Rock Band

The Short


Pros
- Full band experience: Sing, drum, play guitar or bass
- Both solo and band career mode
- Make a customizable rocker and unlock stuff for them
- Excellent soundtrack of mostly original recordings
- Added unison bonuses, where if you play segments of the song perfectly with a band you get bonus Overdrive
- Solos with guitars, fills with drums
- Can sing with a mic or a headset
- Has a distinct sense of style throughout, from the menues to just general UI
- Great animations on the rockers
- Massive amounts of DLC; Harmonix has released at least a song a week since Rock Band's release

Cons
- Songs start locked and have to be unlocked in career mode
- Can't change a character's name or what instrument he/she plays on a whim
- Can't play career mode with just a guitar or bassist; have to have either a singer or drummer
- Instruments could be expensive and have a tendency to break (and were all wired at first)
- Menu UI for song selection is dated and tedious
- Dumbed down the guitar/bass difficulty; playing bass can be really boring
- That being said, Green Grass and High Tides is freaking impossible on Expert guitar.
- Massive jump in difficulty for drums from Hard to Expert
- Can be hard to see bass notes on drums when your overdrive is on

A screen that boosted a genre into superstar status

The Long


Let it be known: I love the crap out of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games. Despite me disliking the direction the later Guitar Hero games have taken (with disc releases rather than DLC that lets me pick exactly what songs I want), I'll always have a special place in my heart for these types of music games, and they have a weird, insatiable draw that ensnares me. I've always had music as a key part of my life (everybody in my family plays an instrument; I'm the only person who doesn't play more than one), so when Guitar Hero (or rather, it was Guitar Hero II that hooked me) came around on the PS2, I literally could not stop playing. Guitar Hero III holds the record of me anticipating it more than any other game released (except maybe Rock Band 3 or Skyrim). Point being: even after the market has technically dried up for these types of games, I still play them all the time. The are fun with friends, my wife loves them too, and the wide selection of music (especially in the Rock Band games) means there's something for everybody.

So take a stroll down memory lane with me as I review every single Rock Band game on consoles, in the order I played them, and talk a bit about each. It might actually be a bit redundant, to review these original games when clearly their sequels are better, but when I said I'd review every game I ever played, I meant it. So here we go.

Seriously, I own 602 songs. And will be buying three more this Tuesday. This might be a problem. 

I bought the first Rock Band after we got our Xbox 360 and we were gifted a corded Guitar Hero II guitar our brother-in-law had found at the Goodwill for $5. Little did he know what he started. I was originally going to buy Guitar Hero III, but I'd already played that game to death on the PS2 and the only other music game (remember when the market wasn't completely saturated?) was Rock Band. Despite me thinking square notes were lame, I decided to pick it up just to play through on guitar.

It was the beginning of the end, for both my time and my money.

After beating it on both guitar and bass (and teaching my wife how to play), I decided I really wanted to play the drums. After finding a corded set for $20 on Craigslist I discovered how freaking fun the drums were. We then found out you could plug an Xbox360 headset into the controller, put my shyness aside, and found out that singing is actually pretty dang fun (I would have never done this in public or around friends at this point; I was embarrassed enough doing it in front of my wife). Before long we'd bought a USB mic, invited friends over, and blasted through a bunch of Coheed and Cambria as a full band. Good times.

Four player madness

So, what about the game? How has Rock Band held up? Well, it was pretty much revolutionary. Four players rocking: one each on guitar, bass, drums, and singing. You all could pick different difficulties if your drummer sucked and your guitarist was boss hog, for example, and you all worked together for a joint score. That's something that (for me) has set this game apart from the Guitar Hero games (even after they got other instruments): It was always about the band. You worked together to get overdrive. When you activate it, your 2x multiplier went to the whole band, not just you. If your friend failed out you could save them, or activate overdrive early to try and keep them alive. It wasn't just you rocking alone with your plastic guitar anymore; it was a group event, something you all had to work together on for it to work.

And it worked. It worked great. Rock Band was a total blast, even on its original iteration. 

In game UI was vastly improved: multipliers and overdrive at the bottom made it easy to see (unlike Guitar Hero, where you had to look off the side of the screen). The only thing I don't like is where your "life" bar is on the left; it's hard to look at during strenuous segments. 

The story about Rock Band's birth from Guitar Hero is stuff of legend now, but we'll go over the very basics while avoiding any of the crazy speculation. Essentially, Red Octane approached Harmonix wanting them to make a game to work around their new guitar controllers they designed. Harmonix used essentially a variation on their previous games, Frequency and Amplitude, to make the "scrolling highway" of notes that everybody recognizes now. To everybody's surprise, Guitar Hero was a runaway hit, earning a quick (and much improved) sequel, Guitar Hero II.

