Confession of a Rock Band addict

[Nick]

So I've just about recovered from the annual HEXUS trip to CeBIT which, as you'll probably have seen reported on the web, was a smaller affair than previous years.

Apart from big names like NVIDIA and XFX being notable by the absence of a booth, the other big non-attendees were the end consumer guys, the companies whose products are, in the main, single box home entertainment systems... so we're talking Samsung, Philips, Panasonic etc. Yeah, they had a presence of sorts, but nothing on the scale of previous years.

But we'll catch up with those guys over at IFA later in the year, so I'm not too worried.

What I am worried about is Rock Band, a game which, provided you can find some friends to play with, really is the most worrying of games.

As you probably know, Rock Band is a natural progression from Guitar Hero, but instead of just having two players shredding their fret boards, you also get a drummer and a singer.

And this is where Rock Band utterly owns anything Guitar Hero has produced to date.

We must've spent at least an hour in total, across the five days we were at the show, rocking out either with some of the Xbox guys that were running the booth, or with random German kids willing to get up on stage and rock with us.

Eren, the HEXUS.tv cameraman, is a god on the drums whilst a journeyman musician like me was fine either on lead or bass... but my hidden talent came in with t he vocals where I found that I could actually hold a tune (to some degree) and, once I'd gotten over that fear of being laughed off the podium, I was belting out the songs.

And songs is another area where Rock Band is also way ahead of GH.

Look at the track list for GH3: Legends of Rock. For someone with more general music tastes, there little to appeal to the prospective buyer. Ruby is a bonus song, When You Were Young is pretty cool and of course you've got Welcome To The Jungle, Anarchy in the UK and Paranoid... but along with perhaps a handful of other songs, you're then reduced to playing through more hardcore heavy metal or some band who're probably massive in Wisconsin but unknown anywhere else.

The whole point of these games, Rock Band and Guitar Hero, is that for the length of the song you're not some ordinary bloke with an ordinary job, you are a rock god with incredible guitar talents (or drums or vocals... whatever)... Unfortunately, I can't identify with Slipknot and I've never been a Metallica fan... so GH3, even though I've played it and enjoyed a few of the songs, the rest are the chore I have to go through to get access to the songs I do like. Everything else leaves me cold.

Rock Band, on the other hand, has gone for a more mainstream approach. Yes, there's still some heavy metal in there and loads of modern bands that to me, with my advancing years, sound like someone playing three guitars while locked in a wardrobe that's falling down a flight of stairs, but there's plenty of other songs to play.

The point is, the proportion of tunes you'll know from just looking at the track list is far higher in Rock Band... and then there's the songs you didn't know you knew... and we've not even touched on the downloadable content (DLC) yet.

Now you might be thinking that Rock Band sounds wonderful but the price of the kit, which is one drum set, a guitar, a microphone and the game, is going to be silly money... but it's not. We've been told that the package I just mentioned there will knock in at around £129... only £50 more than Guitar Hero sold for with one guitar.

And get this, it's been widely reported from the US that GH guitars work with the PS2 and Xbox 360 versions of Rock Band, so you won't even need to buy a second guitar.

But where Rock Band really shines is with the DLC stuff which pretty much makes getting the PS2 version probably the worst purchase ever. The sheer number and variety of artists on there just reinforces the purchase of Rock Band even though there's some slightly odd choices of song from household name bands... I thought I was a bit of Police fan but I hadn't ever heard of one of the tracks...

The good news is that the same DLC is available for both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions... the bad news is that if you're looking to import the Xbox 360 version is region locked. And your GH guitars won't work with the region-free PS3 version... so you're kinda hobbled one way or another.

My advice is to be patient and get your pre-order in with Play, Amazon or whoever now... the price we've been told EA is asking is only £10 more than some websites are quoting for selling you the game and shipping it over from the US, so you may as well wait.

The unconfirmed rumour of launch delay in Europe could be down to the huge amount of localization needed for all the different languages which means that we may still see a March 28th release for us English speaking Brits, which would be nice.

And finally, just to affirm my Rock Band addiction, back at CeBIT we popped along to the Rock Band stand most days and jammed with the Xbox guys... so much so that they offered us a slot up on the main stage in front of an audience of some thousand or so people...

We took up the challenge and the rock band that is the the Red Hot HEXUS Peppers was formed. We drummed, strummed and, in my case, screamed, our way through Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive and ther Chilli's Dani California... and even managed to get a massive cheer at the end...

Expect the video of that soon...

[Parm]

video, video, video!