Surprisingly Fun
Rock Band. Who hasn't heard of it by now? The premise is simple: you and three buddies can get together, and rock out on two fake guitars, a fake drum set, and a USB microphone to over 50 songs included on the disc, most of which are the master tracks. Some people may mock the game, and for good reason; anybody looks like an idiot while trying to windmill the guitar on The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", or busting into crazy drum fills whenever possible on Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills". But these moments are some of the best in Rock Band; moments where you can have a good laugh with three friends, and just act plain silly while creating Rock Fusion™.
If you've ever played Guitar Hero, another well-made rhythm game, then you should be familiar with Rock Band's guitar and bass gameplay. A stream of notes falls down the screen, divided into three, four, or five different colors, determined by the difficulty level you've chosen. On Easy, green, red, and yellow notes stream by at a slow pace. You have to hold down the correspondingly-colored buttons on your plastic guitar, and strum the "strum bar", which emulates the area where you strum the strings on a real guitar.
On Medium, it introduces the blue button, and a faster stream of notes, as well as more notes that you have to play. On Hard and Expert, the orange button comes into play, as well as increasingly-faster note tracks, with more notes to hit.
Playing the drums is quite similar to playing guitar or bass, in that you have five different notes to hit: four pads, and a bass pedal for orange lines on the note track. It has been noted by many people that this makes the drums much harder to play than guitar or bass, as you have to use a foot as well as two hands to play them.
The singing element in Rock Band is a lot like singing on a karaoke machine; words speed across the screen with a bar indicating the pitch of the word, and you must sing the word while matching the pitch. This can be one of the best or most frustrating parts of Rock Band; singing classics like Deep Purple's "Highway Star" and Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is amazing, especially if you're doing well. But there's the catch. If you have a deep or otherwise less-than-great voice, then it's hard to match the pitch of some songs, even when it seems like you're singing them like they should be. Rock Band does a good job of offering diverse difficulty levels on this, though, and singing a song on Easy is just as fun as singing it on Expert.
So, we've covered the instruments. But what happens when you're playing as a group?
The answer is simple; you play like you would if you were playing a song by yourself, but one to three other people are doing it as well on their own instruments. If Bob is playing guitar, and he misses a note, that note won't be heard, and he'll probably drop down a notch on the bar at the left of the screen, which tells you how well you're doing and how much the crowd is into your song. If Bob decides to suddenly stop playing, then he'll continue to lower the meter until he starts playing again, or he "fails" the song, which happens when his own particular symbol in the bar hits the bottom.
You could then "save" Bob by activating Overdrive, which is another meter, but this time there's one for everybody. You collect Overdrive by hitting sequences of notes(or words, for the vocalist) which then partially fills the meter. After collecting several of these, you can then activate Overdrive, which will "save" any "failed" bandmate, and also give you a rather nice multiplier, giving you more points per note.
Which brings us to the score. Every time a band member hits a note, they gain points for that note, which are then increased by any multiplier they have, and then the points are thrown into a total score for the song. At the end of the song, the total score is displayed, as well as "stars", or how well the song was performed.
Rock Band doesn't come without faults, though. While the core gameplay is stellar, the interface before you even get into a song is clunky. Any songs that have been unlocked are seemingly linked to the unlocker's profile, so if you don't have that person in your band, you're out of luck. Getting the band set up before playing is a major hassle, and if it were any other game, it would probably break it. But, it's Rock Band, and the fun the comes from playing with three other people more than compensates for the interface.
In the end, Rock Band is an excellent game, and well worth the steep price.
