5 a.m. Review: Rock Band

No, it's not 5:00am when I'm writing this, but it is when I went to bed last night. We started playing around 8:30pm and, well, that's how the game goes. It's super addictive and loads of fun for people who like loud music. But it will make you realize one thing: playing music in a band is repetitive. Really repetitive.

You advance your band by playing venues. The more fans you gain, the more venues you unlock. You start off with a few songs and have to play them over and over again until you gain more fans. A new venue will give you a song or two.

Another progress measurement is stars. Like Guitar Hero games your songs are rated 1-5 stars. Some venues and gigs require the band to have a certain number of stars. This is how you get to play different gigs. You could play a set list for an audio technician, or a jet. It's all in order to move the band along in the "story". Make you play more. make you play the same freakin songs more.

I was most interested in playing the drums most of the night. They, along with the microphone, are the most realistic things to do. I couldn't ever play outside of the medium difficulty. My coordination just isn't up to par yet to play drums. Even my best friend, an excellent drummer, thought that the hard difficulty offered up some pretty complex patterns. I think he's going to have fun playing that, as he's the one that actually bought the $180 game.

Sadly, the guitar that comes with Rock Band is worthless. It's make of cheap plastic, nothing close to the quality of the developers old Guitar Hero guitar games. Within minutes, the strum bar stopped strumming down. The built-in control pad also stopped working sporadically, so selecting between bass and guitar and the different settings just wasn't available all the time. The effects switch on the guitar is almost directly under the whammy bar. That's not particularly detrimental to the game, but annoying none the less.

Other than those things, the repetitive nature of a band and the cheap guitar (which is under warranty), the game is awesome. It's why we stayed up all night playing. Every time we unlocked a new song, we rocked it out, smiles all around, impressed with our own gaming/musical/singing skills. If there was ever a game to bridge the gap between games and reality, this one does a hell of a job. It should be a new genre of games like there is for talk shows: reality gaming.