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‘Rock Band’: A Hands-On Test of the Most Anticipated Video Game of the Year

What It Is: The sensation of this year’s E3 gaming show, Rock Band is essentially a four-person version of Guitar Hero. In fact, it’s made by same MIT Media Lab music brainiacs (Harmonix) who created Guitar Hero (as well as a slew of other music games from Karaoke Revolution to Amplified). How It Works: Each person takes an instrument in the form of a plastic video-game controller shaped like a guitar, bass, drums and mic, respectively. When the music starts, each member of the band has to press red, blue, green or yellow buttons on the controllers (or sing correctly) in sync with the ever-changing colored squares and bars that run on a track on the screen. It’s typical Karaoke Revolution-meets-Guitar Hero gameplay, but with a seriously intriguing four-person multiplayer element. What It’s Like to Play: We sang along with Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” with words (and bars representing note values and pitches) streaming across the screen in time with the music. We found that all we needed to do was just sing more or less on pitch for as long as those individual bars are on-screen. Like Karaoke Revolution, though, you can basically sing along in a soulless, robotic fashion and still score points as long as you’re in sync with those bars. That said, extra style points are awarded for those singers who improvise here and there. The vocals track also includes some separate onscreen symbols that ask you to tap on the mic as if it were a tambourine, so you’ll need to have your rhythm skills in shape to master this part. Next up, the bass, which is probably the easiest of the instruments to tackle. On Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” we were able to more or less hit most of the extended notes, though a few hammer-ons stumped us until we got a little more practice. The Fender guitar controller was a bit more difficult, asking us for harder-to-hit hammer-ons, regular notes and a variety of extended notes on Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” but we were offered the option of going nuts with a le

Published: 2007-08-17
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News