At this time Activision realized that the money boat was about to set sail, and since Red Octane owned the Guitar Hero brand rather than Harmonix, they bought Red Octane and left Harmonix behind, opting to use Neversoft (who made the Tony Hawk games of all things) to make Guitar Hero III instead. It paid off: Guitar Hero III is one of the highest grossing games of all time, but didn't really innovate at all. Harmonix instead joined up with MTV Games (of which Rock Band is their only real notable release) and made Rock Band. Obviously Activision realized it's mistake (after releasing the horrible Guitar Hero: Aerosmith) and tried to jump on the "full band" bandwagon, saturating the market while still playing catchup to Rock Band until the Guitar Hero brand was finally retired. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has said since then that not acquiring Harmonix was a mistake, which makes me slap my head and say "DUH!" Their company is called Harmonix. Of course they are going to know more about music than the Tony Hawk guys (no offense meant to the developers; they made some incredible games. It was more of a square peg, round hole in my opinion).

Those last two paragraphs had nothing to do with the review. I apologize. 

Anywho, back to Rock Band. I can't say enough good about it: four player awesomeness, a fantastic setlist (that helped my wife discover she actually liked some metal; Enter Sandman was one of our most played songs), and essentially a total revolution for the genre, just like Guitar Hero had been a few years before. It added a character creator, which was awesome, because then you could see yourself rocking up there on stage with your buddies. There are, however, some issues with this game that hasn't helped it age very gracefully.

First off, the career mode. It's bare bones (play songs in venues, go to a new venue and play some more songs) which was standard for the genre at the time, but the real offender is the fact you have to unlock songs. Again, genre standard, but really annoying. During this moment in time, the draw for these types of games was sort of idealizing yourself as a rock star, so who wouldn't want to play career mode? Rock Band marked the shift from wanting to fantasize as a rock star to just partying with friends, meaning quickplay was getting more time than career mode. Meaning unlocking songs was a massive pain.

Everybody can play on their own level

Other annoyances included the fact that every character was locked to a particular instrument forever, meaning you had to make four characters (each with their own unlocks for clothes, etc) if you liked hopping around instruments. The UI for song selection was serviceable (again, it fit the norm at the time) but was a massive pain once you started getting more songs (which plenty were added as DLC; there's something like 3,000 songs available now?). You couldn't play career mode with just two guitars; you had to have either drums or a singer, which seemed like a big fat ploy to buy their stupid plastic crap. Oh yeah, and speaking of plastic crap...

We also have a wired drumset, have bought three drum pedals (we bust those up), have another wired white guitar, have bought three more guitars besides these, and had a USB mic. Oh, and we owned Rock Bands 1, 2, Green Day, and Lego at some point. This game can get costly. 

This garbage is expensive, which is especially annoying considering how frequently they break. I've honestly had much better luck with the Rock Band branded stuff than the Guitar Hero stuff, and the Rock Band guitars are bigger and feel more "realistic" (as realistic as a plastic guitar can feel), but it's all preference. Point being: expect to dump at least $20 per guitar, $20 per drums, and $5 for a mic, which is about $75 just for the stuff. Add on the extra crap from the later games (two more mics for harmonies, keyboard, and cymbals for the drums) and stuff's getting pretty pricy. So you'd better be dedicated.

Song selection UI has much improved since this. If you didn't play Guitar Hero, that is - ZING! 

Before I go to the score, a little (additional) moment of self-indulgence: Rock Band was not just a fun game, but it actually helped out my budding marriage. We got the Xbox 360 two months after we got married, and at that time I was a pretty hardcore gamer but my wife was on the fence. We wanted to do more stuff together in each other's interests (as new married couples are known to do), so Eternal Sonata was a given. However, once it was over, we sort of ran out of co-op games to play.

Then we got Rock Band, and everything changed. As stated above, I come from a very musical background, and so does my wife. We had played piano/flute duets before, but not actually owning a piano puts a damper on doing this in free time. Rock Band, however, proved an excellent channel for playing together, and allowed us both to spend time doing something we enjoyed, while we both played a video game. Maybe this sound stupid (especially to anybody over 40), but I really think it helped strengthen our marriage, and had the added side effect if introducing my wife to both more video games and heavy metal (whether or not this was a good thing remains to be seen :P).

We still play quite a bit to this day, though we usually just sing harmonies in Rock Band 3 (review of that later). And we are godly good at it, so there's that, too.

And it introduced the Rock Band store, which has since sucked all my money away

Rock Band was an incredible game. It took the Guitar Hero formula and fused it with karaoke and that weird Japanese drumming game that never got big over here, and it did so marvelously. That being said, this original game hasn't particularly aged well, but you can export 90% of the songs (but not Enter Sandman :( ) to be used in any future iteration of Rock Band for just $5, so it is certainly worth picking up a copy on the cheap, exporting the songs, and giving it away or just shelving it and playing a later version.

If I were to give it a star rating, it would be four out of five. While I love the game, there is no denying the second game fixed lots of issues (including ones I didn't know this game had), but as a jumping-off point you certainly could do a lot worse. If you love modern music, partying with your friends, or just pretending to be a rock star, Rock Band has your number.