Rockband

Just yesterday I had my first experience with the game Rock Band. For those of you who don’t know Rock Band is a rock and roll band sim where you get to be your favorite part of a rock and roll band. When I say rock and roll band part, I mean the typical guitarist, drummer and singer. Now before I insult every Rock Band lover in the room let me say that as a party game this game works well. Its simple and when you have a simple game several people can play at once it is bound to be a hit. I thought I was going to pee on myself when I heard my friend try to sing “Enter the Sandman”. The playing system is pretty simple as well you basically click color coded buttons in correlation with the screen. The singing is just karaoke.
However, after a few rounds of the game some obvious issues jumped out at me. First off the game culture can be a real turn off at times. More experience players will usually encourage new players to start at a harder difficulty level, which in turn causes them to immediately fail. This instant failure will have you wanting to go back to the sheltering easy levels, but any suggestion of such change will cause the experienced player to begin laughing at you (luckily I sang).
But, if you’re with your friends they probably laugh at you anyways so this isn’t that much of a complaint. The karaoke on the other hand was a giant turn off. Sing karaoke to several rock oldies or some cool rock song you’ve never heard of. Sounds great until you find out that the game has only several oldies and the rest are no name songs nobody really wants to sing. Of all the songs “Fall out Boys” have why did you pick the most obscure one? Karaoke only works when you’re singing a song you are familiar with and truthfully only 5 songs there were familiar to me. Guns and Roses, Led Zeppelin, Queen. Those are the names I expected to see in Rock Band. Sure there are some great bands in Rock Band, but not enough to convince me to embarrass myself in front of my friends over and over again.
In the end Rock Band is fun and for those of you who need a party game and don’t own a Nintendo Wii , I recommend this game. As for those of you who want to live out rock glory or even want to explore rock musically; buy a guitar or Wii music.