Rock Band (Xbox 360)

The Temple of Rock wasn't built in a day.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

The vocal sections play lot like Karaoke Revolution or SingStar. The lyrics will scroll across a horizontal portion of the screen, with lines representing the pitch of each phrase. Each song's actual vocal track will play in the background, though you can adjust their levels in the options. You activate Overdrive by improvising whenever a glowing yellow field scrolls across the vocal chart -- you can bellow, hoot, howl or simply blow into the microphone to trigger it. There are also little rhythm sections sequenced into some of the songs, which simulate the vocalist's percussive contributions. You can simply tap the mic against your hand to play these, but if you have a tambourine or set of timbales, all the better.

While you could embark on a Solo Tour for every instrument except bass, Rock Band was built expressly for the Band World Tour mode, which allows up to four players (if you have a second guitar controller for bass, of course) to create rocker personas and attempt to take the world by storm. It's ostensibly your typical career mode, but it's made all the more engrossing given the added social dynamic. You start out in your band's home city and play a series of gigs that can range from a single song to an extended marathon of jams tied together by genre, theme, region or what have you. The more gigs you play, the more fans you get, which further opens up the world at your disposal. Soon enough, you'll be ditching the funky-smelling van for a real-deal tour bus. You'll know you've made it once you've earned a private jet.

Just like in the real thing, expect some bickering between your virtual bandmates; while you can cut someone some slack if you're not too hot on a single track, expect tempers to fly when you feel like indulging your inner guitar deity in the presence of a bandmate who isn't keen on stomaching a five-song set of classic rock standards. You might want to tread carefully, though: Since you can't do the Band World Tour online, you might have a difficult time replacing alienated band members. Apart from the hardware problems, as a matter of fact, this is the most disappointing aspect of the game. Hopefully, Harmonix will see fit to patch this in, and thereby unite the world through rock. To be fair, you can jam on any song with a full band via the Internet, as well as engage in a couple of competitive multiplayer modes. You just can't go all the way, which is a definite downer.

So, about those broken instruments... The most common complaints seem to be about the guitars -- particularly, problems with the strum bars registering more than one note input per strum, essentially rendering the guitar parts of songs unplayable. Also common are Overdrive issues: Afflicted instruments are unable to activate this crucial gameplay feature, no matter which direction they're tilted. There are also lots of reports of cracked bass drum pedals, and USB mics with faulty sound detection.

Both of the guitars I used in my review Rock Band (which, in the interest of full disclosure, was provided to me by EA) have gone out -- one has the double-strum problem, and the other won't register Overdrive. The latter seems to have been defective out of the box, as I only started using it after the first guitar went out on me. The first guitar was used primarily on the solo tour mode on medium difficulty, though I did mess around with downloaded songs on it quite a bit. All told, I must have played about 100 songs on it before it went out. Judging from the complaints on the official boards, however, the problems don't discriminate based on platform; people are reporting issues with both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 versions of the hardware. I guess I just got lucky (or unlucky, as it were).