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| Source // Nintendo |
By 2007, Guitar Hero was, unquestionably, a rather large success. The sequel proved that, and the stage was set for the actual next step in rhythm-based gameplay: Multiplayer, with multiple instruments.
Guitars? Two flavours of those. Drums? Gotta have a bald guy at the back making a racket. Microphone? Well you don't expect this band to get anywhere without someone wailing about life's troubles, do you?
All I need know are three willing friends to gather around the TV, plastic peripherals in hand and... what's this? Oh, no, that's unfortunate. It's 2020, and there are no indoor household visits. What? Play in the garden? No can do, it's winter. It'd be a washout. Think about Glastonbury? Listen, I'm not playing Rock Band, alright?
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| Source // MobyGames |
Frustrations
The best I could do with no plastic instruments and no copy of Rock Band was to emulate the PlayStation 2 port, but that doesn't let you past the menu screens without a microphone, so I can't even claw my fingers around a controller to butcher the likes of The Clash, Nirvana, and OK Go.
OK Go? How's that supposed to work? Nobody can cover an OK Go song, they're too concerned with wondering what the next ridiculous video will be.
Speaking of ridiculous videos, I did at least get to see the opening cinematic, which has a band playing on top of speeding vehicles and surviving crashes off cliffs. It didn't scream "Rock Band" to me, but it was screaming something musical that I can no longer recall.
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| Source // MobyGames |
How does Rock Band work, then? You should be more than familiar by now. Notes flood down a fretboard for you to clack and strike at the right time for big score multipliers. If you're the drummer, you've got a fretboard too, and like all of these games, it makes no difference what you see in the background because you won't be watching it.
When all your bandmates are playing alongside you, you won't see much of anything anyway.
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| Source // PlayStation |
Across the bottom of the screen are your guitar and drum notes, and up top are the sing-along lyrics, which you hope the microphone will pick up and put more or less in the right place. I don't know the terms. Pitch? Tone? I suspect, given the rest of the band are just clacking and bashing, you can blow raspberries into the microphone and get a result out of it, and who knows, it might make these songs sound good.
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| Source // Nintendo |
Having not played Rock Band, and having less than zero intention of doing so, I can only imagine what it sounds like to gather some mates and bash out a rendition of whatever songs are included as standard, and whatever DLC you've bothered to buy into for reasons known only to the mad.
To be fair, a quick skim of the song list shows nothing to mock. I could rock out to a few of these classics... from the comfort of a CD player, not a rhythm game that now relies on other people for your success.
Surely there are better games to spend hours and hours with. "Ah, but, think of how rewarding it will feel to finally nail a song". Sure. Think of how rewarding it'd be to do so with actual instruments, too.
Final Word
I better wrap this up because I really have nothing to say about Rock Band. I've not played it, don't want to play it, aren't ever likely to play it, can't give you a definitive reason why you should or shouldn't.
It's on the 1001 must-play video game list for a clear and obvious reason though: Name me another game that does this. Don't say Rock Band 2, because, sadly, the 1001 list thinks we should play that as well. This is inescapable. Surely one of these games gives us an idea of what all the rest are like. Why must I play two Guitar Hero games, two Rock Band titles and still have more of their ilk to play?
And I've just glanced at the next game on the list. Ugh.
Play it, don't play it, don't let me get in the way.
Fun Facts
$200m to develop this game, so the estimates say. Cor blimey.
Rock Band, developed by Harmonix, first released in 2007.