Tag: guitar hero

>Beatles: RB Impressions

>There was never a doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t enjoy every minute I spent with The Beatles: Rock Band; aside from being a big fan of the RB platform, I have been a huge Beatles fan for most of my waking life and I’ve spent almost every minute since my packages arrived on 9/9 either playing the game or listening to the remastered albums. I plowed through the game’s story mode in a few short hours and kept on going, playing each of the game’s 45 songs on at least 2 different instruments. (The only thing I haven’t done yet is sing, which is usually my last option in regular Rock Band anyway.)

Any concern of mine that this was just an easy cash-in was immediately wiped away; a tremendous amount of love and care went into the crafting of this experience, and it shows. The bass lines are all tremendous, but the guitar experience is just as interesting, especially since there’s quite a few songs where there are no discernable guitar parts, so the guitar line is transferred to horns or strings or piano. Even just the sound of clicking on stuff in the menus while holding a guitar put a smile on my face – it’s all little samples from “Getting Better.” Hearing in-studio chatter while the next song loads might not seem like a big deal to the casual fan but to a die-hard it’s so incredibly cool.

But I must admit that I wasn’t sure if my wife would care. She’s ambivalent towards the Beatles; she doesn’t like the super-early stuff but overall she doesn’t mind them, even though she doesn’t listen to them. She likes Rock Band, though, and she knew that I was going apeshit for the Beatles version, and I suppose my enthusiasm was infectious. Before we started, though, she was a little apprehensive; she didn’t think she knew any songs besides the really obvious ones. But she picked up her guitar and began to play, anyway.

You know where this is going, of course. I had the game pick out a random setlist of 7 songs and I’ll be damned if she wasn’t singing along to all of them. Even she didn’t know she knew all those songs. So we picked another random 7 (I’m not sure why 7 was the magic number) and, again, she sang along to all of them, even as she clicked away at the guitar parts.

I’m 33 years old, and I suspect that most people my age have the Beatles hardwired into their DNA whether they know it or not. I don’t know that my parents would ever enjoy playing the game, as they’d probably be fighting the controls the whole time, but certainly they might enjoy watching us play it; the game looks fantastic and the music sounds as good as it ever has. I suspect, though, that the game’s real coup is how it will introduce little kids to the Beatles. What better way to appreciate the music than to feel like you’re playing it?

I was listening to the AV Club’s Beatles podcast and they hit on something very true in the show’s closing moments – the Beatles might just be the last musical group that 20th and 21st century Americans can all agree upon as being truly great. The game does as much to ensure that the band’s legacy will continue to live on, and that’s no easy task; look at Activision’s gross mishandling of Kurt Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5 as proof that it’s very much possible to totally screw it up.

The Beatles: Rock Band is very easy to recommend. Yes, you can bitch that you can’t import the Beatles songs into RB2 and vice versa, but that’s really just you being lazy and not wanting to get up off the couch and change the disk. It’s not an issue for me; I couldn’t just play one Beatles song, anyway, without wanting to play the rest.

>Rock Band: Beatles

>The big news this morning is of the new Beatles music game, currently slated for a Holiday 2009 release.

During a teleconference being held by Apple Corps, Ltd and MTV this morning, the two companies, along with Harmonix, announced an exclusive partnership to create a brand new video game featuring the music of the Beatles. This seems to be a new game that will allow friends and families to experience the music of the band in an all new way.

Other than a brief mention of Rock Band during the teleconference, so far no mention has been made of the band’s songs coming to Rock Band or Rock Band 2. In fact, Harmonix’s Alex Rigopolis stated during the call that this is not a Rock Band expansion pack, but an all-new game title built from the ground up.

The game will be a journey that will take you through the entire Beatles catalog, from the first album to the last. There will be an interactive music performance involved using music controller peripherals, but they stress that the game is not a Rock Band title. Visual exploration of the Beatles will be a big part of the game, though they were not prepared to discuss more on that at this time.

I’ve got a lot to say about music games, most of which I’ve probably already said a million times before. I’ve been playing music since I was about 3; my parents were both musicians and I can’t really remember not playing music. (My parents were classical musicians, though, and so they had a pretty big influence over the music I listened to when I grew up; they weren’t very keen on rock music. One thing we could all agree on, however, was The Beatles, and how awesome they were.)

Anyway. My point is that, as an actual musician, the Guitar Hero / Rock Band games don’t necessarily appeal to me; I already have real guitars, and my personal aesthetic when it comes to music is not on shredding ability but songcraft and arrangement. What I liked about Guitar Hero 2 (my first dabbling in this genre) was the song selection, and specifically how they deconstructed the guitar parts so you could really get inside the part and see how it interacted with the song as a whole. And on the flipside, my biggest frustration with Guitar Hero 3 (well, one of many) was that I would fail songs (on Medium difficulty) that I could actually play, on a real guitar; the emphasis was on shredding, not on feeling like you were part of a band. (The other big frustration were the boss battles, which were totally fucking ridiculous. If I were actually on a stage and engaged in a real guitar duel, and my opponent came over and detuned my guitar while I was playing, or futzed around with my amp, I would punch my opponent in the face and then take their guitar and break it over their head.)

I’ve never played Rock Band 1 or 2, mostly because (a) I don’t really feel like I need to, and (b) they’re expensive and I don’t necessarily have the real estate in my apartment to house them. But I’ve certainly wanted to play them; the RB games have a far better selection of songs than the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero games do, in my opinion, and from my perspective, song selection is pretty much the most important issue in this genre.

Which is why a Harmonix-produced Beatles game is so fascinating to me. I know the Beatles catalog pretty much inside and out – well, certainly for everything from Rubber Soul onwards – and none of those songs are terribly difficult to play; George was not a shredder, and Ringo was, well, Ringo. So the appeal of playing a Beatles-themed music game can’t be about racking up zillions of points; instead, the appeal is that almost everybody has an intrinsic knowledge of at least a few Beatles songs, and that being able to play them – being able to get inside of them, subconsciously absorbing how the songs are constructed and arranged – is an experience that, until now, not many people have ever really thought about besides music nerds.

My biggest question, then, is what they’re going to do about the keyboards and crazy sounds. Once the Beatles started smoking pot, going to India, and hanging out with Bob Dylan, everything changed, and I mean everything; they stopped writing catchy pop songs and instead starting breaking down boundaries that nobody had even conceived before. How are you going to play “Hey Jude” or “Let it Be” without a piano? Better yet, how are you going to play “A Day in the Life” without an orchestra? Or “I Am the Walrus” without inhaling a sheet of LSD? Will there be a George Martin mini-game, where you have to build all sorts of crazy shit in order to capture the sounds that John Lennon wants to be able to hear when you’re trying to play “Tomorrow Never Knows”?