kit. You couldn’t really ask for a better set of faux instruments. The guitar is a little bigger and more ‘realistic’ than its Guitar Hero counterpart, and the player who spent most of his time on guitar decided that he liked it better than the Guitar Hero one. The thinner neck has buttons that sink into it rather than protruding outward, which can make playing a little easier. The mic, well it’s just a microphone, but it seems to work well enough and amplify your voice over the back track. (This can be a good or bad thing, depending on who gets to sing!) The drum kit is pretty impressive, consisting of four drum pads and a foot pedal. It was also bigger than we expected. With ‘real’ wooden drum sticks and the ability to give the pads a firm whack, you’re going to need a fair amount of space in your living room for this game. While you might be used to the karaoke aspect of the game and Guitar Hero veterans will take to it like a rock star to groupies, drumming, especially getting the foot pedal timing right, takes a bit of doing. You’ll definitely want to nominate a Drummer who’ll need to practice a lot!
One of the great things about Rock Band is that once you’re chosen your instrument you can customise the onscreen avatar that will represent you on stage. Each of you can choose the name, look, hair, clothes and even attitude of your performer. You then get to name your little group and take to the stage. The range of choices is pretty big, with more to unlock as you play the game and you can create some outrageous characters. Our little threesome consisted of a group of ultra thin rockers with long wildly coloured hair. The band customisation's a nice touch and really makes you feel like you’re a unique group.
The key to Rock Band’s success will ultimately be the music, its initial song list is over 75 songs strong and we played through a few of them to get used to the new instruments. With a range of songs from the 1960’s to the present day, there’s pretty much something for everyone. The Band Tour mode sends your band globe trotting to various arenas around the world, where you play to gain fans, money and unlock new songs. Some of the more memorable songs just from our brief play included the Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly", the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter", Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and Radiohead's "Creep". Even more tracks than those on the disc will be downloadable on Xbox Live and the Playstation store after release.
We only got to play for a few hours and that time just flew by. There’s something special about being able to play in a group like this and jamming with friends is the most fun we’ve had with a game for a while. You all just seem to gel and the ability to save members of the band who are failing their parts makes you work as a team. It can also lead to heated arguments as you bicker over whose fault it was that you failed a song! (That's why you should have taken me with you!-Ed).
Our only real complaint about Rock Band at this point is that you seem to play the same little groups of songs over and over again at the beginning. There was only a small set unlocked for free multi player and even when we started tour we found ourselves playing the same ones with only one or two new additions at each arena. Perhaps we didn’t get to play for long enough, but playing "Black Hole Sun" for the fifth time in a row started to get a bit much after a while. We also don’t know how much fun Rock Band will be as a single player game, all things we’ll get to see when we review it shortly.
That’s Rock Band in a nutshell, and its looking like lot of fun. Odds are that this one will be a party favourite that just about anyone can play. It's set to be released here in March this year and no doubt will prove to be as popular here as it has in the States, where it was released last year.
So was Guitar Hero nothing more than a jam session and will Rock Band truly ‘turn the dial up to 11’? We’ll let you know when we review it fully later this year.
(Update) Rock Band has been confirmed for release in the UK on the 23rd of May-watch this space for our upcoming review and interviews with the game creators.
Written By : Sam Bandah
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