Rock Band Unplugged (PSP)

It's like the world's biggest rock band re-recorded an early demo, and got it right.
6/18/2009 12:53 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Here's the only directive I'm going to offer with respect to Rock Band Unplugged. Don't think of it as Rock Band. Sure, the visual signifiers are all there (animated band members, familiar stages, etc.), and so is the basic setup and collection of modes. But hardcore PlayStation 2 music gamers know this is really just the next evolutionary stage of early Harmonix games Frequency and Amplitude, and that is a good, very challenging thing.

Why shouldn't you think of this as Rock Band? Because it relies on a very different skill set. Compared even to, say, the Nintendo DS versions of Guitar Hero, this is quite removed from the console band experience. Four "instrument" tracks (guitar, bass, voice, drums) are arrayed in parallel. You flip from one to the next, hitting note gems in time to activate phrases. Nail every note in a phrase and that track will play on its own for a short time, so you can move to other tracks and hit phrases to keep the song alive.

The key difference, then, is that you have to be on target. In Rock Band, muddling through a skill level above the one you're comfortable with is the best way to improve, because you can miss quite a few notes and still finish a song. Here, you've got to nail perfect phrases on the regular, or else that instrument will fail out. Star Power -- er, "Overdrive" -- can save an instrument, just like in the console game, but you still only get three saves.

You'll likely wrestle with the PSP hardware as much as with the admittedly high difficulty curve. Though there's the option to assign buttons however you'd like, the frantic (if not thoughtless) button-mashing that ensues on Hard and Expert difficulty can lead to a lot of accidental hitting of the wrong button, which leads to a big fail. So you might have to stick with a lower difficulty level longer than you'd like, as hitting the multi-gem chords in higher settings turns into a more demanding task than even Rock Band console vets would expect.

Those who have spent a lot of money on console DLC [raises hand] may bristle at the lack of interoperability between those tracks and Unplugged. But really, this is a different game. Period. The instrument tracks don't correspond one-to-one by any means, so no, you can't swap songs between games. Downloadable content will be released for Unplugged, but it will be its own thing. Even without that, however, there is still a solid 41-track list.

My real complaint is the continuation of World Tour mode. If anything, this is a game made for the simpler, old-school, tiered song set of the Guitar Hero days. World Tour mode requires playing songs too many times -- not a big deal for songs you like, but it's the same old gripe for ones you don't. It's easy enough to see why the game doesn't ship with all songs unlocked, but after a while, without other players to liven things up, World Tour just gets to be a drag.

Regardless, the return of the basic Amplitude gameplay model is something we've wanted for a long time, and aside from having Sony re-release that game on the PlayStation Network (do it, Sony!), this is the best way to relive the early glory days of Harmonix.